organizing MP3 files

[BigV]

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

[glatt]

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?

[glatt]

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?

[glatt]

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.

[glatt]

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.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by glatt

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'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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Things a little slow at work?