Organizing/Tidying up Mp3's

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Great article i came across the other day when trying to find the most efficient way to tidy up my 13,000 mp3's with correct file info and album art.

Enjoy!

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My post ‘Tidy Up iTunes MP3 Collection’ is now nearly two years old, yet it is still one of the most popular posts each month. Given the mess that iTunes made of my iTunes library when I installed Vista I’ve had a lot of time to update my tagging methods.

My method below may seem a bit long-winded, but it is foolproof and creates nice and tidy mp3 tracks that will work perfectly with all mp3 applications, including iTunes.


Step 1 Tagging

Even if your tracks have been imported directly from CD, the ID3 tags can still contain errors; especially if you are importing old CDs or non-mainstream CDs. In the past I used to use MusicBrainz Tagger to identify albums, but now I use MusicBrainz’s new tool, Picard. The updated Picard tool uses the same mechanism as the old Tagger app to identify albums, but it is much faster and easier to use.

What Musicbrainz Picard does is scan your music files and uses any existing tags to identify tracks. For files that Picard doesn’t recognize, it submits ‘acoustic fingerprints’ (TRM ids) of the files back to the server and asks the user to manually edit the track information or to add that particular album manually to the database, so that the next time someone uses the tool these tracks will be identified.Before using Picard I’d recommend changing the following settings in the Options:

1. go to ‘Audio Fingerprinting’ and check ‘Automatically analyze all new files’
2. go to ‘Tags’ and uncheck ‘Write ID3v1 tags to MP3 files (ID3v2 tags will always be written)’, and Check ‘clear existing tags before writing new tags’ and ‘Write ID3v2 version 2.3 tags’. This is important as I’ve found it’s not good to have multiple tags included within files e.g. APE, ID3v1 etc and also because I’ve found iTunes has problems sometimes with ID3 v2.4 tags
3. If you are tagging files you haven’t added to your music library yet then it can be helpful in ‘directories’ to check ‘move tagged files to this directory’ and create a create a directory called ‘Tagged Music’ so you know which files you’ve tagged and are now ready for importing

Now that Picard is setup, drag your files of complete folders onto the ‘New files’ folder. Once Picard has finished anlaysing files click on the ‘Cluster’ icon in the toolbar to group mp3 files into albums, and Picard will then walk you through tagging files based on the matches it finds. To learn more about using Picard click here.

Once I’ve finished identifying and tagging my files in Picard, I tend to have a quick check to see that all is well using mp3tag. With mp3tag I can check that musicBrainz has only written ID3v2.3 tags which offer the maximum compatibility, and removed all other tags. I can also quickly browse all the various tag info that has been written and correct any typos, capitalisation problems and other errors.

Step 2 Importing To iTunes And Adding Artwork

Before you import your new tagged mp3 files into iTunes, remember to go into iTunes’ options and go to ‘General’ and check ‘Automatically download missing album artwork’. It is best to use artwork from the iTunes store as this is usually better quality than the artwork that most other apps find, whcih tend to come from Amazon.com.

However, when iTunes adds artwork to files it doesn’t actually add the artwork to the Id3 tag - it only adds the artwork to the iTunes database. This means that if you want to use your mp3 files in any other app the artwork will not be displayed.

One Tip A Day found a quick way of fixing this. To add iTunes Store artwork to your ID3 tags do the following:

1. Select all the tracks in each album you’ve just imported one at a time
2. In the bottom left-hand corner of iTunes click on ’show/hide artwork’ button
3. Right-click on the artwork image that is displayed in the small window and select ‘copy’
4. Now right-click on the tracks you’ve highlighted and select ‘Get info’
5. In the pop-up box that appears, go to the ‘info’ tab, right-click in the artwork field and select ‘paste’

Once you’ve done this iTunes will now add it’s high quality images to the albums ID3 mp3 tags, which will mean that other mp3 players and apps will now be able to display the artwork. Although this can take a while if you’ve imported a lot of albums, adding artwork this way will add the best quality artwork to your files.

For the albums that iTunes can’t add artwork to because they aren’t available in the iTunes music store, then a quick Google search should suffice and once you’ve found the artwork just drag it onto the blank artwork space. If you’re in a rush and want an automatic tool, then I’d recommend trying iTunes Art Importer which automatically adds missing album images from Amazon.

Step 3 Finishing Up

The only thing left to do is to add Genres to your new albums as MusicBrainz Picard very rightly doesn’t add Genres, because one man’s ‘R&B’, is another man’s ‘Soul’, which is another man’s ‘Rhythm & Blues’ etc etc. Picard can also sometimes will tag an album as a compilation, when you don’t want it listed as a compiliation because although it may be say a ‘Greatest Hits’ album, all the tracks are from the same artist so you don’t want it appearing in Compilations within iTunes.

To add the correct Genres to your albums do the following:

1. Select all the tracks in each album you’ve just imported one at a time
2. Now right-click on the tracks you’ve highlighted and select ‘Get info’
3. In the pop-up box that appears, go to the ‘Info’ tab, and type in the correct Genre information in the ‘Genre’ field and check/uncheck the‘Part of a compilation’ box as appropriate.