Experiencing music files tagging- few questions

[dbenyakar]

Hi.

I decided to improve my music library folder structure and filenames as well as songs tags.
I'm using mp3Tag most of the time for this task but I have few questions/comments and I would like to know whether you had the same experience as I do.

In my search for the perfect tool that will automatically embed tags in my songs I discovered that the task is not automatic at all.
Basically, I had to go into each artist, use the tool to search for each album, try to find a match out of the search results of the tool for the album and songs, and then apply the tagging process, if such match was found.
So if I have 100GB of music I had to do this for each and every album.- have you also experienced the same process? or you have a better method?

Also, some of the tracks numbers appeared as 1/13, 2/13... n/m, especially when more than one CD is in an album. This is not a problem in itself but if I want to use the tool to also rename the file names based on the track numbers, it appears as 113, 213... In order to solve it, I had to find a match that has the track numbers as 1, 2, 3, ..., or do the change manually. Have any of you experienced the same thing?

Once I finish the tagging I will use the tool to reorder and rename the file names and folders. I saw in some examples that the structure of the folders is as follows: X:\Music\J\Artist\..... Why do the artists folders are placed in Letters folders? is this only for the viewing in the subsonic Web interface? or will the view change also for the Android clients?

Is there a way to auto number the tracks?

How do you handle tagging tracks that do not belong to any commercial folder/album? for example, I have a folder for 80s songs which contains a bunch of 80s files. Do you tag them according to their original artist/album or you tag them based on their new folder?

Assuming the tagging is done for all the songs, what is the best folders structure (if there is any) for browsing in the Subsonic web interface and also the clients?

I know these are many questions but I did not find an answer to many of these issues so I decided to put all in one post.

Regards

[hakko]

I highly recommend using Beets, http://beets.radbox.org, to make the process as automatic as possible.

[BKKKPewsey]

I highly recommend using Beets, http://beets.radbox.org, to make the process as automatic as possible.

Hmm! not so automatic if you are using windows

I have yet to find a media organiser which ticks ALL the right boxes but MediaMonkey in combination with mp3tag works for me.
Beware the auto tag programs as you can quite often get wrong / strange tags and album art
I think the album by album method, although slower, is more reliable as trying to repair wrong tags/ cover art is a pita so human intervention / supervision is still reqd.

[hakko]

I'll admit I never used it on WIndows (I like native shell support), but why isn't it automatic? it's written in Python?

Of course, you can't always rely on it but that's the beauty of Beets, it'll ask you if unsure and do the automatic tagging where it's possible.

[bushman4]

I use Beets with shell integration on Windows all the time. It works great for me.

Every time I rip or acquire a new album, I put it OUTSIDE my music library, and then I right click on it and choose "Copy to Library with BEET" and beet runs in paranoid mode. Assuming it finds a match, it retags and renames according to the specs I set, fetches album art, populates lyric tags, and copies to the library.

All I have to do is check the folders for "extras" that I may want to keep like additional artwork or rip logs, and copy them manually. I hope someday BEET adds a "copy extra files from the source folder" option, and I won't have to do that.

Then I delete the temporary copy of the album that was in my "To Import" directory.

Glenn

[dbenyakar]

I highly recommend using Beets, http://beets.radbox.org, to make the process as automatic as possible.

I will give it a try but it uses MusicBrainz as the source of tagging. mp3Tag uses it as one of its sources as well.

[dbenyakar]

I highly recommend using Beets, http://beets.radbox.org, to make the process as automatic as possible.

Hmm! not so automatic if you are using windows

I have yet to find a media organiser which ticks ALL the right boxes but MediaMonkey in combination with mp3tag works for me.
Beware the auto tag programs as you can quite often get wrong / strange tags and album art
I think the album by album method, although slower, is more reliable as trying to repair wrong tags/ cover art is a pita so human intervention / supervision is still reqd.

Yep this is exactly what I am doing. I found that tagging each album is the best if I want to get the most reliable results and accurate tagging. There are quite few versions to each and every album with different set of tracks which makes the whole process slow and manual.
Also repairing is often required.

But what do you do when you have a collection of singles or single tracks that you created? in my 80s folder I have around 120 tracks and each one is from a different artist or album. Do you go one by one and make sure it contains the original artist/album/track tags or you change it to artist/80s/80s [track#] tags?

[hakko]

I'd make sure to get those 120 albums. Not saying that's a viable solution for everyone though..

[dbenyakar]

I'd make sure to get those 120 albums. Not saying that's a viable solution for everyone though..

Are you serious? Don't you have single songs lying around that are collected in a folder where you want only those songs and not the full albums?

[bushman4]

Are you serious? Don't you have single songs lying around that are collected in a folder where you want only those songs and not the full albums?

Speaking for myself, I'm with hakko. Yes, I do have some random tracks kicking around, but usually, once a track gets into any kind of "rotation" (ie, I played it more than once while DJ'ing a party) I usually go for the whole album to see if there is anything else good, or that other users might like.

And then I usually go to the rest of the artist's albums...

Occasionally it "pays off." I saw someone on my server play "Invisible Touch" by Genesis, arguably their pop-iest and frankly, most annoying song, and then make their way into the Genesis folder, and end up at "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway," arguably one of the finest albums ever released by anyone. And to my knowledge, they never looked back to the cheese whiz that they started with...

Glenn

[hakko]

I had those "single random tracks in a folder" ten or fifteen years ago when disc and bandwidth was expensive. It's all cleaned up by now, no 96kbit mp3s left from those days. Why would I not want the album? I even wrote code to lookup which albums I was missing from the artists that are present in my library (via MusicBrainz), to make sure I'm not missing anything important. I rarely have "single albums" lying around when there's a discography to get...

[dbenyakar]

I highly recommend using Beets, http://beets.radbox.org, to make the process as automatic as possible.

BTW is this for Linux of Windows?

[bushman4]

BTW is this for Linux of Windows?

Both. it is written in python, which is cross-platform.

Glenn

[dbenyakar]

Once I finish the tagging I will use the tool to reorder and rename the file names and folders.
I saw in some examples that the structure of the folders is as follows: X:\Music\J\Artist\..... Why do the artists folders are placed in Letters folders? is this only for the viewing in the subsonic Web interface? or will the view change also for the Android clients?
What is the best folder structure for both the android clients and the web interface?

[dbenyakar]

Are you serious? Don't you have single songs lying around that are collected in a folder where you want only those songs and not the full albums?

Speaking for myself, I'm with hakko. Yes, I do have some random tracks kicking around, but usually, once a track gets into any kind of "rotation" (ie, I played it more than once while DJ'ing a party) I usually go for the whole album to see if there is anything else good, or that other users might like.

And then I usually go to the rest of the artist's albums...

Occasionally it "pays off." I saw someone on my server play "Invisible Touch" by Genesis, arguably their pop-iest and frankly, most annoying song, and then make their way into the Genesis folder, and end up at "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway," arguably one of the finest albums ever released by anyone. And to my knowledge, they never looked back to the cheese whiz that they started with...

Glenn

I understand. But for me it is not a commercial server. It is for my android devices and few relatives.
If I do have these "loose" tracks in a folder collection, what will be the best tagging?