Organising music: Motoring Computer Related forum

Computer Related > Organising music	Miscellaneous
Thread Author: Mike H	Replies: 9

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Wed 9 Apr 14 19:49

Organising music - Mike H

Having had it for more than 5 years, I have just got round to using my USB turntable to convert all my old vinyl into electronic form. The software has created .wav files of everything I have recorded. I carefully created separate folders for each album and named each track, but when I view the "My Music" folder with Windows Media Player, all I get is a long list of tracks under the generic title "Unknown artist". The few CDs I've ripped show up in their separate folders, with pictures of the album sleeve. I'm guessing that some tagging information is missing from the .wav files.

Anyway, what I want to do is simple. I want to be able to see each artist, and within each artist, the albums, and the tracks for each album. Secondly, I'd like to convert them to .mp3 files for portability - I believe mp3s are smaller than wavs? So what is the best way of going about this? I don't have an iPod or anything like that, I just want to get them onto a USB stick. I might want to create playlists I guess as well. Should I ever have any money, there's a chance I'll get a car with iPod integration or USB capability, so having them properly organised and in mp3 format would be useful for the future.

Running Windows 7 mainly btw, although I've actually created the wavs on my Vista desktop. TIA for any help.

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Wed 9 Apr 14 19:56

Organising music - sherlock47

Some very smart programs around that will identify the tracks, and rename them and download all the Album Art. I do not have them on this machine and cannot remember the good (free) ones, but someone who is a music nut will be along shortly.....

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Wed 9 Apr 14 20:15

Organising music - smokie

Most programmes use a folder called Artist name> then underneath that then the filename is often

You will probably want to get the MP3 tags corrected as that is how many programs display, rather than the file name structure. I reckon it's unlikely this can be done programmatically with tracks you've ripped yourself as they are unlikely to have the same signature as recognized rips.

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Wed 9 Apr 14 20:39

Organising music - spamcan61

Provided your track timings are close to the originals MP3Tag should be able to create the ID3 tags for your files, one album at a time:-

www.mp3tag.de/en/

a quick goggle image search can normally find the album artwork to import.

Just remember to hit the 'save' button for each set of files before moving on to the next

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Wed 9 Apr 14 21:06

Organising music - sherlock47

musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard

IIRC this was one of the programs that identified nearly everything!

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Wed 9 Apr 14 21:24

Organising music - No FM2R

1) Use Mp3tag

Set the tags; you can bulk edit, the directory name is frequently a clue. You can set the tags from filename or vice versa.

The important names are;

Title (Track title)
Album (all tracks from the same album tag will ultimately be sorted into the same directory by Windows Media Player (see below)
Artist
Album Artist (All albums from the same album artist will be sorted into directories below the artists name by Windows Media Player)

Have a good old play with it, *BUT* make a copy of your files first in case you screw up with a mass edit.

2) Open the directory in Windows Media Player, set it to download album art, rearrange directory structure, rename files and download MISSING tags/data. Then go out to dinner or something. because its going to take a while.

Windows Media Player will pretty much sort it according to your rip settings.

Do NOT allow WMP to make *any* changes if you have not sorted the tags out first.

As at this moment [I just checked] I have 51,254 tracks arranged into 3,157 directories occupying 327GB and they are all tagged and named perfectly using the above method.

There was a thread about 2 weeks ago discussing WAV -> mp3 conversion. Its worth checking.

Last edited by: No FM2R on Wed 9 Apr 14 at 21:24

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Wed 9 Apr 14 21:26

Organising music - Zero

I organised all my music (43k tracks - 100gb all with a cover pic) ) with MP3 tag

Follows marks advice and you won't go far wrong.

Last edited by: Zero on Wed 9 Apr 14 at 21:27

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Thu 10 Apr 14 09:54

Organising music - Mike H

Thanks for that detailed response Mark. I also read the other thread that you mentioned (should have spotted it, doh!). I'll have a go and see how I get on.

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Thu 10 Apr 14 09:53

Organising music - Mike H

>> Provided your track timings are close to the originals MP3Tag should be able to create
>> the ID3 tags for your files, one album at a time:-
>>
Not all of them. but most. Some tracks have very short sections where the music stops and restarts, and the software interprets this a new track, hence splitting what is logically one track into two in the folder. And sometimes, two tracks are created from one where the music doesn't stop properly. Where I had particular problems, I just recorded each side of the LP as one track, but these are in the minority (the software has a tick box to specify whether to split the recording into tracks or not).

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Thu 10 Apr 14 12:12

Organising music - spamcan61

You can fix these sorts of issues in most audio editing programmes, although you may not consider it worth the effort/learning curve if there aren't many wrong uns.

Usual freebie recommendation is Audacity:-

audacity.sourceforge.net/

Personally I use Goldwave, although it isn't free the demo version lasts for ages:-

www.goldwave.com/

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