organizing MP3 files
 

Let's say I have a friend who has an external hard drive with a whole boatload of MP3 files on it that are unidentified. Is there some sort of software that can rename files that are named things like track01 and track02 in folder disk01 so they are named with their actual track title and the folder is named the album title? There is also a text file in each disk01 folder that has a list of the track titles, so this could be done manually if my friend had a free week or so. He's just not so keen on doing that.

Is there some easy to use free software that can ID these MP3 files and change their names? My friend isn't sure how he'll end up playing these MP3 files, so he doesn't necessarily want to load them into a proprietary system like iTunes that would need to be opened every time he wants to play the tracks in the future. But he might be willing to do that.

Audio files usually have metadata embedded in them, even if the file name is useless. The last time I had any cause to care about this, the term was 'ID3 tag', and you could find free programs to read and edit ID3 information.

It's probably worth checking if they do have metadata on them, since more than renaming the files, adding/correcting metadata is what would be useful -- it's pretty straightforward to mass process files to change filenames based on ID3 information, and it's also the same information which iTunes, etc, will use to sort them.

This is what my friend sees:


Attachment 44451

There are probably about 300 unidentified disks like this.

The answer to this is MusicBrainz Picard. It can identify and tag MP3s by comparing them to its music database.

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard

Excellent! Thanks

I haven't used it, so let me know how it goes, I'm interested to find out. I used to be in the business of identifying music on the radio.

So far, so good. Took about 5 minutes of reading the quick start tutorial and trying some stuff not covered in that tutorial, and I'm making it work for me. So far, I've converted one folder with 13 albums in it. It was able to identify 12 of the 13 albums but not an obscure one that according to the existing text file in the folder is:
DTITLE=Ultraboogie / Head On
TTITLE0=radio edit
TTITLE1=collision mix
TTITLE2=visciouslymixed
TTITLE3=collision edit
TTITLE4=the late night guitar mix
TTITLE5=the long lost guitar mix

So except for the Ultraboogie mix, it did well.

Only complaint so far is that it didn't change the name of the folder from Disk01 to AlbumTitle. But the album title information is included in the tags for each track, so that's all good, and it's renamed the tracks with their actual titles and left them in the original folders. (I had to check a box to get it to rename instead of save a new copy elsewhere.)

Now I'm going to see if it can handle multiple subfolders so I don't have to drag batches of albums from individual folders.

coooool. i can make use of this, thanks UT.

Hmm. I think I got greedy. I loaded a few thousands unidentified tracks for it to process, and the program seems to be frozen.

I wonder if I'm eating a lot of my firm's bandwidth right now and will get a phone call from IT?

I forced it to close and I restarted it and am taking smaller bites now. Doing a dozen or so albums at a time.

One interesting thing, the Run Lola Run movie soundtrack was identified as Lola rennt, which is the original German name. I believe the original source material came from the US Run Lola Run soundtrack, so I'm not sure if you would say it got that one wrong. How persnickety do you want to be?

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but it's having a little trouble on compilation albums of various artists, like movie soundtracks or hits of the 80's type stuff. It will ID some songs, but not others, and it will say that the source info for a particular song it has identified is the original album that song appeared on, not the compilation album it's currently on.

I guess it just depends on the database that's been built up by its users. This obscure stuff I have is giving it some trouble. So far, I estimate it's identifying about 95% of the tracks. Maybe more. I'll have abetter idea when I'm done.

Turns out you have to go slow. Probably one album at a time, to make sure it's doing it right.

It had trouble identifying which album Stop Making Sense was, and was assigning the tracks to greatest hits and other albums. It identified the tracks correctly, but was putting in the album information incorrectly, so I had to manually move the tracks into the correct album. Otherwise, they would end up playing in the wrong order.

I'm afraid that when I was initially just letting it do everything automatically, it assigned many tracks to the wrong albums, so the track order is all messed up.

Oh well. So it's less automatic than I thought. You have to watch it.

I can start over again. I still have the original source material, so I may just do this over and go slow next time.

I have the same problem on my mp3 players. Bunch of songs by same artist, but it shows as 25 albums. It would be a pain to change the attribute 1 at a time. I saw something about 2 programs, Mp3tag and MP3jam. I've not tried yet as I have other problems. Thnks for this thread.

I'm done cleaning everything up. I went through 197 albums containing about 2400 tracks.

This program correctly identified about 60% of my albums with no problems at all including getting the track titles right and in the correct order. For about 30% of the albums, it would identify the tracks, but assign some of them to incorrect albums, so I had to manually drag them from the wrong album (like a greatest hits compilation or movie soundtrack) and into the correct album. And worst of all, for about 10% of albums, it failed to identify anything, or might only identify one song if that song had shown up on an obscure movie soundtrack or something. To be fair, for the most part, when I'd try playing some of those unidentified tracks, I couldn't recognize anything about them, so they were also unknown to me. I mean they were unknown to my friend. I had nothing to do with any of this.

None of the tracks it was asked to identify were from later than 2001. So I don't know how it would do with contemporary music. The completeness of the music database is the key.

Things a little slow at work? :eyebrow: