Cleaning up the MP3’s

My MP3 collection isn’t as large as some people have but I needed to get it organized. By organized, I mean actually in directories and not all dumped into a single directory. Plus, the ID3 tags were a mess. Most of them had the wrong genre or were missing album information.

I didn’t want to have to fix each tag individually. The program I decided to use is called Picard (free, open source). It runs on Windows or Linux and uses the MusicBrainz database as a back-end to lookup album information for music tracks. The program will not only write the ID3 info but will also rename the file using any combination of artist, album title, track number and track name.

How does it know what the track is called? It works by analyzing the music and comparing its PUID to a huge database maintained by thousands of users. An account is free so you can help add or edit albums. If your track isn’t a 100% match, like some of mine were 60 & 70%, you can submit the PUID using the brain button in Picard.

Not all of my tracks were able to be automatically tagged. Sometimes, there was a PUID collision (multiple track matches). When this happens, the track will be placed under “Unclustered Files” and you can use the lookup feature to manually find the album on the MusicBrainz site. Once found, you simply click the green tagger icon next to the album title and the album info is sent to Picard. Detailed instructions on how to tag file with Picard can be found here.

Picard isn’t the only application that can use MusicBrainz. There are a few other front-ends that can be found here under Client applications. Not all of them are cross-platform. The only one not listed on that page is iEatBrainz for Mac OS X. OS X support for Picard is planned in a future release.

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. – AnaÃ¯s Nin

04.Apr.07 Software

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6 Responses to “Cleaning up the MP3’s”

bobo | April 4th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
If you import your stuff into itunes it will find the tags for you too.Though album art seems to give a problem
wyckedone | April 4th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
iTunes wasn’t writing the tag in the format that Jinzora reads (ID3v2?). I did find another program for Windows that works with iTunes to pull album art. If I can find where I downloaded it, I’ll post it.
bobo | April 5th, 2007 at 8:17 am
cool yeah I be interested in that
Zarggg | April 5th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Actually, I prefer the MusicBrainz system. I’ve been using that for a while for my tagging/organizing.
Cold Drink | April 8th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Don’t trust iTunes, as much as I love it. When iTunes fetches artwork, it writes it to a album art file, instead of placing it in the actual file.
wyckedone | April 10th, 2007 at 8:33 am
I didn’t know that. I thought it wrote it to a JPG like Media Player does.