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Recently I have been looking around the internet for the best free solutions to organize my music and I thought I would share my findings here.
1) First off, the most important thing in a music library is having consistent tags, filenames, and folder structure. I have found MP3Tag to be perfect for organizing your mp3s and other audio files. So if you want to organize all your files to look like artist - album - track# - song.mp3. MP3 can do this with "one click of the button". You can also remove any characters that seem to conflict with Music Collection for Joomla. For instance songs that have apostrophes in the filename. There is also a lot more features to look at when using this program.
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
or
http://download.cnet.com/mp3tag/3000-2141_4-10313616.html?tag=mncol;1
2) Now as files/folders are renamed and moved accordingly, you will find that you have a lot of empty folders... vuala...
http://download.cnet.com/remove-empty-directories/3000-2248_4-11725582.html
or
http://www.jonasjohn.de/lab/red.htm
3) I used to use Itunes to play and manage my music, but I have found MediaMonkey to be a better solution. MediaMonkey is also a great solution to convert many types of audio files. For instance, you will find a lot of high quality files in the .flac format. Of course the JW player will not recognize this format nor is this format ideal for streaming over the internet. MediaMonkey will convert your .flac files to mp3 (or whatever other format) and keep the tags associated with them.
MediaMonkey also has a tag and file editor, but it is not nearly as robust as MP3Tag mentioned above.
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
On a side note... The one major thing that MC lacks is the ability to batch add music to the database. I do not know why we have continued to ignore this. I know that MP3 tag reading is suppose to be added to the next release, but nothing has been said about batch adding music. So with something like MP3Tag editor, were you can name files with a consistent structure throughout, could this be one way to accomplish this? Any ways, I hope the developers address this soon.
1) First off, the most important thing in a music library is having consistent tags, filenames, and folder structure. I have found MP3Tag to be perfect for organizing your mp3s and other audio files. So if you want to organize all your files to look like artist - album - track# - song.mp3. MP3 can do this with "one click of the button". You can also remove any characters that seem to conflict with Music Collection for Joomla. For instance songs that have apostrophes in the filename. There is also a lot more features to look at when using this program.
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
or
http://download.cnet.com/mp3tag/3000-2141_4-10313616.html?tag=mncol;1
2) Now as files/folders are renamed and moved accordingly, you will find that you have a lot of empty folders... vuala...
http://download.cnet.com/remove-empty-directories/3000-2248_4-11725582.html
or
http://www.jonasjohn.de/lab/red.htm
3) I used to use Itunes to play and manage my music, but I have found MediaMonkey to be a better solution. MediaMonkey is also a great solution to convert many types of audio files. For instance, you will find a lot of high quality files in the .flac format. Of course the JW player will not recognize this format nor is this format ideal for streaming over the internet. MediaMonkey will convert your .flac files to mp3 (or whatever other format) and keep the tags associated with them.
MediaMonkey also has a tag and file editor, but it is not nearly as robust as MP3Tag mentioned above.
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
On a side note... The one major thing that MC lacks is the ability to batch add music to the database. I do not know why we have continued to ignore this. I know that MP3 tag reading is suppose to be added to the next release, but nothing has been said about batch adding music. So with something like MP3Tag editor, were you can name files with a consistent structure throughout, could this be one way to accomplish this? Any ways, I hope the developers address this soon.
Responses (2)
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Accepted Answer
0I am big into keeping my music very well tagged. To the point of obsessive lol. I agree that mp3tag is probably the best one if your stuck on only using a free one. However if your willing to go with a commercial product, jaikoz blows it out of the water! It integrates with both musicbrainz and discogs to grab track info and auto tag for those that are to lazy to tag their music themselves. It also allows one to show all the fields, including the ones that most programs hide, so you can make sure to clean up all the crap that some people and some tagging programs put in. It works great out of the box, but it also has the most extensive customization and preferences of any tagging program that I have came across allowing on to pretty much do anything with it and configure it anyway possible. It can be found at http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/jsp/startup.jsp and costs around $30. The best thing I like about it is the support there. The programmer knows his stuff and responders nearly daily. He is also very quick at fixing any bug that is reported on the rare times a bug might appear. It is also written in java so will work on any platform, ie win, mac, linux.
I like remove empty directory program as well and I still use it on occasion. Though to be honest with you, since I have been using jaikoz for the last 4 or so years, I have not used RED much at all. Mainly because jaikoz has an option to check that it will remove any empty directory upon file remove and rename. It also has an extremely powerful file and folder renaming mask. Similar to the one that media monkey has.
I second the recommendation for mediamonkey. It is a very powerful player and looks very nice. It also handles large music collections better than any other player. They have both a free and gold version. The free version works great for most users. The gold version is a decent upgrade if you plan on wanting a tad bit more power and you want to use it for ripping cds and what not. I currently use the free version as most of the added function that the gold version provides, I have better apps for. For example I prefer to use dbpoweramp for my cd ripping as it is a lot more exact at making a perfect rip, than most other programs. dbpoweramp also has a killer batch converter, that one can point to any folder, set your filters, and have it convert all other audio formats to what ever other format you want. I use it to convert all my lossless files over to mp3. It is nice to just point to the top folder of my download directory and tell it to convert all audio files that are not mp3 to mp3 and to name them accordingly and keep them in their default folders. One click and it starts a chugging away on it.
Anyways, just thought i throw my 2 cents in on the discussion. -
Accepted Answer
0I being Using Tag&Rename from www.softpointer.com/tr pretty good but only good for window no mac version. I believe Mpetag its also for window only. jaikoz they have Mac Version I never used before. currently running windows fusion on my mac just for tag&rename. had done lots of research and it look like lots of people lot tag&rename
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