Music Collection Tools

[Lazybones]

 My music collection has grown out of control and I am looking for tools to clean it up.

So far I have found:

http://www.mediamonkey.com/
To clean up tags and sort files

and

http://www.musicbrainz.org/
For finding the names and tags for very poorly named files.

Anyone else use these tools or think they have better ones to suggest?

[Shayne]

 http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ < is by far and away the best tag system available.  Ive tried 10s of different programs to do this specific task, but mp3tag is the best.  its web framework system allows you to create custom plugins to access online music directories for tag information, etc.

Look into it.  Freeware, and whickedly powerful.

I used this program to organize and update my music collection which is at 110GB, and its 100% albums.

[Lazybones]

 

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ < is by far and away the best tag system available.  Ive tried 10s of different programs to do this specific task, but mp3tag is the best.  its web framework system allows you to create custom plugins to access online music directories for tag information, etc.

Look into it.  Freeware, and whickedly powerful.

I used this program to organize and update my music collection which is at 110GB, and its 100% albums.

Maybe its better after tracking down more plugings but the two apps I listed above both seem to have better UI's and much better features for managing incorrectly and poorly sorted collections.

My collection is not already sorted into albums so the mp3tag program wasn't able to pull meaning full lists.


http://www.musicbrainz.org/ is very cool.. Take any file from your collection, name it something useless and remove the MP3 tags, chances are that it will find out what the file is by its sound print.

[Shayne]

 mp3tag has a net framework for musicbrainz, but freedb is far better

To each his own though.

[Lazybones]

mp3tag has a net framework for musicbrainz, but freedb is far better

To each his own though.

I gave it a shot, I just didn't find it as intuitive as Media Monkey.

[Melbosa]

 I haven't had a chance to try the MP3 version of this yet, but I do have it:  http://www.collectorz.com/

If it works like the movie and games versions, which I have tried, it is an awsome tool!

[Shayne]

 I used to use the Collzectorz mp3 thing, its got 2 massive flaws.  No internet album look up, no album art grabber.

[Melbosa]

I used to use the Collzectorz mp3 thing, its got 2 massive flaws.  No internet album look up, no album art grabber.

Hmmm weird as those are the features that I like about the Game and Movie versions that it has .  And it does both very nicely, downloading the Game/Movie Details and Box Art .

Maybe I have a newer version than what you used.

[Shayne]

 the mp3 collectorz seems more geared for people like Lazy with lots of singles and few albums.

The biggest issue i have right now though is finding a tool that will put the album art into the ID tag.  iTunes does this, nothing else seems too.

[Lazybones]

The biggest issue i have right now though is finding a tool that will put the album art into the ID tag.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/ does this and more.. I am telling you this is a great tool.

I have shoe horned my collection into an acceptable state. If you have albums already finding album art will be a snap as it will download it from Amazon for you.

O and yes its free.. It works like the winamp model, the main program is Free but extra features like CD burning are found in the paid version.

It has a neat tool for creating play list sets that you can download to your portable music player.. You rate your collection and it will grab play lists based on your selections to fill your media. Syncing with those devices it a paid feature.

[Shayne]

 ...i gave it a shot yesterday.  Not bad, i dont like the "library" system or the categoried treeview.  However its not bad beyond that, i wish it had identifiers and the like though...ways for me to tell that certain aspects of the tags are missing (album art). Its not like mp3tag has that functionality, but i rely on another program for that functionality.

[Lazybones]

However its not bad beyond that, i wish it had identifiers and the like though...ways for me to tell that certain aspects of the tags are missing (album art).

In the tree view

Library-->Files to Edit-->Unkown Album Art

Done