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 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 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 tribe.net: www.connectedinternet.co.uk on 19 October 2005:
Found this article via Lifehacker: http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/blog/_a...
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 Link-Fu on 19 October 2005:
Tidy Up iTunes MP3 collection…
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 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 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 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 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…