Music Library Clean Up

[menikmati]

second step? Third step?

step 2 - download and install winamp

step 3 - tag and rename (the files themselves AND the folders)

(and one good reason to hate itunes is it doesn't support flac - not to mention you'll eventually get the underwater garbled sound, and it will ask you to download and update at least twice a week)

[Wheres the beef?]

Why exactly do people hate iTunes? I never understood that. It organizes and plays my music. That's all you need, right?

The way that itunes categorizes and presents my music is counter intuitive. Apple couldn't just follow the regular file tree structure but instead created an ass backwards way of presenting my music based on ID3 tags. If you download a lot of music that is not tagged properly, the chore of tagging and renaming files so they are categorized correctly is painfully tedious and frustrating. Say I have downloaded a bunch of music....say live sets by Richie Hawtin and lo and be hold iTunes presents me this under "artists":

Richie Hawtin
Richie_Hawtin
richie_Hawtin
Richie_Hawtin

Give me a fucking break.

And when a file is renamed or changed it doesnt get deleted from itunes and changed to correspond to the actual file. Instead, itunes leaves the file in there and puts an "!" next to it. And the geniuses at Apple didn't put in a function where you can sort/see all files with exclamation marks to delete all at once. Each file must be manually found and deleted. If not, you can end up with multiple instances of one song where only one of files shown is the actual song and the rest are just ghosts of whatever it used to be before you renamed it.

But, Tommy, I'm sure iTunes is great if you like listening to albums by popular artists who have music on itunes and such. However, I don't, so iTunes does little for me except being a vehicle for swapping songs on my ipod. There are plenty of other programs that allow me to do more like play flac files, edit, convert, rename, and organize that itunes just can't do. iTunes sucks.

And, in regards to the OPs question, I like media monkey. It won't auto-rename stuff for you but it makes mass-renaming files a breeze.

[Wheres the beef?]

step 2 - download and install winamp

step 3 - tag and rename (the files themselves AND the folders)

(and one good reason to hate itunes is it doesn't support flac - not to mention you'll eventually get the underwater garbled sound, and it will ask you to download and update at least twice a week)

....and sign your life away by accepting the EULA to be a human centipede....

[malcolmjamalawesome]

Why exactly do people hate iTunes?

[fatbastard]

It’s all done manually over here.

First, I only rip when online. This ensures that track names and album covers are part of the rip.

I use windows media player to label everything else. Pretty good results most of the time.

Most of the work is in the album folder that wasn’t ripped from a CD. Variations include tracks without track number in the name, tracks that have the name of the artist included in the name of the song, partial song names due to text size limitations, generic track names i.e. Track 1, Track 2, etc.

If I’m able to get the track information from Windows Media, I copy the name information from the detail at the bottom and paste it in the track itself.

If that does not work in each of the above scenarios, I manually make the corrections.

I prefer name of artist, then name of album; nothing more than that. I’ve seen people who like to start with artist, then name the CD starting with the release date. I see no relevance to this process.

I’m currently 365 folders short of having my entire collection of 13,000 CDs in the order of my preference.

Though it may seem time consuming and frivolous, I take great joy in spending time with the music.

[SoulDischarge]

iTunes also takes forever to load for me, seems to be buggy as hell, and I don't like the way it presents my music library. Winamp is structured much nicer. You can add files to your player as a playlist directly, make an impromptu playlist without having to create a new playlist, adjust and delete songs and albums on a whim, the media library is much better organized, giving you options on how you'd like to see your files presented. It's just quicker, more convenient, more customizable, more user friendly, and more streamlined in general. Even loading songs onto my iPod is easier with Winamp. Bottom line: Use Winamp. Fuck iTunes.

[nathanfairchild]

[OutOfmYminD]

Media Monkey.

[TommyboyUNM]

The way that itunes categorizes and presents my music is counter intuitive. Apple couldn't just follow the regular file tree structure but instead created an ass backwards way of presenting my music based on ID3 tags. If you download a lot of music that is not tagged properly, the chore of tagging and renaming files so they are categorized correctly is painfully tedious and frustrating. Say I have downloaded a bunch of music....say live sets by Richie Hawtin and lo and be hold iTunes presents me this under "artists":

Richie Hawtin
Richie_Hawtin
richie_Hawtin
Richie_Hawtin

Give me a fucking break.

And when a file is renamed or changed it doesnt get deleted from itunes and changed to correspond to the actual file. Instead, itunes leaves the file in there and puts an "!" next to it. And the geniuses at Apple didn't put in a function where you can sort/see all files with exclamation marks to delete all at once. Each file must be manually found and deleted. If not, you can end up with multiple instances of one song where only one of files shown is the actual song and the rest are just ghosts of whatever it used to be before you renamed it.

But, Tommy, I'm sure iTunes is great if you like listening to albums by popular artists who have music on itunes and such. However, I don't, so iTunes does little for me except being a vehicle for swapping songs on my ipod. There are plenty of other programs that allow me to do more like play flac files, edit, convert, rename, and organize that itunes just can't do. iTunes sucks.

And, in regards to the OPs question, I like media monkey. It won't auto-rename stuff for you but it makes mass-renaming files a breeze.

That's an alright answer. You know you can just highlight a bunch of files and change the artist name, album, genre, year, etc. all at once. If Richie Hawtin gets put on your iTunes in multiple ways, you can sort by album name and select all of those files. If it doesn't have an album name, it should still be easy to find. I seem to run into this when I download hip-hop albums. I don't know why, but hip-hop fans have their stuff labeled incoherently. Sorting by album name has always worked. And it's not tedious because I can change the properties for the tracks all at once.

Also, I think it's funny that you say iTunes sucks and a reason is because you can't use it to edit. That's really not it's function and common sense should tell you that it's the last place you should try to edit audio. And why would you want to re-name a file in your root folder? I only look at the actual folder when I'm pasting a new album there. I only care about how it's labeled in iTunes. And if I accidentally change something in a folder, I know it right away and I go to iTunes to delete the tracks that no longer have a valid path. It really isn't that hard, confusing, or tedious.

You guys seem to like to do a lot of shit to your music. At most, I'll have to convert something to mp3. I'm just a simpleton, I guess. And I'm kind of anal about this stuff, so I made sure my iTunes was organized from the very beginning. It makes re-labeling new albums, the rare times I even have to do that, a very easy task.

[mmsk123]

If you live in an iTunes world, then yes only caring about how it shows up in iTunes is fine.

If for ANY reason you need to get out of iTunes and play your music somewhere else, you are screwed on all of the fixes that you've made. Any changes you make to your iTunes library only get made to the iTunes library database and not to the original files themselves. This is one of the huge, huge negatives that alot of people have about iTunes.

So if you happen to want to load up some mp3's on your friends non-Apple player, the files were never touched and therefore still borked. And you can bet almost every single other player out there other than Apple ones use the id3 tags on the files themselves.

Plus I also think that iTunes is slow, bloated and just not plain worth using. If you need to use it because you have an iPod, so be it. But to use iTunes just to play music? Winamp (or any of the lighter music players) would be much better for this (memory footprint, etc.)

[fatbastard]

I've spent all weekend reorganizing my music collection. As of Friday, I had a music folder and 2 subfolders of various artists and soundtracks. I'm now separating music by genre. If there is a various blues CD, then it put in the various blues folder within the blues folder.

As of today, I have created the following folders.

Alternative
Blues
Classical
Country
Disco
DJ Sets
Electronic
Experimental
Folk
French
Jazz
Pop
Reggae
Rock
Soul and R&B
Soundtracks
Spoken Word
Vocal
World

I'm not even close to being done. Anyone have a recommendation on how to easily move music by genre in one big swoop?

[Mugwog]

I organize the same way you do FB, I feel pretty much after the basic genre point - everything is tossed into folders by artist. Doesn't get much more organized from there in my opinion unless you throw a "A-K "L-Z" folder for when you have too many artist in a genre.

I just wish there was an alternative to loading tracks on an iphone/ipod without having to go through itunes. The modifying a music library is the most painful task at times. Add one song - iTunes is now backing up your phone.

What the fuck?

"Press "sync" to add selected files"

*Click sync*
*Syncs whole fucking library except for the ONE song you wanted.*

"Itunes can no longer add files to your iphone as has reached its storage capacity"

It is a painfully long process to simply add a common mp4/mp3 file.