Subsonic Forum

When it comes to organizing and tagging music, we all have our own preferences on how we want to do it, but we all can agree that we want to do it right according to our own opinions and needs.

What I wanted to share was two tools that I have been using to help me accomplish the never ending task of properly tagging and naming files. While my server isn't Windows, my desktop is. These tools are specific to Windows.

In keeping of the spirit of the Subsonic community, I am sharing these links for the reasons of the betterment of the end user, and not as any sort of means to get people to leave Subsonic. (These tools don't even replace the function or purpose of subsonic anyways. They only add to your role in managing your Subsonic music collection.)

Without further delay, I present my two favorite tools, (yes, just two) for the purpose of tagging and naming my music files.


ReNamer

• License: Freeware
• Platforms: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/Win7
• Used Since: 2006
• Focus: Batch Tasks on Renaming files of any kind.

I have used ReNamer since 2006. ReNamer is a powerful file naming tool, with the ability for you to define macro's to run, in specific order. It allows for advanced features such as scripting and regular expressions.

You can create a series of rules to run on given files, folders, and subfolders, and preview the end result before you run it.




TagScanner

• License: Freeware
• Platforms: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/Win7
• Used Since: 2002
• Focus: Batch audio file tagging from files names, and vice versa.

I have used TagScanner since 2002. TagScanner is very powerful as well, and even allows for renaming files based on their metadata. With support for MP3, AAC, FLAC, and other formats, I have found it to be very useful for cleaning up my music. It has features such as retrieving the missing tag information from the internet, populating the tags based on the position of information in the file name, or renaming the files based on the tags. Batches can be done, and it also has previewing before making the changes as well.

I hope you find those tools useful as I have. I have used them both for hours and hours over the years, and would stand behind them both as reliable, useful, and trustworthy programs.

Thanks for posting this, it should be useful to a lot of visitors.


I also have 2 recommendations, also for Windows . These two programs have been the largest influence on organizing my collection (over 1 TB) nicely.

Foobar2000
It's actually a music player, but it has a whole lot of advanced features making it worth to install this, even if you will never use it as your music player.
It can tag very well (from freedb, from the filenames, or from your info).
It does ReplayGain (it can scan the files and add the RG information to the file's tags. It supports both track and album gain).
It does file operations (for example to change an album, or everything you have to the same 01. Band - Trackname.extension format).
It converts. It does it quite well, supports a lot of formats.
It's free. I personally use it as my music player, have changed around the UI a lot (easy to do, many cool features), and have several plugins for extra functionality, it's my alarm clock to wake up in the morning for example.

Xrecode II
A converter and audio-grabber. It's real fast (good multi-core support for example) and smart. It supports a lot of formats, has a ton of options, but it still easy to us. Can do nice things, such as splitting files (from a album-as-one-file to nice seperate and named tracks). It even does multichannel (5.1 and such) things well, because early in it's development I emailed with the developer for my own conversion purposes . There is a free version, I do not know that it's limitations are (I have the full version myself).

musicbrainz picard

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard

In my opinion these are the best I have tried many:

Mp3tag

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

And for renaming files/folders etc:

Flexible Renamer

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA014830 ... /FlexRena/

Mediamonkey has worked wonders for me. I've been using it for several years to keep my MP3 collection organized.
Maintaining metatags and embedded album art is a pain with any size collection, until you get it in check. Once you play with Mediamonkey for a while, you'll appreciate its power, simplicity, and its speed.

Also... It's FREE!!!

FYI: They are currently working on compatibility with iOS 5.
I've managed to keep my collection from being contaminated by Itunes... Thank you Mediamonkey
http://www.mediamonkey.com/

5,786 artists
9,253 albums
99,592 songs
452.99 GB (~ 7,036 hours)

So far the best app I have found by far is MusicBee, It does a really good job and is really configurable.

www.getmusicbee.com

I've been using Tag & Rename for some time now:

http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm