Organizing all that music. How?!?!

[Elluzion]

Ok, so i have around 2k songs I need to go through and check all the tags, etc etc...

I just want everything organized.
what is the best way to do this? i was going to go album by album with mp3tag

what parts of a tag are the most important??? do i really need track numbers and years? should i keep or just remove them all?


Thanks for any info or any way to make this better:

by the way, i use Jriver media jukebox to play music.

THANK YOU

 

[Mr. B]

I'm going under the assumption your collection is largely comprised of complete albums.

If you haven't already done so, it might be beneficial to put your music in a coherent folder tree of some sort. Personally I have to organized by jazz/electronic, classical, soundtracks, everything else and a small folder of loose tracks... then put the individual albums in their own subfolders.

Properly tagging a whole collection is a lot of work. MP3tag is a perfectly decent program but you may want to check out other options before starting a big task. As there is no real way around that, I would suggest you do it right the first time. Make the effort and do everything including genre, release year and track numbers. It also couldn't hurt to tag album artist(band in mp3tag) for various artist albums.

 

[paaj]

most important is artist/album/track (preferably with number!) this way you have it all organized and it is all you really need.
there is software that automatically does the tagging (mp3tag mentioned, and probably many more) but I have never liked the automated process, left a lot of faulty info and then had to do a lot by hand later.

you'll have to bite through this, and then keep it updated when you ad new cd's.

 

[xHassassin]

I'd go with artists -> albums -> songs

I like having everything in there, but if you don't like the clutter it's fine too.

 

[euphoracle]

I did my ~16GB (@V2-V0 MP3 when I started; has since expanded and all my newer music is purchased in WAV online or ripped to FLAC from CD) in /Music/Album/[Track] Artist - Title structure. I do it album->artist-title because most of my music is made of compilations (part of that whole electronica thing I have going). It took a very long time. I only have Album, Album Artist (mostly Various Artists), Artist, Title, Year, Track and the catalogue numbers in the tags as well as a separate cover.jpg for album art. Find a method that works for you and DO NOT SLOUCH. Always do your tagging/organization as soon as you buy/rip new music. If you let it pile up, you'll never get around to doing it. As an added bonus, you'll be able to find all your music quickly even if you don't have a media library because you'll know how it organized. There is really nothing better for you to do with your music collection than organize it how you like it and keep it so (other than updating any old 96kbps or 128kbps mp3s that you may have had from your Logitech ignorance days if such occurred

)

 

[ROBSCIX]

I would go album by album and tag them all. You may not think you need DATE and track numbers etc. The more information that tags have the more options you have for listing them in players.

You may think dates aren't important but what if you have multiple albums by the same artist. It is nice to be able to list them in chronological order...etc

When I rip a CD to flac I make sure all the information is tagged, going back and doing it afterwards to a whole list of albums can be a pain.

I suggest sitting down with a beer or a drink and start tagging and organizing your collection.

 

[panda]

i am in constant reorganization of my collection, i imagine this is going to take me about a year to complete as i am doing it one by one. i used to have separate files per track but have been combining them into one file with embedded cue sheet (flac, using foobar). i also have this thing where i like to keep all my tags in lowercase letters.

this is how i have my folders setup: genre/artist/album but i also hold track number and date info as well as a comment if it's an audiophile release or vinyl rip.

 

[FallenAngel]

Make sure to properly tag everything

I use directory structure of \Album Artist - Album Name\Track# - Track Artist - Track Name.extension

Load everything into foobar2000 and make sure to have genre as a column for easier ID of tracks.

 

[skudmunky]

I sort everything in folder trees by Lossy or Lossles \ Artist \ Album

I don't use genre at all because with the music I listen to every album by a band could be tagged with some random genre.

 

[Punnisher]

I use mp3tag, which is an amazing tool for editing tags. A lot easier to use than foobar2000 in my opinion.

I use Artist/Album/Song

Example:

Rush/Moving Pictures/01 Tom Sawyer

 

[Nonchalance]

Throw everything into Musicbrainz Picard, let it do its thing, press save. This fixes all of your tags and tags them in accordance with ONE standard.

To make this seem more appealing, I'll elaborate. All you have to do is drag your Music folder into the program, click Cluster, select all the clusters it makes, press lookup. Wait for it to do work, press save. Done.

Use Mediamonkey or Foobar to organize/rename your library.

I did this with a 10k song library a few months ago. Took 2-3 hours (I manually checked every album though to make sure nothing is messed up at the "look up" stage).

 

[ericj]

2000 tracks?

I'm at about 17,000.

I have no method other than making sure every artist has their own directory and every release has a directory under that.

I'm considering breaking it down by genere as well.

 

[Ham Sandwich]

If you're using J. River Media Jukebox for playback you'll probably find it more convenient to use J. River Media Jukebox for tagging changes and filename changes as well. JRMJ has some good tagging and renaming tools built in (Tools >> Library Tools >> Rename, Move & Copy Files...) as well as the tag panel.

JRMJ uses a database as well as the tags in the files to organize. When using a media player that combines a database it us usually best to do tagging and filename changes within the media player so the database stays current and in sync. You can make tagging changes outside of the media player, but you should be smart about it. If you want to make changes outside of JRMJ then make sure JRMJ is configured to "update for external changes" and "fix broken links" (Tools >> Options >> Library & Folders). JRMJ will get the database back in sync as best it can after external changes.

The most important tags (as named in JRMJ) are ALBUM, ARTIST, NAME, and ALBUM ARTIST if you like special names for multiple artist albums.

GENRE is handy for organization, but not critical, and it's up to you as to how detailed you want to make the genre.

TRACK # is important as well for complete albums. JRMJ uses the track number to help determine if an album is complete or not and to help group multiple artist albums. I'm not sure what JRMJ would do if you deleted the TRACK # tag from all files. Would it still correctly group files together as albums?

If you have complete albums that come on 2 or more CDs it is helpful to have the DISC # tag correctly set. You can use DISC # as part of your naming scheme.

JRMJ assumes that the files for each album are in individual directories. So your file naming scheme and directory structure needs to put each album in an individual directory.

Once you have all of your files correctly tagged it is easy to redo the entire directory structure and file naming structure (Tools >> Library Tools >> Rename, Move & Copy Files...). You can rename and move based on tags and even scripting functions.

 

[Elluzion]

ok thanks for the info guys.

i am thinking of using Media Jukebox mainly to sort things out (of course putting everything in folders before hand by Arist - ALbum - Track

i like mp3tag, its pretty helpful

QUestion: do i have to include cover.jpg in every folder of music? or can i just tag the image file to the music tag????


Any other info i should know before tagging?

also , is it worth it to change the filenames? or kind of a waste of time and I should leave it?



another questoin: would it be easier to do the tagging in media jukebox, or in mp3tag. it was weird, i started tagging with mp3 tag and then imported into media jukebox and the comment that was blank on the songs i tagged in mp3tag said "media jukebox" under them... hmmm??
-Elluzion

 

[Ham Sandwich]

JRMJ is flexible in how it handles cover art. You can save the cover art as folder.jpg and/or you can save it embedded in the tags for each file. JRMJ also has the option of saving/exporting the cover art to a directory of your choice (I do that so it is easy to backup my cover art). (Tools >> Options >> File Location)

Some people consider it wasteful to save cover art in the tags of each file. If an album has 10 songs and the album art is 100KB in size you end up saving the file 9 redundant times "wasting" 900KB of space. In some cases it is more convenient to have the cover art in the tags because some portables and devices prefer it that way. It all depends. I save my cover art in the tags.

You can choose to rename the files or not. It shouldn't make much (or any) difference other than as a convenience factor for you when manually browsing the directories. As long as the files are properly tagged it is easy to do a mass rename of all files to whatever you want. Then the next week you can decide to change the file names and directory structure to something else. Do whatever you find to be convenient and helps you organize.

I have classical music that can have very long album names and track names. The directory names and file names for some files can end up exceeding the maximum pathname length allowed by Windows. To avoid that I have a special naming scheme that trims the filename using the scripting functions available in JRMC (I use Media Center rather than Jukebox). That way the filenames are never longer than a set length.