Tidy Up iTunes MP3 Collection - Fix ID3 Tags And More
One of the reasons I haven’t been posting recently is I’ve been spending a lot of time organising my music collection. If like me you have a big music collection gathered from lots of sources, then you are probably having the same problems with the awful metadata that some tracks have.A lot of my tracks have weird or missing track details, errors and for some tracks I have no ID3 tags at all for the artist and album. I also have a lot of duplicates which have happened from mistakenly importing the same CD twice, or when I’ve added a friends collection to mine and they have the same track but with a slightly different filename, so it slipped through the net.
Given that my collection is continuing to grow, and I am increasingly accessing my library via other PCs, devices and my Xbox via Xbox Media Centre I decided it was time to tidy things up before it became an impossible task.
Below are the steps I went through, which I will now do with all new tracks before they get into my library.
Step 1 Tagging
Update: I have written an updated guide to tagging mp3 files. If you want to tidy up your iTunes collection then carry on reading, but if you just want to tag your files read the new guide.
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. The best tool I have found to fix tags is MusicBrainz Tagger. This great tool scans your various music files and writes clean metadata tags (ID3 tags or Vorbis comment fields) to your files.
For files that MusicBrainz doesn’t recognize, MB submits acoustic fingerprints (TRM ids) of the files back to the server and asks the user to manually edit the track information, so that the next time someone uses the tool these tracks will be identified.
MusicBrainz allows you to set the threshold at which it thinks it has a match. For my collection I found that very few mistakes were made with a threshold of 80% and I was able to automatically update the tags on around 50% of my 8,000 track collection this way.
For the other 50%, MetaBrainz Tagger still made a pretty good guess as to what the correct tags were. In some cases I was able to automatically accept MB’s best stab, but in other cases I had to use the tools within MB to find the correct details. This took quite a long time, but was worth the effort as MB helped me identify a lot of previously unknown tracks and artists. Sorting by album proved to be the quickest way to process my tracks as once I’d confirmed what album a particular track came from I could usually process another 10 tracks from the same album immediately.
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Comment by Music Collector on 18 October 2005:
If you decide to erase your iTunes library, I suggest before you erase your existing library you want to export all your playlists which will allow you to import them after you create a new library. Though there may be some bad links to files that were renamed, many of the lists can be restored.
You can also save your ratings (which I value more than play lists). This can be done by creating a new playlist of all your five star songs. Then save this playlist (something like “5 star songs”). Create a seperate play list for 4, 3 and lower (if you bother with 2 or 1…). These play lists can be imported after you recreate your iTunes library. When you view the “5 star songs” play list, do a select all and rate the group as 5 star. Bingo, the library now has your former ratings. you get the idea…
Comment by Gareth.ky on 18 October 2005:
I too had problems with my library, especially when I had re tagged a large number of songs. Importing the songs is tedious and dead tracks remain if you rename the songs. I wrote a script to automate this. Its a 1 click deal, it imports all new music & removes all the dead music. If you have simple updated the MP3 tags your play counts and other data will not be lost. You can even specify the folder(s) where you store your music if need be.
check it out: iTunes Folder Sync
Comment by Anonymous on 18 October 2005:
What do you do about backing up your music library? I now hate the idea of organizing albums simply by genre/artist or whatever… I make backups of everything to MP3 DVDs so I've organized it as:
\DVD001 - Alternative, Rock Pop\
\DVD002 - TripHop, Chill, Jazz\
\DVD003 - [whatever is on the dvd]\
I think it's a good way of backing stuff up, and even locating it since i hate itunes .. I use winamp so simple file browsing to mp3s.
What do you think?
Comment by Anonymous on 18 October 2005:
Can you please share some of your music so that I can go out and later buy the CDs *innocent*blink* dextroz (at) jee mail . comm
Comment by Anonymous on 19 October 2005:
If you want to force iTunes to re-read your collection without losing playcount and ratings and such, try this little script:
http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/update.txt
Usage is fairly obvious.
Comment by Link-Fu on 19 October 2005:
Tidy Up iTunes MP3 collection…
Comment by Lifehacker on 19 October 2005:
The blogger at Connected Internet spent a few nights cleaning up and de-duplicating an out-of-control iTunes library and came out with a fully tagged and pruned collection of songs all with album art.Using the previously-mentioned MusicBrainz song tagg…
Comment by tribe.net: www.connectedinternet.co.uk on 19 October 2005:
Found this article via Lifehacker: http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/blog/_a...
Comment by Filesharing Review on 22 October 2005:
[Source: Connected Internet News | Broadband Mobile Gaming News] quoted: A lot of my tracks have weird or missing track details, errors and for some tracks I have no ID3 tags at all for the artist and album. I also have a lot of duplicates w…
Comment by Savage Nomads on 17 November 2005:
I got a Ipod shuffle, I tried to use the winamp plugin to sync MP3 to the shuffle, but I couldn't get it to work. So I installed Itunes. I really don't care for Itunes but I'm giving it a…
Comment by Geek Habitat on 21 February 2006:
Christmas time brings new iPods and other MP3 players to many, many people — even those of us who've already owned three or more generations of the little white (or now, black) beauties. A new portable music player always seems to make me feel a litt…
Comment by dem on 2 May 2006:
im very new silver surfer ,thanks for all the info ,just done the double killer and now on the Music tagger.;35300 tracks and still going a lot of work to get them right
Comment by Anonymous on 24 May 2006:
If you really want to clean up your mp3 collection use Zortam Mp3 Media Studio. (http://www.zortam.com). I managed all my files within day and left it over night to download lyrics and covers for my iPod.
Comment by Bill on 8 June 2006:
Anyone know how to import home-recorded MP3 files into iTunes? I have 1000’s of home recordings which are all neatly filed in sub-directories by artists, venue, and dates. I would like to script that info to populate this into iTunes.
Comment by Everton Blair on 8 June 2006:
I would use mp3tag. You can use it to automatically add tags to files based on how they are stored on your computer e.g. Artist/venue/date and also by the filename.
It will take one minute and then all have to do is just use the usual file/import function in iTunes.
Whole process shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes.
Comment by matt kowalski on 25 June 2006:
the link under the article to other itunes article, doesn’t work
http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/blog/_archives/2005/11/24/1420681.html
ps: new themes … suck a bit
Comment by Everton Blair on 25 June 2006:
Thanks for pointing this out Matt. For some reason the file on the server which redirected all my old links to the new site links got deleted. Without this file every external link before the move (including from search engines…) would be broken.
Luckily I made a backup so everything is ok now. thanks again
What don’t you like about the new theme?
Comment by Phil on 21 November 2006:
[Comment ID #213 Will Be Quoted Here]
this file if 404′d now. anyone else know this?
Pingback by Getting Vista, Zune Or Another MP3 Player? How To Migrate From iTunes » Connected Internet on 15 January 2007:
[...] iTunes will now whirr away and move all of your mp3 files to one folder for easier management. Stage II - Make Sure All MP3 Files Have ID3 Tags [...]
Pingback by links for 2007-05-22 at LifeParticles.com on 22 May 2007:
[...] Tidy Up iTunes MP3 Collection - Fix ID3 Tags And More | Connected Internet (tags: software music mp3) [...]
Pingback by Updated Guide: How To Tidy Up MP3 ID3 Tags | Connected Internet on 24 June 2007:
[...] 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 [...]
Comment by Anon on 19 August 2007:
If you really want to get all the songs you want without begging for downloads over the web (and its a slow process), go fly to Bangkok, Thailand or Manila, Philippines and buy a stack of Mp3 CDs. They sell em for 30 cents a CD. Each CD has some 300-500 tracks.
If you saw my collection, you’d drop. I have more songs than the average retail outlet
Comment by edebiyat on 30 August 2007:
I think it’s a good way of backing stuff up, and even locating it since i hate itunes .
Comment by Ashish on 15 October 2007:
nice tip .. i think it will help me a lot to organize my music collection. thanx a lot ..
Comment by cwright on 23 October 2007:
thanks for this post, I will try it one of these days. But wondering if anyone knows how I can easily get back my recently accidentally deleted ‘recently added’ list? on itunes?
I really miss it!
thanks
cw
Comment by Everton on 23 October 2007:
@cwright
Create a Smart Playlist rather than a normal playlist
Comment by cwright on 23 October 2007:
Ah! Thanks Everton!
That WAS easy!