Organizing my music collection

Raven · Post by **Raven** » 2007-07-01 01:18pm

What application do you guys use to organize your media library?

For years, I've dumped all my music files into a single folder, loaded them all up in Winamp, and sorted by purely arbitrary groupings.

There is some semblance of order in there; most songs are grouped by artist, and most genres are close to each other (Simpsons songs next to Family Guy next to TV themes, for example), but for the most part I find stuff by memory, because they've been arranged like that for years.

I don't have many items, under 1000, but they've been randomly acquired over the years and have no naming scheme in common. The filenames and ID3 tags are all over the place.

What is a good application for managing your music? Winamp, WMP, and Itunes seem okay once I've gotten them organized (went through and straightened out their filenames/ID3 info), but are rather unwieldy for making those modifications to 1000 files.

Is there any media application that makes renaming/organizing your music simpler? Or will I just have to tough it out with one of the above?
Basically I'm looking for a quick and efficient ID3 tag editor for a large number of files.

EnsGabe · Post by **EnsGabe** » 2007-07-01 01:41pm

Tag & Rename was the software I used to get proper tags to all of my music. It's the stick to which I compare all other music taggers. Its Amazon/CDDB/Freedb album tagger is something of which I've never seen its equal.

EDIT: Fixed tages

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2007-07-01 01:52pm

iTunes.

Standard feature.

Laughing Mechanicus · Post by **Laughing Mechanicus** » 2007-07-01 02:45pm

I use Media Monkey, it has lots of features to help you organise large music collections - for example it can dynamically take information from the file names and apply them to the ID3 tags and vice versa. It also does auto-tagging from various sources.

My advice though is before you start anything make sure you know how you want your tags/file names laid out - nothing worse than getting half way through a huge music collection and realising the way you are tagging them is less useful/misleading and having to start again.

YT300000 · Post by **YT300000** » 2007-07-01 09:02pm

Folders. Artist -> Album -> Songs

WMP10 forced me to adopt a library, though, which was my biggest problem with iTunes (I just don't like libraries, for some reason). It's basically just a carbon copy of my folder library, though.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2007-07-01 09:04pm

I typically just use iTunes to rename the tags on my songs when I have to. But otherwise I organize my music by Genre > Artist/Series (for soundtracks), > Album as far as folders go.

I find that's the best way of keeping my albums organized at least.

Lisa · Post by **Lisa** » 2007-07-01 11:32pm

iTunes will manage your music for you, but only if your tags are good. you can also batch tag for group/artist and pretty much everything but the song...

Raven · Post by **Raven** » 2007-07-02 12:18am

I grabbed Tag and Rename. It's a 30 day trial, but it works great for the time being. I could arrange all my files by filename (how I currently have them organized), then convert filenames to ID3 tags. I could also easily edit batches of files at once.
WMP likes to sort things into folders, but I don't. All my stuff is stored in a flat structure in a single folder.

Once my tangled mess of a collection has been somewhat straightened out by T&R, iTunes can pick up from there. It turns out I've been using an extremely old version of iTunes; the newest one has some more functionality I was looking for.