The Aerie
Ah, I'm happy. I finally had a couple of minutes this weekend to address a burning question - are there any tools out there to help me organize my music collection?
Mind you, after (yes, yes I did) ripping every CD I own into my server, I have north of 5,000 songs online. Well, you may or may not know that most song files come with small, internal "tag" files, that tell you about the song: who wrote it, what kind of music it is, etc.
However, lots of my songs either didn't have that tag information filled in, or in the case of some CDs I found, had erroneous tag information because, when I ripped them, I had no idea what was on them.
Then I found EasyTag!
EasyTag is able to read that information, using the customizable formatting described in the box on the lower left side of the screen. So in this case it reads /genre/groupname/albumname/track - songname. Then it sticks the words it finds separated by the /'es and the hyphen into the tag entries on the right side.
And this formatting can be applied to every file in a given directory, at the same time! Since the albums are usually ripped all at once, that's usually about as good as it gets for song-to-song consistency of naming.
The end result is that everything in the filename gets chopped apart and inserted into the track tag, as at left.
The format of the /'es and the hyphens and almost anything else is completely customizable. For example, I could have added a pair of parenthesis to the format, and pulled out the word "Guantanamera" from the filename of this song. Then I could have put it somewhere else in the tag.
But wait! There's more!
Not only can you change the tag based on the filename, which honestly would have made me quite happy by itself... but you can change the filename based on the tag.
For example, I found a cover of "Big Yellow Taxi" by the Counting Crows, misnamed as "Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot." However, inside the song file, the track tag not only reflected the proper name of the song, but the album and track from whence it came.
By using the Rename Filter, I was able to assemble the track tag entries into a new filename with the proper name of the song. And not only does the program rename the file, but in this case I didn't have a directory for the album "Films about Ghosts." EasyTag renamed the file, created the album directory, and moved the file into the new directory. You can inspect the bottom line of the image at right to see the final disposition of the song file. As you can see, I could even re-use the %b album tag, both in the directory name and in the file name.
it doesn't take a lot to make me happy: a good cup of coffee, a trip to Germany to get a fresh, warm pretzel, or a pratically-perfect-in-every-way free MP3 tag editor. Not a lot at all! I sat at my desk during one of the execrable post-Tina-Fey episodes of Saturday Night Live, and cleaned up all of the tags in my music files, "A" through "C." Tonight I may sit at the computer while watching the almost-as-execrable "Heroes" on NBC, and try to get "D" through "F" cleaned up.
Oh, and why does this matter? Because my music server can only sort songs based on the information in their track tags. If I want to listen to Classical music or music by Counting Crows, the tags all need to be accurate. Without tags, I end up listening, randomly, to seasonal holiday music all year long. WIth tags, I could decide, if I wanted, to listen to the third track on every album I own...
And that's important! Okay, it's not "How do I escape that tiger?" or even "How to do I find a job?" important, but it's important in a very wealthiest-1%-of-the-world kind of way...
Posted by Albatross at October 23, 2006 3:47 PM | TrackBack