Music Library

[Mclaren]

OK, so i am sure this has been asked here before and there are lots of opinions on the net.

I am in two minds about taking my whole MP3 collection and dumping to one folder, or having all artists and albums in individual folders.

If i do the all in one folder i will be able to get rid of a load of duplicates, but it may be a bit messy looking for a track i may want to hear

If i leave all as they are now i am stuck with duplicates.

I also have a lot of songs that are label "artist" or Track....", some of these tracks have the tag but are just named wrong, is there software to re-name the file according to the tag info ?

[Monty]

Any reason this is under gaming?

Winamp and iTunes have the ability to update the information of the songs.
Rather keep the songs in an artist/album type layout and just delete duplicate songs as you come across them.

[Stuart]

Moved to software (in light of his request about software to update song information).

[Mclaren]

Any reason this is under gaming?

Yeah....stupidity....sorry guys.

Thanks Mighty Mouse for moving it.

[rustypup]

also, check out MP3 book helper... it supports limited regex...

[Bluez]

I find MediaMonkey works quite well... it even has a filter for "Files to edit" where your duplicates will show up if they have the same tag info.

[Tel]

Well Mclaren, it's all down to personal preference I would imagine.

Each option has it's pros and cons. Depending on how vigilant you are, there should be no duplicates in the library.

All the mp3's in one folders sounds novel, but this could get messy, and depending on how many songs you have in your library, you might start getting issues when attempting to open the folder.

Personally, I use the Artist\Album option. It makes it easy to browse and maintain.

\My Music
\Artist
\Year - Album Name
\Number - Track Title

But again, it's total a personal choice.

[Sojourn]

Funny I don't have this issue.
I only rip my CD's once and enter details if needed, but lately it is automated.
Pirate much?

[Tel]

Funny I don't have this issue.
I only rip my CD's once and enter details if needed, but lately it is automated.
Pirate much?

Nah, I just still don't trust an app automagically sorting my stuff.

[Sojourn]

My first post was aimed at thread creator.

Question remains... how do you end up with gigabytes of music including loads of duplicate songs, WITHOUT copying (pirating) from that "server" at the office or your friend?
If you buy a CD, rip it and classify and store it, you will never have this "how do I sort all the crapp I've copied from my 3rd cousin's friend's buddy at the lan" issue.

[rustypup]

If you buy a CD, rip it and classify and store it, you will never have this

i've put myself there more than once... mainly due to laziness... when the choice is between mounting and restoring a backup buried somewhere in another room or spending a minute or two re-ripping a CD, i've opted for the rip... then when i finally get around to finding an external chassis and recovering, boom... duplicates galore.

it's really not that hard... and i will probably do it again when my current media machine gives up the ghost...

[Sojourn]

Come on Rusty, how often do you have to restore backup's? Even so, you will end up with duplicate files easily fixed as the file names will be the same. The one time I had to copy music back from dvd backup's I was prompted for overwrites as the file names were the same.

anyhow... moving right along.

[rustypup]

you will end up with duplicate files easily fixed as the file names will be the same.

onyl if you're using the cddb entries, which i don't... they irritate the fudge out of me...

[DAE_JA_VOO]

Gotta agree with Sojourn here. I honestly don't understand how this can happen. I have my music organised in a simple \Artist\Album\ format. I don't have a single duplicate.

[Mclaren]

My first post was aimed at thread creator.

Question remains... how do you end up with gigabytes of music including loads of duplicate songs, WITHOUT copying (pirating) from that "server" at the office or your friend?
If you buy a CD, rip it and classify and store it, you will never have this "how do I sort all the crapp I've copied from my 3rd cousin's friend's buddy at the lan" issue.

Easy.....Nokia music store.....And.....Lets say you have three albums from one artist one with greatist hits, and then compilations.

Several years ago i had the "get legal bug" and rid my machine of all the pirate music. i then ripped all my discs (100's of them), and back then didn't bother to name all correctly (laziness). I also have a Nokia comes with music phone and i am downloading like mad, So yes, i have a **** load of crap that needs to be sorted and renamed accordingly.

[PureFire]

lets take afrikaans music compiliation cd's. do you have ANY idea how many of the songs are THE SAME from album to album, with only a slight handful being "new" tracks.

THATS how i have duplicates.
then also different hit compilations. same thing as mclaren pointed out.

[Sojourn]

even so... I store my ripped CD's arranged in their own folder, meaning if Mea Culpa gets ripped from the original CD and re-appears on a best-of CD, I will not delete the dup as it is part of that specific compilation CD. If you rip music and dump it into one folder you have serious organisational issues.

I also download from the Nokia store occasionally and have to concede that the f#ckers could have at least ID3/4 tagged their files.

I still believe the majority those with this problem (as in opening post) sourced their candy from a lan/buddy/office.

//moving along retry

[Mclaren]

just got the new PCF. there is a nice tagging app on the cover disc. A little cumbersome to use but works a treat.

I decided to just have all music in folders from A-Z. So all my tracks for Avril lavine and ACDC etc are all in A. this actually works better for me than Letter/Artist/Album/track. One can immediately see if a track is duplicated (i don't see the need to have thunder struck 3 times, even if it is on three albums). I have deleted about 10gb of duplicates so far.

[KagutsuchiZA]

I use mp3tag. It can be used to name multiple files from tag to file name and vice versa. I used to arrange my folders letter/artist/album, but now it is just artist/album, too many letters not having any/enough artists in them.

Then again, you probably would not have this problem if you weren't lazy

[Mclaren]

for me the whole Letter/track is working. tracks are labeled Artist - track title. really does make it a lot easier for me.

I use winamp to listen to the tracks.

[KagutsuchiZA]

I have used winamp for a long time and I was getting tired of the winamp look and feel, so I tried switching to other music players. In the end I always go back to winamp. Simply the best.