About ID3 tags for disc number: It looks like TPOS may be what you want (http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames.txt), though this may be a case of the standard far exceeding the typical implementations, so the tag may not do you much good.

Run, don't walk over to Musicbrainz and pick up the latest version of Picard from them.

It is an album based tagger tool that will match up your albums either by metadata or by audio signature to a huge, user edited/moderated, music library. If you are working from CDs you've ripped this will work for you an astonishingly high percentage of the time. It can auto-tag the files as well as rename and move them if you want. And if you have some album that isn't there (doubtful) sign up, add it in and then the next person with that album will get it too.

The moderators do a good job of enforcing the Musicbrainz naming policies. Of course it is not perfect, but you'll be surprised at the quality.

I've been doing this MP3 library stuff for close to 10 years now and I've tried everything.

I tried Picard, and I wasn't impressed. The audio signature matching is the only unique feature, and when I tried to do it, the app crashed on me.

Not sure where it ends up in the ID3 tag but iTunes has a field for disk X of Y.

iTunes approaches the file system from the other direction: if you let it (by enabling the Copy on Add and Keep Music Folder Organized options), iTunes will maintain a directory tree organized by artist and album, with each song named appropriately and prefixed by its track number. It it, however a one-way operation. iTunes expects you to manage your music in the richer, iTunes environment. The directory tree is offered as a convenience for when you are forced to interact with the collection via the sparse, file system environment.

iTunes has defined metadata entry for disc number. I don't know if it's a weird, non-standard extension, but it is there. And if I ever decide to abandon iTunes in favour of another system, I can preserve all of my iTunes data. The worst case scenario is that I have to write a small AppleScript to interrogate iTunes and build a text file (XML, CSV, whatever) with all the metadata for each file, along with the path for that file. I'm sure that whatever system would lure me away from iTunes would have some method of inputting the contents of that file. (Even if it's just another brute-force script.) That said, that's the worst case scenario, which is why I have no problem letting iTunes manage my music metadata.

The rich environment iTunes provides is quite enough for me. A simple listing of all the files in my music library, which I can search, sort, and filter to my heart's delight. (And, yes, the editor offers field auto-completion based on your existing library.) And I can also customize the listings with what specific metadata I want to see in the list and what I want to leave behind the curtain of the Show Information command. With that environment available to me, I have zero interest in using the file system to find my music.

Any system involves trade-offs, of course. But I 'm happy to let the computer take care of all the bookkeeping so long as I have my sorting, searches and filters. And, for myself, iPod integration is vastly more important than Windows Media Centre. But that's just my specific trade-off.

> iPod integration

Can't you just copy mp3s on the iPod like it's a filesystem? What other "integration" is really necessary?

Hrm. Why do you still use Audiograbber? It was top dog back in the day, but now almost everyone can agree that Exact Audio Copy is king for the "when the data absolutely positively has to be read off the disc correctly" crowd.

And what LAME settings are you using? I started to phase out MP3 a while ago, in favor of MP4. I wish more companies *cough*Microsoft*cough* would get on the ball and start supporting it natively.

> iTunes has a field for disk X of Y.

I just tested this and it's the TPOS field as Ned mentioned. Weird oversight on the part of MusicMonkey.

> xact Audio Copy is king for the "when the data absolutely positively has to be read off the disc correctly" crowd

Well, I never had a problem with data being read *in*correctly off the discs, so I see no need to switch. Data is data. Using LAME is what matters, I could care less what program shuttles the bytes over. Well, I do care that the ID3 tags are carried over, but you get the idea.

I use the default VBR settings in whatever version of LAME I have installed. Right now its 3.96. I choose VBR "level 3" which generally equates to 140 - 210 kbps depending on the song, but tends to average around 165 kbps or so. I feel that the sweet spot is 160 kbps for VBR..

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000470.html

I've found that foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org) is the best masstagger for my needs. The Mass Tagging engine is scriptable and can do quite a bit of useful things (one of my favourites is being able to tag all the selected files with one giant text box of metadata -- with each line representing a different file; useful for copying & pasting info from a band's web page). It also has freedb tagging capabilities.

But I haven't tried MediaMonkey yet.

I'm just over 12,000 mp3 files... ripped from my CDs with Audiograbber & LAME, just as you've described... Even though I have perfect folder structures - I share the same pain you've described here... Glad others can share! :)

I've been using MP3-Info Extension to quickly do ID3 updates (and file renaming). I've been around the block a lot looking for something easy and this does the job.

http://www.mutschler.de/mp3ext/

Ugh - and I hate the thought of Windows Explorer or iTunes wrecking my ID3s! (Even Winamp!)

Enjoy!

_dave

My biggest problem with id3 tags is the idea that every song has a single performer/composer. Obviously the artist is not "Bob Marley & Bob Dylan", it's "Bob Marley" and "Bob Dylan". And since most libaries are based on simple relational databases with schemas mapped to a subset of id3, even formats like ogg/flac that can support multiple artists/titles/etc or custom tags are truncated to only using the first and no custom.

"However, I do recommend switching to ASCII tags; it defaults to Unicode by default, which most people won't need, and this doubles the size of the tags."
An extra 100-200 bytes to keep foreign songs from showing up as gibberish is a worthy tradeoff? Or no savings at all if the tag has extra padding? Iffy support is a much better reason.

> An extra 100-200 bytes to keep foreign songs from showing up as gibberish

Of course! I don't have any songs that require Unicode in my library of 11k songs. I guess what this really says is, I don't personally listen to any Asian music.. YMMV.

> I have zero interest in using the file system to find my music.

I agree! The filesystem display should be nothing more than an artifact of proper ID3 tagging. Normally you'd use whatever program/UI you want to browse, sort, and play music based on the ID3 tags.

But you still need the filesystem representation at some point, otherwise your music is trapped inside a proprietary program like iTunes..

> Which of these is correct?
>
> "Earth Wind & Fire", or "Earth, Wind & File", or "Earth, Wind and Fire"?
>
> The correct answer is "all of the above".

Except for "Earth Wind & File", surely? You've been writing about filesystems too long...

When I say 'iPod integration', I mean that when I put the iPod in its dock, iTunes automatically copies any new songs/videos/podcasts onto it. Any songs played on the iPod since the last docking have their playcounts updated in iTunes. If I've adjusted the star rating for any songs one the iPod, iTunes updates the local copy accordingly. If I've created or modified an On-The-Go playlist, iTunes creates a local copy of that playlist. And anything I've deleted locally gets deleted from the iPod. And it also syncs my contacts from Address Book and my photos from iPhoto.

To be honest, if I had to manually copy files onto the iPod, it would get updated maybe once every six months. I much prefer just having iTunes transparently download the five or six podcasts I listen to and transparently load them onto the iPod.

And, full disclosure, the iPod stashes it's music in a hidden folder, with obfuscated filenames and an undefined hash-based directory naming scheme. It uses a proprietary, undocumented file to map songs to files. Since that's actually more difficult than just copying the iTunes directory tree onto the iPod verbatim, I tend to assume that it's a result of Apple negotiating with the music industry. Still the tools exist to pull the songs (and playlists) off the iPod -- but they really don't hold much interest for me, since the music is all, by definition, already in my carefully backed up iTunes library.

Hi,

I prefer id3-tagit (http://www.id3-tagit.de/english/index.htm) to do my tagging. It's free, feature rich and can be controlled via the keyboard making working with it very fast.

Unfortunately, it can't read id3v2.2 tags though, which may or may not be a serious limitation for you.

Philip

> I do recommend switching to ASCII tags; it defaults to Unicode by default, which most people won't need, and this doubles the size of the tags.

Interesting advice, Jeff. The tags are, what, a few hundred bytes worth? So doubling the size of tags of everything in your collection costs you literally some megabytes. At current rates ($0.60/GB) that could add up to maybe even a penny with a really big music collection!

Alternatively, you could say damn the expense, spend the extra penny, and let bands like Sigur Rós be represented faithfully in your metadata.

> spend the extra penny, and let bands like Sigur Rós be represented faithfully in your metadata

Point taken. It's a meaningless savings.

But Sigur Ros doesn't need Unicode, does it?

I escaped from the mp3 tagging hell!
I completely gave up on relying on mp3 tagging. I'm sorting my music library with folders (interpret/album/trackXX.mp3) and that works fine for me. I fiddled around with iTunes for a while but I do not use it anymore.

And I deliberately provided myself with an iRiver MP3 player, which can navigate by folders as well. And as I generally listen to music by entire albums, I do not need Genres, year of release and other metadata.

Works fine for me, YMMV though.

Have you ever tried mp3tag?

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

This tool is very user friendly. Especially when mass tagging! It auto-focusses on the right fields when performing actions and can also use CDDB queries to tag files on a artist/album search!

The only disadvantage is that it rebuids it's index at every start. This really takes some time if you have a large music collection.

I was about to make the same point as Alistair about the true savings of ASCII/Unicode for a few words in a file megabytes in size, but then I noticed I had been beaten to it...

It seems to me that the Genre tag is a problem - with some music you really need to be able to assign it to several genres (or rather, there are several possible genres that might all make sense) and so really you want a collection/set of genre tags for any given recording, rather than just a single, arbitrary one. After all, one person's rock is another person's metal, and so on and so forth.

I have a 70Gb+ library on the Mac, and using iTunes I find it's not too bad really. As has already been mentioned, iTunes has some acceptable tagging features and allows you to create reasonably flexible 'smart playlists' too. Whether I encode something myself or acquire it in electronic format already, I always try to get the tags right because I listen to a lot of my music on my old iPod and good tags are vital when you have a large library on something as limited as that.

Perhaps we need a 'tag authority', a central database of artists and albums with appropriate, acceptable genre tags. Maybe some neat way of searching CDDB to come up with a 'general consensus' of who belongs where? :-)

I was about to make the same point as Alistair about the true savings of ASCII/Unicode for a few words in a file megabytes in size, but then I noticed I had been beaten to it...

It seems to me that the Genre tag is a problem - with some music you really need to be able to assign it to several genres (or rather, there are several possible genres that might all make sense) and so really you want a collection/set of genre tags for any given recording, rather than just a single, arbitrary one. After all, one person's rock is another person's metal, and so on and so forth.

I have a 70Gb+ library on the Mac, and using iTunes I find it's not too bad really. As has already been mentioned, iTunes has some acceptable tagging features and allows you to create reasonably flexible 'smart playlists' too. Whether I encode something myself or acquire it in electronic format already, I always try to get the tags right because I listen to a lot of my music on my old iPod and good tags are vital when you have a large library on something as limited as that.

Perhaps we need a 'tag authority', a central database of artists and albums with appropriate, acceptable genre tags. Maybe some neat way of searching CDDB to come up with a 'general consensus' of who belongs where? :-)

I'd echo Nicholas's comments on Exact Audio Copy (EAC). It really is a superior ripping tool. Jeff is right that "data is data", but I don't know how many times I'll be listening to a song I ripped a long time ago (without EAC), and there will be a skip in the track. I *hate* that!

EAC let's you know when there are errors in the read, and even allows you to listen to the exact position of the error, so you can tell if it's audible. Combine that with being able to use whatever compression algorithm you want (FLAC's for me), and EAC is the king!

I use iTunes to organize my music as I found doing the filesystem way to be a complete pain. I should preface by saying that I use iTunes on a Mac, so it may not apply to iTunes on Windows; I have no idea.

There is an option in iTunes under "Advanced -> General" that says: "Keep iTunes Music folder organized. Places songs into album and artist folders, and names the files based on the disc number, track number and song title." I've used this since the beginning and I can browse my library without iTunes if the need arises (it helps when copying some music out of it sometimes). It's considerably better than when I tried to organize it myself, but that probably has something to do with the irregularity with which I actually added things. And laziness.

I would contend that although "Earth, Wind & File" isn't correct, it's an understandable Freudian slip after your Herculean reclassification effort ... :-)

I have been doing the same thing recently Jeff with over 300 gigs of FLAC files. Albums are the easy part, but what about live stuff. I bet at least half of my audio is live soundboard recordings with no way to lookup information (even though I have it all int he .txt), so I have just been doing the albums first. I have been using Picard, even though I hate it because I haven't found anything better. I will try out MonkeyMedia thanks for the tip. It really shouldn't be this hard though IMO I guess thats what happens when your on the edge;)

> I prefer id3-tagit (http://www.id3-tagit.de/english/index.htm) to do my tagging. It's free, feature rich and can be controlled via the keyboard making working with it very fast.

I second this, I use ID3Tagit myself, and it is very good to use for tagging files.

> But Sigur Ros doesn't need Unicode, does it?

Oh dear God, yes! Or Latin-1 at the very least. It might be a lesser sin to misspell non-English words by dropping accents, but "þ" (thorn), "ð" (edh) and "æ" are another matter entirely.

"It's giant-- currently 10,970 songs and 733 albums in 48.9 gigabytes"

uh-huh, and you have ALL the cds for those right. ;) (jk). It may be time to look into a music subscription service. I don't often say that to people since I hate the idea of renting music. But if you've got THAT much....it seems like the amount of time you've spent ripping them would be offset by a $10/month charge.

Have you tried MusicBrainz? It allows you to pick the tag you want to use from multiple tags in the database (I'm assuming it's the Gracenote one). I used it to clean up a bunch of dupes and ones with no information other than a partial title in the filename.

Well I got tired of fixing albums after i rip/download them, so I wrote a tool that best fits my needs: http://thecrab.sf.net/ It won't fix your whole music library, but it does help me out with new albums.

> uh-huh, and you have ALL the cds for those right.

Actually, I do have the CDs for 90% of my collection. Like I said, I'm maniacal about VBR and LAME encoding, and the only way to get that is to have the original uncompressed versions..

> It seems to me that the Genre tag is a problem

I'm pretty sure the ID3v2 spec allows multiple tags (frames) for Genre and Artist. But none of the applications support displaying it.. classic chicken and egg problem.

> The only disadvantage is that it rebuids it's index at every start.

This is also a key difference between Tag&Rename (it lets me set the "disc x of n" TPOS field) and MediaMonkey. T&R doesn't build an internal database of ID3 tag info. So it has to re-scan every time you select the target folder(s). Although both methods have pros and cons, on the whole, I think I prefer the internal database method. It's much faster for hopping back and forth between folders, particularly if you are only using the one tool to change things.

Jeff, it is often over looked media player but I am a big fan of Musicmatch. It has a feature that will parse the file name (you can choose it parses) and automatically update the ID3 tag. Might help with your problem.

Um if my memory serves me right than WinAmp let's you edit ID3 tags with ease..

All you do it right click on the file in the play list select "View file info.." and it comes up with all the info that the file has. Simple and free. It even has ID3v2 tags. Now this can't organize your music, but simple folders do the exact same thing yes? and you can open an entire folder via-WinAmp.

Here's another vote for MusicBrainz... It truly is an amazing app.

Shame it didn't work the first time you tried it, but I very strongly recommend giving it another shot.

I love MediaMonkey as well. I'm sitting ar right around 74GB of music and I am fanatical about proper ID3 tags and foldre structure.

MP3s have to be in Genre\Artist\Album\Song.mp3 format, and those same ID3 tags must be correct.

MediaMonkey makes it amazingly easy to do so.

Several tools specifically support converting filenames to ID3 tags. For example, Mp3tag has this feature:

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/images/sht_optcon1.png

MP3 tagging is always subjective, particularly the 'right' tool for the job. But why on earth are you worried what CD a track was on? For me, if a track is on an album, thats it. Its not 1 to 10 disc 1, 1 - 9 disc 2, its track 1 to 19, done.

A more flexible metadata system would be preferable, a taxonomy style, polyhierarchical etc etc, so an artist could have more than one spelling. But the MP3 file isn't the place for that. KISS in the ID3 tag.

And why do none of Musicmatch, mediaplayer and winamp support ordering playlists by ID3 Track number!?! Drives me nuts relying on sorting by filename. Corrections to me @ finnie dot co dot uk :)

No one mentioned the Godfather?

It's the best tagger in my opinion.

http://users.otenet.gr/~jtcliper/tgf/

You can search CDDB with it, use regular expressions to lift tags from existing files/folders, batch rename. I've yet to find something it can't do.

The other trouble with a rental service is that they're very limited in what they have. AllOfMp3 is nice since at least what they have is available the way I want it (flac) and the tagging is pretty good. But I admit I only bought the plastic junk for about half the music I own. Another 20% or so comes direct from the artist and the rest from allofmp3 (with the interesting legality of that site).

I've been pleasantly surprised at how many artists are happy to accept payment for ripped albums, one in particular responded by putting hi-res artwork on his website for me so I don't have to live with scans (there's a huge loss from jpeg- print- scan- jpeg).

Beware MediaMonkey. I downloaded it because of this entry and after tagging many files with the Amazon search I noticed that it was renaming the track titles. Now I don't know how many tracks I have which are mistitled :-( So turn off auto tagging the tracks!

I assume you meant 489 Gb

Problem is backing it all up means you need a terra- byte or risk your collection being lost as soon as the disk goes belly up

Have had 3 external drives go over last 3 years (all within warranty but so what if data is lost)

The Library view in Windows Media Player shows the full file path of each music file. The File Name field can be dragged to the left so that it is immediately viewable.

And think of the problems when you get to 50k tracks or more which is easily (ahem) achievable given current technology ...

Most programs like MusicMonkey that maintain internal databases of the tags and tracks (for performance) start to crawl at that speed.

Windows Media Connect which I use for my Roku Soundbridge iterates over the entire collection every time I restart my server. Ouch!

re: Musicbrainz.

"The audio signature matching is the only unique feature"? The audio signature matching is in flux and Picard worked happily for a long time without it.

"the only unique feature" of musicbrainz is surely the massive, reliable, user-moderated and regularly updated databse of albums and artists that blows cddb away for reliability. (PS try the old pre-picard tagger application. Some people still prefer it to Picard)

My library includes about 900,00 songs. (3TB) on a 3 box network.
I too am fanatical about tagging songs well. To do that I use DrTag (from NL). It is the most intuitive at extracting data from the file structure and doing swaps of title\album, etc. There are several config feature too once you get used to it. The best $20 I ever spent. BTW - I swap all names library style e.g.. Beatles, The, & Lennon, John, etc. This gets real tedious with all the "THE" bands out these days :).
Generally I divide all music into Genres (Metal, Folk, Electronic, etc.) until a band has 4-5 CDs or about a gig of material. At that point they go into the A-Z by artist section.
I also have about 700 DVDs of backed up music data.

Too keep track of all that and to find a individual tune across all the discs (fixed and removable) I use MyMp3Organizer. With the database itself running at over 1 gig, it is the only program that will handle such a large number of records. MS Media player simply stalls out at around 150k records.
In this program, once you have run a search (on any of the ID3 tag fields), you can simply click and play, drag into Nero, or modify the tags. It will also move and restructure as needed.

> the TPOS tag, ... does not appear anywhere in MediaMonkey

It does in MM V3 - as Disc#.