Music tagging software (tidying up)

OCdude

OCdude

OCdude

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I've got a pretty large MP3 collection which I've nicely tagged using Tag&Rename. However as I've tagged all my albums, I've always left off the genre (mostly because I can never decide on what genre a particular album falls in to) and also the year (mostly due to laziness!).

So I'm looking for a bit of software that will "smartly" scan my collection and suggest/auto-fill in the missing details (without butchering the painstakingly-entered info that's already there!)

I've come across this: http://www.rinsemymusic.com/ and it seems to fit the bill, so I was just wondering if anyone had used it, or any similar software? (the website seems a bit simplistic and almost reeks of scamware... but I'll probably download it and test it anyway!)

Any recommendations would be gratefully received!
 
mp3tag looks very similar (in terms of functionality) of Tag&Rename. That also has the ability to get tags from CDDB/Amazon etc, although it doesn't include the fields i need (year and genre) plus it can only do one album at a time. Is that the case with mp3tag?
 
Check out MusicBrainz Picard - perhaps not the most straightforward to use until you get the hang of it, but the results are well worth it.

I never bother with genres in my music collection; as you pointed out, it's often impossible to decide how to classify (and subclassify) an album, it's all hopelessly subjective anyway, and once you get started you'll just end up in an OCD sufferer's nightmare. :)
 
Thanks for the suggestion, but the only information I want to add is the genre and year (everything else is already properly in place). Doesn't look like that app supports that (neither do many of the others by the looks of it).
 
OCdude said:
Thanks for the suggestion, but the only information I want to add is the genre and year (everything else is already properly in place). Doesn't look like that app supports that (neither do many of the others by the looks of it).
Click to expand...
Yes it does - under Options > Options > Metadata, check "Use folksonomy tags as genre." Then under Options > Options > Tags, fill in the box "Preserve these tags from being cleared or overwritten with MusicBrainz data," listing the names of the tag fields containing existing data you want to preserve. Having said that, the MusicBrainz database is pretty accurate, and you may want to just leave it to do its thing with all the fields.

If you want even more [major genre/minor genre/mood/category/occasion] options, you could install the Last.fm Plus plugin - personally I think life's too short, but each to his own I suppose.

As I suggested, it's an advanced tagger (it also has some quite sophisticated inbuilt scripting functions), and a quick glance won't really give you a fair idea of what it can do.
 
ah okay, i was just going by what i could see in the screenshots. I'll give it a go!

As for the genres, yeah I definitely don't want to be drilling down too much. The whole point of the exercise is to enable me to easily create playlists based on similar genres etc, so the last thing i want is 100,000,001 different stupid sub-genres :D
 
I currently use media monkey which im enjoying.

Ive never used anything like it before so I can't really say if its hugely good or not but its definately helped with organising my music files.
 
CaptainCrash said:
Check out MusicBrainz Picard - perhaps not the most straightforward to use until you get the hang of it, but the results are well worth it.
Click to expand...

musicbrainz.org is a very good source. and the best thing of all is that it has an open API so you can you use plugins in other programs if you don't like picard. foobar2000 and cuetools are 2 that i know of. there must be many more.
 
On a side note to this (hope this isn't hijacking!) but I hate it when I rip a CD to my PC and it chops the artist up into different folders.

For example if there is an album you rip to your hard drive and within that album it has a song that was credited to someone else or has a collaboration with someone else then it always ends up as a different folder than the album artist your ripping.

Is there any way to stop this happening?

I hate, hate, hate it when it does this. I don't care who collaborated or whatever I want the album to be complete in its own little folder not scattered all over the shop!
 
Emjay86 said:
On a side note to this (hope this isn't hijacking!) but I hate it when I rip a CD to my PC and it chops the artist up into different folders.

For example if there is an album you rip to your hard drive and within that album it has a song that was credited to someone else or has a collaboration with someone else then it always ends up as a different folder than the album artist your ripping.

Is there any way to stop this happening?

I hate, hate, hate it when it does this. I don't care who collaborated or whatever I want the album to be complete in its own little folder not scattered all over the shop!
Click to expand...

If i'm understanding you correctly, then I think that's avoided by applying the "part of a compilation" tag, to all of the tracks, then they'll remain in one set/album.
 
Emjay86 said:
On a side note to this (hope this isn't hijacking!) but I hate it when I rip a CD to my PC and it chops the artist up into different folders.

For example if there is an album you rip to your hard drive and within that album it has a song that was credited to someone else or has a collaboration with someone else then it always ends up as a different folder than the album artist your ripping.

Is there any way to stop this happening?
Click to expand...
It depends on the program you're using to do the ripping, athough most should recognise the standard "artist" and "album artist" fields and differentiate between them. The better apps will allow you to automate the creation of pretty much any folder structure you want - something like [\Music\Album Artist\Album\Tracknumber - Track] is fairly usual, and the track artist (if different from the album artist) would be ignored, although the tag fields will still be filled in as necessary.

If it's a compilation album of various artists, then as OCdude said there should be some way of passing that information to the ripper - in that case the "album artist" could be "Various Artists," "VA" or whatever else you want to designate.
 
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