Get all my mp3's properly tagged

my god, what a lot of shite! I’ve cleaned out so much crap and doubles.

My recommended strategy would be:
1) use mp3tag to quickly check that as much artist/album information is set in the tags
2) do a pass with the old musicbrainz tagger, autosave all recognised albums with a certainty of 85%+
3) check the remaining entries in the mb tagger
4) use picard (the next-gen mb tagger) to mop up the remaining unrecognised albums
5) use mp3tag and sites like www.discogs.com,www.allmusic.com,www.last.fm and the wikipedia to fill out the year and genre tags
6) rejoice in a beautiful library!

I’m at step 5, making steady progress.

the musicbrainz tagger correctly identified 20000 files, 10000 to go. Of course, a lot were already properly tagged but I took the opportunity to have the files moved to a folder structure like this:

artist\album (year)\tracknr – title.mp3

‘cept musicbrainz often can’t decide on a year and then fills in (0000). A minor annoyance, easily fixed by doing a pass with mp3tag. At the same time I will fill in some missing artist tags, musicbrainz tagger sometimes completely misses the song if the artist tag isn’t filled in. After mp3tag is done a final pass with the musicbrainz tagger. Then a file search for (1);(2);(3); etc to catch all the duplicates and weed out the lower bitrates.

And then we shall never speak of this again.

Added a lot of new MP3s, moved the collection around, you know how it goes. Its a mess again.

This time, I will set some higher standards for tagging
- Record label should be set in comments
I want this because its sometimes fun to browse by label!

- Year should be (more or less) correctly entered
Again, a compilation thing.

- v1 and v2 tags
Some programs don’t write both tags. Others can’t read one of them (often the one you don’t have). Dual-tag the lot.

- stricter genres
I’ve started using Last.fm (www.last.fm) for reference on genre as sometimes it can be hard to categorise. Last fm will display similar bands and user-generated category tags so often an acceptable suggestion will come up.

- track numbers added
Some albums are MEANT to be listened to in order, dynamic playlists be damned! ;)

almost 30000 files to go sigh

I found mp3tag http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ to be the most effecient (and free) tag editor for windows. It loaded 30000 songs without a hitch, can edit multiple entries, the works.

On the linux side of things I’m hacking away at this massive task with Kid3 (http://kid3.sourceforge.net/) an equally procifient editor.

I will use Amazon for (sometimes wildly inaccurate) album stats like label and year and song order. I might have a stab at it with musicbrainz but in this case I don’t trust automation.

Update: Frack it, I’m going to do a musicbrainz run and check the remainder with mp3tag.

feck that took a lot of effort.

But it was worth it: I get more from my ipod because of the cleanup and more out of my collection as a whole.

Being able to create smart playlist based on genre and grouping and other listening habits rocks! Next up: rate all my music!

Since I’ve installed iTunes there’s been some improvement because the itunes ‘smart playlist’ feature really makes you care about proper tagging!

It’s a slow, uphill battle but I’m winning! ;)