[How-To] Organize Your Music Files and Tag Them Automatically

[SathyaBhat]

I’m a music buff.Music surrounds me all time time, whether its listening to it from my laptop or from my P1i. My music collection though isn’t as large as some other people’s, regardless I’d like to keep it organized. While re-organizing my music files, I realized that a huge chunk of my files were badly tagged, and erroneously named. So I set about searching for a software which can automatically tag and rename my files, and I found MusicBrainz Picard Tagger.

So what is MusicBrainz? The wiki states

MusicBrainz is a user-maintained community music metadatabase.Music metadata is information such as the Artist name, the release title, and the list of tracks that appear on a release. MusicBrainz collects this information about recordings and makes it available to the public.​

Picard tagger is a software which makes use of MusicBrainz database.

Picard is the next generation MusicBrainz tagging application. This new tagging concept is album oriented, as opposed to track/file oriented like the ClassicTagger was. Picard is written in Python, which is a cross-platform language, and makes use of cross-platform libraries - this allows the same code to run both on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.​

Picard Tagger is a powerful, but the interface is a bit confusing for first time usage, and hence I thought I’ll write this small how-to.

Picard tagger has a 3-pane interface, the left pane is the File browser/manager, the middle pane shows the files which haven’t been identified, and the right pane is for files which have been identified and tagged. In case you’re seeing only a 2-pane interface, click on View –> File Browser.

Now, from the file browser drag and drop the files you want to be identified and tagged. The files will be grouped under “Unmatched files”. Click on the cluster button to cluster them according to to albums.



Next, click on the folder and click on Lookup or Scan button. Picard Tagger will contact the MusicBrainz database and list all the albums and the tracks will have an icon next to them, indicating how much of a match it is.



Now if you’ve got your music from multiple sources(you know, *ahem*) then its possible that looking up will bring up multiple albums, so just drag and drop the tracks to the relevant albums.



This isn’t necessary, though, and you can skip this and just click on Save.



And that’s it’s it! The tags are saved.

Picard tagger is also extensible, you can use plugins to extend its capability. One of the must-have plugins is the cover art downloader By this plugin you can not only embed the cover art within the tag, but also save the cover art as a separate file. Just click on Options –> Options –> Cover Art –> and ensure “Embed Cover Images into Tags” and “Save cover images as files” is checked. Windows Media Player 11 users would want to enter “folder” as the file name, else WMP won’t detect the CoverArt.

Besides tagging, Picard can also rename files based on the tags. For this Click on Options –> Rename. You can also change the filename structure, for this Click on Options –> Options –>File Naming and change the structure there.

Hope this post was helpful.

Here are the download Links:

MusicBrainz Picard Tagger: Windows / *Nix / Mac OS X

Cover Art Downloader Plugin

 

[xfire]

Try media monkey. It's very good.

 

[DrunkenMafia]

awesome thanx for that, my music files are a huge mess.

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

god i needed this

 

[exodusprime1337]

oh man this is awsome, i've been trying to get an album and maybe 450 other songs to not show up as unknown in media player now they're in the right place

 

[btarunr]

Satya, the pics you posted don't seem to work, the image host seems to have ran out of (free) bandwidth. Use http://www.techpowerup.org (ORG = our image host, COM = our homepage), repost the screenshots. So glad to have you here.

 

[SathyaBhat]

@Tarun Yeah, Will do. Will upload to flickr instead, gotta make use of that pro account
EDIT: Glad to be here

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

yow so what exactly does it do, it moves them into folders?

 

[SathyaBhat]

@You mean the pro account?
A flickr free account is limited to 3 sets. Plus cant upload vidoes.

Pro account gives you access to them

 

[FatForester]

Try media monkey. It's very good.

That's the first thing I thought about when I saw this. MediaMonkey is a lifesaver. I might give this a shot, but from the screen shots I don't think it's going to replace MM anytime soon.

 

[xfire]

I think he mean's the software's method of organisation.
AFAIK it just catalogs it, as long as you view it to the software everything is organized but in explorer everything is the way it is. When you sync it with an external drive it gets organized.

 

[SathyaBhat]

Um, Picard *does* move the files according to the tags,AFAIK I didnt write on it, as my folder structure is organized, though my tags weren't prior to this, LOL

 

[xfire]

Media Monkey doesn't do that. Are you sure it moves the files? Did you check in windows explorer to see?
You should do one on Amarok's organisation too.

 

[oli_ramsay]

Is there a way to associate a jpeg with an ablum for album art? I have loads and loads of mixtapes (not albums) which aren't listed at musicbrainz and most of the folders have a jpeg in the folder of the front cover. Is there any piece of software that'll associated that jpeg with the ~30 mp3's contained in that folder?

 

[3870x2]

sounds good, lets see what it can do with nearly 2TB of music...
so far from what ive seen with these programs is a huge mess. Theoretically it works great.
but when half of your entire collection is named differently, it gets pretty messy.

 

[3870x2]

going to try this on a group of my songs, about 31000 of them to be exact, well see how it works on that many, which is probably the average person.
Edit: its been frozen for about 5 minutes so far, but i asume it's working because it is heavily utilizing memory and CPU, ill give it some time.

 

[xfire]

If thats no good try media monkey.

 

[3870x2]

its working pretty well now.
its still going to take alot of physical work for me to get my close to a million songs together.
EDIT: closer to 500000 actually.

 

[3870x2]

programs been working for 15 hours and 30 minutes so far. Looks good though!

 

[DonInKansas]

Holy pissballs that's a lot of tunage!

Thanks for bumping this; I've been looking for a program that did something like this.

 

[thraxed]

music brainz is so outdated why you even recommended this beats the hell out of me. You guys really don't want to use this method. Everything powered by gracenote day for musical imprinting, which winamp supports, and by far is a kick ass mp3player that whoops the lhama's ass for a reason! Now if you didn't uncheck the auto tagger, playlist, and media library boxes on install your all set. when your song playing double click the the name of the song it will bring up a box to edit the info, in the lower right there a box that says auto-tag. so you say yeah but 1 by 1 takes to long. Well thow 200 songs or so in play list, hit ctrl-a or right click & select all, then right click and choose send to auto tag. I would not try your who library at once, I don't think winamp has the memory buffers for that.