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- mklopez, on 10/12/2007, -3/+35Part I:
http://lifehacker.com/software/mp3/alpha-geek-whip-your-mp3-library-into-shape-part-i--level-the-volume-230105.php - strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17Thanks for telling us what the blurb says.
- rudy23, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14you need to get laid
- gaberowe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Lifehacker also mentioned a way to see when concerts are coming up for bands you have in your itunes music lib. That's more interesting than album art in my opinion....
http://lifehacker.com/software/itunes/download-of-the-day-iconcertcal-windowsmac-229823.php - DuraznosTJ, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I'm still not confident that volume leveling is the proper way to go. Someone convince me.
- Spaztic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I found Album Cover Art Downloader to work the best...
http://louhi.kempele.fi/~skyostil/projects/albumart/ - canewediggit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6eliminating dupes. i've noticed on more than occassion i've got the same track a few times; original album, some dj's mixtape/comp cd, friends mixtape, etc. i'd like a way to have the track in my memory only once, but also be available for all the different albums it may be a part of.
- joncoop, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Tag & Rename is a good tool for this. It pulls album art and tags from Amazon.com databases. Also handy for getting your folder names in order, if you're anal about that sort of thing.
- RadiatedAnt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5If you really want make your library shine, you have to do it by hand. I have tried countless programs only to get half ass results and low resolution pictures. I use ID3 Tag-it http://www.id3-tagit.de/ Its the best one out there and im an avid audiophile so making me switch to digital was a bit hard considering I would lose every physical aspect of my CD's. It does absolutly everything you could possibly want from an mp3 tagging utility. querry cddb (though it doesn't ussually work right because of cddb's ambiguity) batch rename files from filename to ID3 that is the best feature I can think of!! well enough with my ranting theirs too many features the program offers and im a lazy bastard which is why I love this program in the first place.
- mklopez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I have the same problem with naming my mp3 files (as surely many other people).
I have used a program called The GodFather to fix my library:
http://users.otenet.gr/~jtcliper/tgf/
Is not very user friendly (so I think the name is very appropiate) but is very good at batch renaming, updating tags and reorganizing folders with whatever criteria you need - kimos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4At least your cover art will travel with your media files.
I let iTunes retrieve most of my cover art only later to find out that it it doesn't actually write it to the ID3. Now not only do I have to find the art for most of my music again, but I need to identify which ones have already been saved to the tag and which are just stored in the iTunes meta information. - Teridon, on 11/01/2007, -0/+4I wrote a program to embed your iTunes 7 album art. It is for Windows only, and is available here:
http://teridon.googlepages.com/itunesscripts#itunes_insert_artwork - kimos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Because the predominant human sense is vision and we can identify and associate with images more quickly than with text.
- BigJuiceMan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3me likey AAA's ability to do mass updates! THANK YOU!
- jannefoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3iTunes is the thing that needs fixing though
- bdbr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Well I'm hoping at SOME point he'll want to make sure the basic tags are correct! That would have been my step one!
- rudy23, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3especially when all your songs end with torrent-tatty
- noisebleed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3As mentioned in the first article, programs like mp3gain change the file's metadata and don't actually touch the encoded audio, resulting in no loss of sound quality and the ability to easily undo the changes. There's really no reason not to give it a shot if you're interested.
- FBMGriever, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You're surprised it can't Sync with your iPod?? Its a Microsoft application, man.
Both your points dont really affect me though. I dont even own an iPod and I rarely listen to podcasts. For the common user, I think WMP11 is a fine application. - jsully, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I use Album Art Aggregator - works great, especially for those of us who use WinAmp's medial library. I used it to tag my complete collection - works great with my Gen 2 Nano.
http://team.thenexusnet.com/nexus/AAA/
AAA uses Amazon's insanely large artwork collection. - FourDoor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I use iTunes to manage my songs on my iPod. I also use WMP/MCE to listen to songs via MCE or on my 360. Before importing any of my songs into iTunes or WMP, I manually append the album art and correct tags to each track via Media Monkey. Media Monkey is a great program not only for album art but also for normalizing your file name structure and tags.
Bottom line, if you want a clean and organized MP3 library, you need to go through it manually and clean it up one album at a time. All the auto-tagger utilities will only get you so far. - RadiatedAnt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2the program i posted above does exactly what you want, it has a function that puts your ID3 tag to file name and vice versa depending on a template you set for example Track - Artist - Title giving you countless variables to play with on a naming scheme.
- linuxdaemon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I have been using musicbrainz picard to clean up my collection( http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardDownload ). It does audio fingerprinting to determine the song and then it will add the tag data. The fingerprinting part can take a while, but it has done a really good job of helping me clean up my collection. It does NOT have any information on genre though, so you have to add that in later. I have used it in conjunction with easytag ( http://easytag.sourceforge.net ) to fill in that missing part.
- sfmman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Here is a good tutorial from Infinite Solutions that will really clean up your iTunes library:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gF9l4wh4ZBA
Very helpful! - kepsux, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Ugh. Call me a troll but seriously now.... rm -Rf *.jpg /mnt/media/audio/
- ispshadow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I used Tunesleeve for my collection (161GB @192kbps). That program was the best thing since sliced bread.
That was a LOT of artwork to download....
BTW, Tunesleeve does right to the mp3 file... - shertzerj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I manually searched for and installed album art for my 350+ album library, only to have iTunes 7 come out mere months after I finished (which of course can download many covers automatically, and in a nice high res format). I was slightly miffed...
- Niffer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I highly recommend Album Art Aggregator
http://team.thenexusnet.com/nexus/AAA/
searches amazon and lets you choose among the results. Very useful! - petroK, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3tunesleeve is handy too (if you don't want to mess w/ mediamonkey, and iTunes doesn't have your art):
http://tunesleeve.googlepages.com/ - petroK, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2tigotago is a great app for just fiddling w/ ID3 (v1 & v2) tags:
http://www.tigotago.com/index.html
Can set tags based on file names, file names based on tags, change capitalization, apply tags for several files at once... pretty versatile, but not great for initial tagging: it's best for consistent tagging, naming, etc.after musicbrainz, mediamonkey, gracenote etc. has already grabbed the tags. - kimos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@mklopez
I second the vote for TheGodfather. Great app that renamed a huge library for me. I disagree about user riendlyness mind you. It's extremely powerful so it just takes some time to learn it, but I found the workflow and the controls were excellent once I got the hang of it. - DuraznosTJ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Tag&Rename does this as well when connecting to Amazon.com to get album information.
- mkoby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I use Tag&Rename to handle the downloading of album information (including album art) and ID3 tag editing before I import my music into iTunes for iPod syncing.
Tag&Rename is definitely worth the money that I paid for it. Sure it is not free, but it is an ID3 tag editor and it is probably the best out there. Not to mention it doesn't try to be anything more than what it is. - Nitesh9999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@verse101
I can get the job done quicker in MediaMonkey, the interface for me is a little more intuitive.
MM is free too. :) - gaberowe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1cool stuff
- starguy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is stupid cosmetic advice, the real need is some kind of program that can log into a massive database onlien, and start to organize all your music which is a mishmash of artists and songs from different alubms, into folders that make some sense. do you organize by genre, then artist, then album? or by simply artist? what if you have only 1 song from an album, do you make a folder for it? i have so many different ways of trying to organize my 30 gig collection, no solution seems to work really.
- packetlock, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4@kepsux
I agree. The best way to whip your album art work into shape is delete it. Why do I want that taking up space on my MP3 player? Know many people enjoy seeing the image but mostly I just hit play and put it back in my pocket. I want as much space as possible for real data. - wvdavis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@ crilen007 - Because, once it is done, it is done and one would have to restore from a back up they made prior to leveling it to return the music to its original levels. Assuming that one did make a back up prior. Sounds like a lot of hassle, just to try it.
- evangelion01, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1mhmm gimmesometune?
- FUElitists, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Tag & Rename is awesome. Very stable and powerful app with no bloat.
- argonaut99, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1wrt "Album Cover Art Downloader":
I've used this tool and although it is faster than doing it manually (i.e. google image search), prepare to be frustrated with this tool if you use it. It throws errors on v2.4 tags, doesn't handle album or artist names with special characters very well, and will frequently go off into never-never-land while scanning your mp3s. In addition, do NOT let it automatically download the art and add it. Too often the wrong album art gets selected from the list of results, which just defeats the purpose of using such a tool. I just finished using this program to update album art for over 12,000 songs and I had to resort to loading each folder manually into the program because it just couldn't handle more than about 200 mp3s at a time. Took me maybe 12-14 hours of computer time over 5 day span to get all the art loaded, and even then I still had to use google's image search for about 25 albums because this program couldn't get any matches.
Be prepared before using it. You have to babysit the process to get the right art. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Media Monkey doesnt like to delete album art
I have like 3000 songs in a playlist, does anyone know how I can do a mass delete of all the album art? - bdbr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well if you're really concerned with iPod space, you can take heart that the iPod doesn't actually make use of the MP3 album art tag - it stores what it uses in a separate file. So the album art on all the song files is just wasted space (though not a lot).
I still prefer to use the MP3 album art just so the art stays with the file. - guhappy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
If you like Tag&Rename, try this free alternative instead... Mp3tag - mousky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Are you sure it is LAME? Which version of LAME are you using? I have no problems with LAME encoded VBR MP3s with my SanDisk Sansa players.
Go to: http://rarewares.org/mp3.html to get the latest version of LAME. There is also an alpha version that you can try out. - petroK, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I need to look into that... doesn't iTunes not write it to the ID3 tags either.
If not, I really need to find a hack to apply iTunes art to ID3v2 tags (of course that would mean a little more file bloat...wouldn't it?) - jguerry, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i've just tested ID3-TagIT and Tag & Rename software. There is an inconvenience which I do not like. When I have multiple copies of the same song/file, it will not rename them and gives an error message. Does anyone know of a program that will just append a 1,2,3,etc to the end of the filename before the .mp3 ?
- cyclopsface, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah, they were encoded with the latest version of LAME. It's a pretty well documented problem with iTunes (though not anywhere on apple's support site of course :/) that it uses old school VBR headers or something and doesn't understand the newer standard, so it calculates the length of the song based on how many bits are in the first chunk, and so if the beginning of the song doesn't just happen to have the average amount of bits, the length of the song comes out wrong. There are some programs on the internet that are supposed to batch rewrite the headers for iTunes benefit but nothing worked for me.
ps: the problem is with iTunes. I wish I could just use Amarok, but it took me 2 days to compile it for my mac and i never could get it to update my iPod :( - bdbr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"I'm still not confident that volume leveling is the proper way to go. Someone convince me."
If you have songs that are particularly loud or soft, you want to level them...otherwise you have to keep futzing with the volume to make up for songs with the wrong gain. mp3gain does a great job of this.
In theory it sounds good to just level everything, so you won't have anything too loud or soft. mp3gain isn't perfect and sometimes (though rarely) misinterprets levels...then it will have made songs that were at the right level worse. And if you use the default gain, it will make all your music quieter, so you will have to run it on every song you ever play, or they will be too loud. - markdr123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well I've been using Windows Media Player 11 for my library and it works fine with album art, which it downloads automatically. Honestly, I prefer it to all these third party media organising apps.
Digg me down if you must... -
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