Music cataloguing software?

[Condi]

Looking through my external HD and there are a lot of music files on there from about 10 years ago when downloading them was a thing. Unfortunately they are very very disorganised, lots of folders, sub folders, "my music", "my downloads", "XXXX's music" etc. Also the files are missing a lot of meta-data, so have blank artist and album folders.

In 2024 there must be some program which will work through the whole collection and tidy up the file structure while also adding any missing meta-data, mustn't there? If so, what program would be good to use? Ideally I don't want the files held within a program. just them tidying up on the drive.

[bigpriest]

Condi said:

Looking through my external HD and there are a lot of music files on there from about 10 years ago when downloading them was a thing. Unfortunately they are very very disorganised, lots of folders, sub folders, "my music", "my downloads", "XXXX's music" etc. Also the files are missing a lot of meta-data, so have blank artist and album folders.

In 2024 there must be some program which will work through the whole collection and tidy up the file structure while also adding any missing meta-data, mustn't there? If so, what program would be good to use? Ideally I don't want the files held within a program. just them tidying up on the drive.

I can't comment on software for auto-tagging and searching for artwork etc. as that's a task I'd enjoy doing myself (sad). Most music organisers such as MusicBee tend to leave the physical files where they are and simply build a database of the music and a link to where the file is stored so not sure any of them will re-arrange the actual file structure. The old way is to create a folder for artist > album > track but in reality you could just have thousands of files in one folder, not sure it matters.

[Murph7355]

When you say missing metadata, do you mean it's just the files and folders that aren't named "correctly", or the files themselves had metadata stripped or never had it in the first place?

If the latter two, I suspect you might struggle.

Have you tried MP3Tag or TagScanner? Run against a few of the files you think are dodgy so you can tweak what they do, then let them run against the lot.

Before doing this, I'd get everything in one place, even if the directory structures are messed up - that doesn't really matter so much with modern players...but the tools above can help organise the folders and filenames if so desired.

[sgrimshaw]

I find Tagman useful, not free but not exactly expensive either

https://www.abelssoft.de/en/windows/multimedia/tag...

There's a test version you can use to try it (free).

[Condi]

sgrimshaw said:

I find Tagman useful, not free but not exactly expensive either

https://www.abelssoft.de/en/windows/multimedia/tag...

There's a test version you can use to try it (free).

This looks perfect, thank you. It will also reorganise the file and folder structure so does everything I want. Great.

EDIT - looking around the internet a bit more this appears to be a better option.

MusicBrainz Picard (https://picard.musicbrainz.org/) uses an online library of song waveform data to identify and set the meta-data, in the same way as Shazam works. It's free and open source, and will also rearrange the file directory.

Edited by Condi on Sunday 25th February 12:05

[Murph7355]

Condi said:

...
EDIT - looking around the internet a bit more this appears to be a better option.

MusicBrainz Picard (https://picard.musicbrainz.org/) uses an online library of song waveform data to identify and set the meta-data, in the same way as Shazam works. It's free and open source, and will also rearrange the file directory.

Intrigued I just gave this a whirl.

Chose a random track, and then a full random album. Changed the filenames to be non-descript, used MP3Tag to remove all the tags and ran it.

Great results.

For the album name (and associated data like album cover) it gave a couple of choices...but nailed it.

Impressive.

[Condi]

Murph7355 said:

Intrigued I just gave this a whirl.

Chose a random track, and then a full random album. Changed the filenames to be non-descript, used MP3Tag to remove all the tags and ran it.

Great results.

For the album name (and associated data like album cover) it gave a couple of choices...but nailed it.

Impressive.

Yeah, to be fair I've been pretty impressed. Where it has struggled (and not it's fault) is where a single song has been on 101 albums and compilations. For example one complete album was "split" into about 4 different ones by the program because the songs had been released on different albums in different countries and at different times. It would be best if you could get it to use the original album for all songs. That said, it did manage to sort out some compilations very well, which was clever.

It's not 100% perfect, but is 95% perfect for a sum total of £0, and it's considerably better than the mess which was there before. Has also sorted out the file and folder directory so everything is neat and tidy.