music file management

[jimmygreen]

I am not sure where to ask this (or to ask at all in this forum). I am at an Army camp in Iraq and we thought we would try broadcasting American music for the Soldiers.

I have it up and running now, but my problem is managing 200+ gigs of music from several donors. Some of it is well organized and some isn't.

Does anyone have experience or know how to edit multiple audio files at one time. There must be software out there somwhere.

Thanks for any help and if I am in the wrong forum I apologize.

Jimmy

 

[kay]

Grab the latest Windows Media Player for free from Microsoft - their "Library" functionality is the easiest and simplest to use that I've experienced.

 

[jimmygreen]

Yes, the library is easy to use, but I want to change the files' properties without going back to each one individually. Media Player 10 really is easy to use.

I wanted to make this change so that they affect the files not just the player.

Receiving music from all of the Soldiers is great, but the file properties are so varied that we end up with so many duplicates. I have 60,000 songs and we are still getting more every week, but the music folder as a whole needs to be better organized.

I have 250GB of free space on the hard drive and that means alot of time changing a thousands of files once it gets full. Maybe I am not making sense. This also might not be a problem for many poeple. Not sure if there is a fix for this.

 

[kay]

Oh, I misunderstood your problem! Try the MusicBrainz Tagger - it makes an attempt at guessing the songs based on special signatures and a CDDB-like back-end. I can't remember if it can organize the actual files better, but once your ID3 tags are correct there are other tools to do that - none jump at me right now though.

 

[jimmygreen]

Okay, this sounds cool. I will give it a try. I don't know what a CDDB is or what ID3 does, but I learning. Thanks for the reply.

Jimmy

 

[MDS]

CDDB is a giant database (now actually owned by GraceNote). That and others like it (FreeDB) are what the media players use to identify a CD when you put it in the drive. Basically it calculates an id using the number and length of the tracks on the cd and that id is the key in the database to look up the details of the tracks (title, length, artist, etc).

ID3 is the 'tag' you were talking about. Version 1 tags are at the end of the file and are not used too much anymore because it doesn't work too well for streaming music (you have to read the whole file to get to the end where the tag is so you can't display the details of the track when it first starts playing). Version 2 (2.4 is the latest) tags are at the beginning of the file and may contain far more information than v1 tags.

There are many freeware and shareware apps that deal with tagging and renaming multiple mp3s at a time. Tag&Rename is one I remember that seems to work pretty well. Just google for 'id3 tag' and you will find them.

I personally don't use those tools because I do all of my music in SoundForge and I get it right the first time. . But if you are getting files from alot of different sources and need to get the tags to be correct and consistent you are going to need a tool that can deal with multiple files at a time.