You might also have the problem that the music on your computer is a mess. Programs like WMP or iTunes are not capable to identify the music and sort it into categories. I am looking for a solution (a program, a mod or a add-on) which scans my computer for music, erases duplicates, adjusts volume, categorizes in genres & quality, adds missing titles and artist names. I don’t want to spend a year doing it on my own. Looking forward to your help!

There is no program who does it all I think and you won't get it sorted quickly even with the best programs who do each a bit of what you need IMO. And there is no magic program that will sort your music files by genre if they aren't tagged.

Organize your stuff well (folders and subfolders in explorer you know) for a start.

Then find good free proggies to help you go quicker for doing such or such task.

Very nice program for writing tag's:

Mp3tag

No single program will do all that for you automatically, since all files are different in their own way there is no all-in-one utility that will set everything the way you want.

You should develop a habit of organizing files directly when you get/make them!

But that's not saying you have to do it all manually, which would indeed take quite a while.
Using a combination of programs will make it a lot easier for you.

Mp3tag as mara- mentioned is a great program (probably the best one) to do most of the things you want, try it.

Other programs you may find helpful are programs to:
-Find and remove duplicates.
-Rename multiple files/folders easily, for example Rename Master.
-Play the files and be able to change tags and filenames directly inside the player, it can be done with for example Quintessential Media Player.

Categorizing the files will be a bit more difficult if they aren't already tagged with genre, but there may be a program for that too.

Even if you use all of those programs you will still have to change the settings manually and make sure they do what you want. Otherwise you may end up with files organized/tagged/named even worse than before. It will take time, but doing a little once in a while will make it easier.

I've got 11000+ files of music and very few of them have incorrect/missing/awkward looking names/tags. I've used only Quintessential Media Player and Rename Master combined with Windows Explorer to do it, Mp3tag would have made things even easier.

Hi guys

Thanx for great answers and advice!

Yeah, I know that you should develop the habit of tagging when downloading music, but when you load an entire mp3 player into your hard disc it's a hazzle.

I have been told that programs like Media Monkey and Music Match should do a great load of the work. Any of you have experience with that?
Also I have been warned that these programs sometimes rather tend to mess up your music collection than actually sorting it. Don't want that to happen!

The programs you mentioned will probably also do just as well as any other similar prog.

But any of those sure can mess up your collection, just as almost any utility to automatically do things. So be careful and just tag/rename/normalize/modify a few albums at once (and verify the results the first times just to be sure it's ok).

Sorting the music like this may be quite ok, but it depends on your preferences (folder structure):
-Genre/type
....-Artist
........-Album(s)

This post has been edited by DL.: Nov 28 2007, 12:56 AM

wmp does most of that. only thing it doesn't is delete duplicates.
there's an option to scan your pc for music etc, and automatically add it to your library.
to add missing media info, just right click the album name, click find album info, type the album name, click next and click OK. simple as that.

as for volume, i think you mean volume normalization? all of the song is adjusted to the same volume? i rip my cds to 320kbps mp3, use mp3gain on them http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/ and encode them to 128kbps WMA from that. works fine for me, and the quality/size is decent. mp3gain also supports batch normalizing, you can normalize tons of songs at the same time. wmp has it's own auto volume levelling but for me it decreases quality... mp3gain doesn't so may as well use that.

This post has been edited by clidx: Jan 10 2008, 05:05 PM

Cd's put them in one folder but for the rest leave them in the main music directory where you store your other data. For me I have them where I use random music to play background music like GTA or MUGEN.

Hi, this prob has vexed me too for a long long time
I dunno abt MediaMonkey and MusicMatch but you might want to try this:

1. Download Winamp 5.5 and use it's Auto-tagging feature.
2. Once all the mp3s have their tags, use TagScanner to organize your files the way you want

Pros:
Tagging is done automatically and very quickly.
The files can be organized for eg as "Artist\Album\Title" or "Artist - Album\Title" or any way you want.

Cons:
Auto-tagging is not infallible. Tho it is correct more than 95% of the time, you've to watch out for that 5%
TagScanner has a bug (dunno what else to call it) and creates a "noAlbumArtist" folder, even tho the album artist has been specified in the tag.
All files in this folder have to be manually moved.

This is by far the easiest and fastest method I know of organizing Music.
If anyone can suggest improvements, I'm all ears...

Well Ive been looking for a music file organizer for ages! I have hundreds of mp3s all without order and some are even duplicates. Ive just recently come across a program 'nerxy file organizer' and I love it!
It automatically organizes my music files into folders using options of my choice AND it deletes any duplicate files I may have.
Check it out at www.nerxy.com

As being a former DJ I had a need for organized music as well. All of my MP3s are what I have on CD (or LP), but I do not organize them that way. It is because there are the same song on different CDs and also the same song with different actual labels on the CD or in CDDB. Right off the bat I name all songs as 'artist - title'.mp3. My music folder is like this:

MUSIC
-A
--band1
--band2
--band3
-B
--band1
-C
-D

etc.

Having a good organizational method at the start is what helped me. Prenaming files is what stops me from having duplicates. I don't overly concern myself with the ID3 tags, although I will fix some occasionally.

If you put the effort in getting the ID3 tags correct, then programs like MP3Tag can rename and organize the files programmatically based on the ID3 information. This allows you to change the filenames in seconds rather then doing tedious manual handling to do the same objective. Further renaming from an example of "%artist% - %title%" to something like "%number% - %title%" is easy and quick based on correct ID3 tags.

That is cool. I still use CDex with CDDB to get all my tags filled when I rip from CD. The only real problems is getting stuff on straight DL that are tagged or named wrong. Those are so few in number that it really isn't worth it to me to have such a system.