Music Organization Software

[Blog]

I was wondering if any of you guys could recommend a decent piece of free software that will go through my .mp3's and organize them in proper folders and rename the files appropriately. Ideally a scheme where my folder structure looks like:

X:\Music\Artist Name\Albumn Name\Artist - Trackname.mp3

for every track.

I'm sure this is likely not difficult but has eluded me thus far. I tried to make Windows Media Player organize my library based on my rip settings (which I had setup as shown above) but it made a mess of things and duplicated tracks and whatnot. I am hoping someone can help me out a bit so I dont have to sort through thousands of files manually.

[Candiarie]

I'm pretty sure you can do it in foobar with file operations, and iTunes can do it by default, assuming they're all in whatever folder you have your itunes library set to. But itunes does Artist\Album\Tracknum Trackname.mp3 by default, which I prefer anyway so it works out.

[Hateyou]

What I did was got a good buzz going one lazy weekend, turned on some good music and just ground out sorting my music. It honestly isn't as daunting as it seemed.

I just made some basic genre folders, like 'metal', 'drum and bass', 'butt rock', 'punk' , etc and just went through my main folder and threw each album into one of those. Once you do that it feels so much easier to manage.

Then I went through and made artist folders. It really went much faster than I thought it would.. Now whenever I rip or DL something I do it to the appropriate folder, and it's headache free.

Every software I tried to use sucked because well, people mislabel shit that you DL. For example it put Opeth in to a Black Metal folder, a Rock folder, a Death metal folder, and so on. Sorting by name-only sucked also because it would mix different albums together. Personally I'm way to anal for that.

Now I have 30k+ songs organized and it's easy to browse through. I didn't do sub genres because for me it's way too fucking hard to do, as so many people have different opinions on where a band fits.

Good Luck~

[The Ancient]

Windows Media Player does that, I'm not sure what you did to create duplicate tracks besides owning duplicate tracks.

If you want to delete duplicate tracks do a search in the folder containing all your musics for tracks listed as (02),(03), etc.

[crrimson death]

butt rock.

[decairn]

ID3-TagIT does it.

[Fog]

MP3Tag is the canonical standalone software for this.

[Kindnugs]

I ran into the same problem. I tried em all.. I hate them all. I have a huge collection and my main thing is updating the album art and tag info. The best one I found was media monkey. The problem with itunes and media player is when you have albums that are not popular and are not in a lot of the online databases. They fuck up all my lounge albums to no end. I have to manage those manually and media monkey so far the easiest for that.

[Opulis]

I do it all by hand! It's much prettier that way. I'm really anal about music organization though...

[Fog]

Are we talking about just fixing the directory tree, or organizing in the first place from scratch?

If organizing from scratch, then I'm glad I'm not in your shoes, because there aren't really any reliable options besides just going through every file and tagging it as per your filing scheme. I use foo_discogs for foobar2000, which is very good - I can tag an album from the discogs data in about three clicks - but for someone with a less electronic-oriented collection, discogs is probably not sufficient.

I have about 12k files all tagged by hand, and it's not so bad, because over the years I've just tagged them as I filed them away. Doing them in one chunk, though - say goodbye to a weekend.