Get all my mp3's properly tagged

tiz good web..but i dono how 2 use tiz…lol

i spent a whole lot of time on this and got rid of the worst offenders.
every file now has artist, album, title, and track number tags, and a
script checks for problems and puts them into the appropriate
directories.

beyond that, i’ve decided to stop worrying about it and fix problems as
i come across them. there’s no sense in doing all this work for music i
never want; better to wait until i actually want it and go looking for
it.

a lot of the problems with tagging are in the limitations on how you can
enter data. to take a small example, say you have the emi recording of
the beethoven triple and brahms double concerti. there are no fewer
than nine clear candidates to be entered in the “artist” tag:

• Berliner Philharmoniker
• Cleveland Orchestra
• David Oistrakh
• George Szell
• Herbert von Karajan
• Johannes Brahms
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Mstislav Rostropovich
• Sviatoslav Richter

which do you enter? if you make different choices for different tracks,
will the album be split to different locations when sorted by tags? if
you pick one, how will you find the album again when you’re searching
for it by a different artist?

as a kludge, everyone ends up creating enormous album and/or title tags,
shoving all the data in wherever it will fit.

and how long is the “album” (and “track”) concept going to persist in a
musical world of non-physical media?

in the long run, tagging by current tagging standards will be a losing
game, but it’s the best we can do for now.

attempts at doing this just reinforce what a big job it is, but a new mp3 player which organizes files by tags reinforces my desire to get it done. (why are movements 1, 3, and 4 in this part of the player, and movement 2 over there?...) need to keep hacking away at it a bit at a time.

Probably one of the most satisfying things I’ve done over the past month or so, I now can’t stand seeing a lower case artist name or a non-conforming file title. Shudder.

The path to enlightenment is:
“Artist Name” – “Song Title” (Ft. “Supporting Artist”).mp3, complete with album art.

Seeing this for all of my song files makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. Worth doing!!

my music collection is a big pile of evil. half-tagged files everywhere, and a lot of nonsense like these artist tags:

Beethoven
Beethoven,_Ludwig_Van
Beethoven_-_The_London_Classic
Ludwig_van_Beethoven
Ludwig_Van_Beethoven
Ludwig_van_Beethoven_-_Artur_S
L_v_Beethoven
Schnabel,_Ludwig_van_Beethoven

i shudder to think of tackling this, but i’d like to move my collection online, possibly to http://www.mp3tunes.com/ , and want to get it ready.

i need to look for what i can delete, then start rationalizing the remainder.

in the grand scheme of things, this goal isnt important… was just a way for me to waste time.

i dont even own any mp3s anymore.

Is tagging the same as making playlists??? Maybe that’s what I mean here. In order to do this I guess I need meaningful tags/lists identified. So that is the current sticking point.

I’ll investigate this by asking my 13 year old what his tags are. I imagine it’s easier to accomplish this goal when your music collection is smaller than my decades old one.

But, it will be nice to have my music organized.

There’s a few things that need to happen before I embark on this project, and a major one just happened.

Specifically, I acquired a 750 Gig external drive where I dumped all of my music. There, I’m organizing it into a file structure that makes sense.

I’ve also picked out an app (EasyTAG) that I think will do the job quite well.

Onwards…

and I don’t really need to tag them now.

kablamo