Music Library Workflow
With the advent of Q’s new computer, she’s presented with the dilemma of sorting through all of her old music and making some sense of it. We’ve spent a few nights together reviewing how ID3 tags work and why the iTunes is great but at the same time shitty.
I was wondering what tricks others who care about their music libraries use to manage their stuff. Personally my end goal is to have properly named MP3s with the correct tags sorted out in their correct genre/subgenre/artist/album/ directories, along with their correct album art embedded into the ID3. All this while using the least amount of programs.
- After I extra my music, if it’s not in an MP3 sort of format, I’ll use Foobar2000 for windows to transcode it to MP3/LAME.
- Delete anything that isn’t a MP3, album art or NFO file from the album’s directory.
- Feed the album into MusicBrainz Picard for window.
- Picard should compare the current tags to the MP3 with ones on its site, and thusly figuring out what album I’ve fed into it.
- If all goes well, it’ll match every song with entries for the album from MusicBrainz.
- After I’ve done this for every new album I’ve got laying around, I’ll tell Picard to save tags/file names.
- File names look something like “Arist – Album – TrackNumber – Title.mp3″ unless it’s a compilation.
- If Picard can’t locate the album in the MusicBrainz database, I can force a scan via music fingerprint.
- If that doesn’t work, I can search through their database via their site.
- If that doesn’t work, I can always just correct the tags by hand via Picard, which’ll save to tags/file names.
- If that still doesn’t work, I’ll load up Musorg to hit up the ID3.
- Once I’ve got files I’m pretty happy with, I’ll place them in their correct directory.
- Tell iTunes to add these new songs to my library.
- Unless the songs have high quality album art, I’ll tell iTunes to search for it through the iTunes Music Store.
- If the Store returns with nothing, I’ll search through Google Images and check to see if any JPGs were left in the directory where the music sits for that album.
- Once I’ve got found some good quality album art, I’ll copy it to my clip board (this can also be done with album art that iTunes has located from the Store).
- Select all songs in the album, select Get Info, and then paste the album art into its respected field. What this does is force iTunes to write the album art directly to the ID3 tag.
- If the album is two disc, I’ll correct album titles which contain disc information (The Beatles White Album (disc 1), etc.) through the Get Info tool that iTunes has.
- Also if the album is a compilation, I’ll add Album Artist to all of the MP3s.
This, at the moment, has been the quicks workflow for what I want out of my library, and boy have I gotten fast. After completion I normally sync what I have back up to my server for storage.
So what do you do? Are you as OCD as me when it comes to this stuff? Are you the sort of person that doesn’t care and is ok with iTunes doing what it will to your music? I’d like to know.
Mon 2008-02-18T22:56:58+00:00 at Permalink
yes, i am just as OCD about my music library as you are. ersonally, i haven’t found a good automated way to organise my library to my satisfaction, so i end up doing a lot of manual editing, which causes great pain to my inner geek because there should be a way to automate this. i am not 100% happy with iTunes, but i haven’t found anything else that works better.
Tue 2008-02-19T04:34:02+00:00 at Permalink
i use Max for encoding and adding/adjusting tags. if i want to covert something already in itunes to mp3, i use itunes/LAME. for album art [if max can't find any of good quality], i can usually find what i need via discogs.
Tue 2008-02-19T04:55:12+00:00 at Permalink
Thanks for the link to Max, seems like that could replace Foobar and EAC in one swoop.
Tue 2008-02-19T05:28:06+00:00 at Permalink
I don’t have any idea how I oculd help, except for wishing you the very best of luck with your tasks…
Tue 2008-02-19T05:38:05+00:00 at Permalink
I used to sort my music religiously (by genre, artist, album), but I eventually gave in and I let iTunes put it where it wants to.
The lack of good players out there is frustrating. It wouldn’t be too hard to make one, except that nobody seems willing to pay for a good music tool these days.
Tue 2008-02-19T05:40:06+00:00 at Permalink
There was one, it was called WinAMP 5.
Tue 2008-02-19T05:43:47+00:00 at Permalink
There was another called Moodlogic which seemed promising until it went away… It actually had a feedback system so it could learn from the community of users.
Tue 2008-02-19T06:44:06+00:00 at Permalink
Please, please explain that photo.
Tue 2008-02-19T06:55:14+00:00 at Permalink
Our friend Nifer used to hold this pirate birthday party. The set that photo belongs to is part of that.
Tue 2008-02-19T08:27:40+00:00 at Permalink
When I accidentally chose to allow iTunes to manage my music I just gave up.
Tue 2008-02-19T17:26:15+00:00 at Permalink
Personally, I’m fine with iTunes moving things to artist/album, since I think the genre tag is mostly useless. Lately I’m more concerned with bpm’ing and keying my music more than anything else, and iTunes doesn’t fuck with those tags, thank god. As for filenames, I really never see those. I generally go through and retag the tracknumbers as x of xx when I have time. Additionally, when I have spare time, I’m album-artist’ing pretty much everything now, so that if I ever feel like making artist a spot where remixer could go, it won’t completely fuck the world.
Wed 2008-02-20T10:32:24+00:00 at Permalink
I use Winamp 5. I even paid for it. I find it far more flexible than iTunes.
I edit tags by hand in Winamp when I find something wrong.
I keep things stored by artist/album in my file system.
I use track – name.mp3 for filenames.
I prefer AAC at 160kbps.
But I find life too short to get truly upset about music organization. I ensure it’s filed under the right artist, I fix the ID3s if needed (normally just by hand, next time I play it), and I don’t give a shit about album art.
One day someone will make the uber-tool that does all this automatically. Until then, I’m not really having any difficulty finding and playing my music.
There was a time when i would have… but I have too many other interests now.
Wed 2008-02-20T18:56:16+00:00 at Permalink
If someone ported WinAMP 5 to OSX, that’s what I would be using. The sad truth is that iTunes is the least suckiest mp3 player for Mac.
Sat 2008-03-01T17:28:16+00:00 at Permalink
Absofuckinglutely.
However, I don’t transcode things since that loses quality. I do use Picard, like crazy, and MusicBrainz. Usually Picard and/or iTunes is enough to fulfill album art needs for me. I use iTunes to organize and name everything. I don’t use “Album Artist” because that seems to mess with sorting, but I do use the Compilation tag instead and that seems to do a good job in most cases with multi-artist albums.
I also use MusicIP Mixer to find and nuke duplicates. Finally, I use iTLU to re-sync my iTunes library database to make sure it recognizes any changes and cleans up anything I added/deleted from behind its back. :)