Tagging CDs

As you're ripping to FLAC and all CD's so far have been correctly identified, I'd say no, you don't need to do anything else.

I am of course assuming they all display, and play, correctly on your ND5X

So where do all those warnings and long discussions about tagging correctly or incorrectly come from...? I'm just worried that I'll rip a 1000 CDs only to find I should have been doing something differently. How can I check if everything is tagged right before I proceed?

PS. Can't check at the moment if they display correctly, because I just took the delivery of my Fraim and the system is disassembled Will check tomorrow, though. I know they play right, I just want to make sure the album art displays on the iPad and there are no pauses inserted into the 2nd side of Abbey Road

It sounds like quite a few people alter the Genre to suit their own needs - there's a separate thread running on this.  I don't myself but I can see the reason some people do.

Yeah, I can see the reason - 90% of my collection will probably be automatically tagged as "Pop/Rock" which won't be helpful when searching... But I don't mind, really, because I go by the printed catalogue anyway.

Speaking of which: is there a way to export the entire catalogue from the NAS (genres, artists, albums, songs) to a text file so that I could import it to Excel, edit and print?

You can do it with some fairly simply VBA in Excel - just google it.

I use Music Collector to catalogue my CDs.

Music collector requires putting a CD in the drive 1500 times - no, thanks...

I'm fairly good in Excel, but don't see how I can make it read the information from the tags on the hard disk. Some software would be needed to go into those files and pull the required data. It's already there once they've been ripped with dbPoweramp, so sure there's something that can take that data and output a coma delimited ASCII file that I can later import to Excel?

Gajdzin

You could download the free version of Media Monkey,  It should pick up your NAS. You can then run a report in media monkey and export it to Excel. 

FF

With a large collection - and with 1500+ that's also qualifying, tagging becomes quite important. Out of the following reasons:

1. While the ripping engines recognize most of the stuff pretty fine - some mistakes come through. Which need to be corrected.

2. Also the usual topic of connecting a double CD to each other won't easily work with only the ripping engine. I like to have a double CD under one and with connected numbering.

3. With classical music you will find a lot of trouble with the quality of tag's - and you will need to do it better - in order to enjoy afterward.

4. The topic of finding music. I find it nice to have my music easily at hand. So the subdivision in categories will make it more easy to have quick access to what you want to listen to. I have 3000+ and then it's realy a benefit to have what you want in a couple of clicks. Important is to find a system of tagging that works for you - but which might not work for everybody. F..i. as I have a lot of progressive rock ect. I made a difference between Progressive Rock and Progressive Metal and have allocated groups to what works for me.

For the tagging I just use a very simple tool: MP3Tag.

MediaMonkey. If the base program doesn't provide the report that you want then there is a plugin that does. It is also very good for tagging.

Thank you, guys! I'll definitely check out the MediaMonkey

See here: https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...44#34512058691537544

My quick advice is to rip 10 - 20 CDs and test how everything looks on the playback software you are using.

Also, pay a lot of attention to "Album Artist" tags. This is how albums get grouped together for some software. Its easy to get an album split into 2 or more, which is a real pain.

Great advice.

I'm a member of 14 internet fora (studio recording, drums and Mazda cars) and I think there's not a single one among them with folks as friendly, helpful and nice as here.

I just got home and fired up MM.

From File you can choose to Create Reports as HTML, XML, CSV, or Excel. It works as Excel just fine but maybe doesn't provide all of the columns that you want (just song, album, artist, length, year and genre). But there are plugins that will help.

Just downloading MM... Already found the first issues - Ammonia Avenue got ripped into "Alan Parsons" folder while all the other Alan Parsons Project CDs got ripped into "Alan Parsons Project, The" folder. Do I guess correctly that I need to:

1. Use MM to change the Artist tag for Ammonia Avenue (and all of its songs) to: "Alan Parsons Project, The",

2. Manually move Ammonia Avenue folder from "Alan Parsons" to "Alan Parsons Project, The"?

Tagscanner, simple and brilliant (and free)

Looks GOOD! Off to check it out. In reading the software feature I have just learned something new: embedded lyrics. I had no idea its possible. I think dbPoweramp doesn't grab the lyrics when it rips the CDs... Will TagScanner reach out to the internet and pull the lyrics and attach them to songs? But nStream won't display the lyrics when the song is playing, I haven't seen a "lyrics" button...?

Yes 1. use MM to retag. You can do the whole album in one go.

And if you want to create and save playlists to your NAS there are instructions here

http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=34512&hilit=export+child+nodes

Be careful - you'll start him buying equipment again....

The other often thorny tagging issue is around what to do with compilations and soundtracks.

I tend to set AlbumArtist to 'Various Artists' or 'Soundtrack', but I'm sure there are other approaches people use

Nick

I normally select the dominating artist and use that - I don't like various.

I got a mail yesterday saying that my NDX is at my dealer. And I can't get to collect it until Easter...

I also change to various artists but there is the option to select 'part of a compilation' in tagscanner although I haven't tried it

Also maybe have a look at MP3tag which, despite the name, works well with FLAC. You can find it with Google. It's a bit quirky to use, but works fine. 

Ripped CDs generally tag ok, and you can tweak them to your taste, eg with DBpoweramp. I suspect some bigger tagging issues come from people downloading torrents - not on this forum I'm sure, but more widely.