Managing a huge digital collection

Antmast, you are right. All sites I download music have different naming/tagging protocols.

The worst is B&W, every album I have downloaded is diffrent.

Linn, HDTracks, Naim and Hiresaudio have small differences, one space more or the lack of a dash in file names and also some differences in tags. I am living with those. But in the case of B&W I am changing tags and also file names using xAct, one by one.

I drag and drop the files or folder to Audirvana, so tagging and file names are not so important, but I imagine when using streaming devices with remote applications, good practices naming files should be very important.

When I rip cd's I standardize tags with xld.

I have read in this forum that Media Monkey and other apps are better to do the work of modifying tags.

Regards.  Erich

These days I go for the 'tag as you go' option so the effort involved is minimal.

But I didnt start like that, so the initial effort once youve realised everything doesnt look right

when presented through eg. Naim App is not inconsiderable!

But once they are all tagged in a similar way, streaming is great.

(I use DB Poweramp for retagging as recommended by others on the Forum by the way)

+1, I use it and I'm a numpty who won't even read the instructions (Does it have any?)

Assume all files are wrong and fill in the metadata yourself. Dont forget to backup/replace the improved files if you have a manual backup scheme.

I can recommend Metadatics for Mac. You can buy from the App Store and it's pretty reasonable for what it does.

+1 ChrisH     -   once you've realised whats what when you firs get into streaming & set your own stnd for editing (& got it all done) then edit as you go is easy.

I invariably end up editing Qobuz with_their_ anyoying_underscores & -LLS.wav title endings. HDT are the best & Naim normally don't need anything.  B&W are inconsistent. 

Then I nearly always run dBpoweramp .wav to .wav "conversion" to consolidate & pick up any missed errors.  dBpoweramp is my "must-have" tool,  its engenius.

ALL my hires downloads go through MP3TAG (don't be put off by the 'MP3', it does lots more) to be 'sanitised' and 'normalised' and then some of them go through Bliss if the artwork needs adding or updating.

A couple of years ago I spent a solid three weeks getting all of my FLACs and MP3s properly indexed - somewhat boring, even challenging, but thoroughly worth the effort.  n-srtream now shows all my albums as they should be (I think).

'Bon chance' as they often say in Salisbury!   

Talking of MP3TAG,  I tried it I found it did not read .wav files

Reading in other places it is intimated that it does with some fiddling. I should go back to it to dig deeper (life's too short) - anyone have some tips on a place to get started.  

You're right Mike, it doesn't do WAV, but then I find that the Naim servers provide enough tools to get WAVs looking good !   Of course if one doesn't use Naim servers, one is making life that bit more difficult for oneself  .

I use mediamonkey very successfully for all my tagging.  I always make sure everything is tagged correctly before copying to my NAS.  It's the only way to keep ahead..  Works ok with WAV files too.

I've read a lot on the subject and finally decided there's only one solution: a tagging program (I use the superb and free TagScanner) plus a LOT of free time... I devoted 3 weeks of this year's summer vacations to nothing but tagging, working 8-10 hours a day to tag my 3000+ CDs. The good news is that it was fun work, I re-discovered a lot of music I forgot I had.

It's true that if you standardize on your own naming convention, decide what will be the "artist" vs. "album artist" etc, and then rip your CDs very carefully with something like dBpoweramp, choosing those tags from this database that are closest to your naming system, you will minimize the amount of work needed to manually correct some tags. But nothing will completely eliminate the need for the manual work. In my case it was all the more work, because I name all artists: "Surname, Firstname" (Banks, Tony) and albums: "Year - Album name [technical details]" (1979 - A Curious Feeling [LP 24-96]). Unfortunately that requires renaming every single entry by hand, unless there is some software out there that could do advanced macros with what-if logics etc...

PS. The 3 weeks I spent on my music did not include Classical - I run out of time, but also Classical is a nightmare in that I don't even know how to categorize many of the CDs... In case of Rock it's usually the artist and the album. Here, we have the composer(s), conductor(s), orchestra/ensemble(s), and soloist(s), in many cases all on 1 CD... But it's not a problem unique to tagging - my physical Rock/Pop CDs are ordered alphabetically, but I never knew how to order my classical collection to be able to quickly find what I want to find

My music library is almost entirely classical.  I forget about the CD being the "album".  One CD might contain Mendelssohn's violin concerto coupled with Tchaikovsky's violin concerto.  So I split these tracks (1-6) into two separate albums each with tracks 1-3. The album titles are along the lines of "Mendelssohn: Vln Cto [Kennedy].  (Abbreviations help to reduce scrolling on the little Qute display).  Then I have lot's of custom genres like "Concerto-piano", "Concerto-trumpet".  So finding a recording to play usually means navigating the tree: genre->composer->album or artist.

John

+1, I did somethiing very similar, and I also enjoyed the work, discovered a lot of music I had forgot I owned and was able to weed out some I will never listen to.  I also use tagscanner, if you get it right you only have to do it once and then make sure anything you rip or down load follows the same conventions

This is certainly one way... As for me, having worked in a recording studio, I have too much respect to the album being a certain artistic whole, a concept from the first to the last note. Somebody (in fact several folks) have done a lot of work to come up with the right selection and order. We may not like it, but we may also not like the selection of short stories in a book, yet most of us would hesitate to cut it to sections and put on different bookshelves according to our liking...

I have more than 2500 CD ripped.

All with EAC and managed with JRiver.

In order to manage the classical music better I have defined additional tags

e.g:

-genre_1: sinfonic music

-genre_2: violin concerto

and

op. number: 43

tonality: h-moll

and Work long: work&op.number&tonality

Try using MediaMonkey for retagging if you want to reorganise your collection. It work very well for me.

I'm with Gajdzin on this, an album is an album, and besides, making a new selection every 3 minutes or so would drive me nuts. Except that the classical equivalent of an album with a dozen tracks would be, say, a symphony in 3 movements, so lumping 2 or more together, even by different composers, makes no sense (other than to use the full capacity of the disc.)

Actually I use MM4 for not just the media management but also as the UPnP server. Small diskless PC with SSD... Works faultlessly - once you've disabled the windows updates! ;-)

Hi Antmast,

I spent quite some time figuring out how to order, tag and maintain a relative large collection. Finally I choose for MediaMonkey. I use the "free" version. Strong point of MM is that you ca easily:

• create custom groupings
• use customized fields (I use for example one to indicate whether the album is High-Res or not)
• re-tag various albums or records at once
• auto-refresh when new albums are added

There is one annoying thing missing: MM is very weak in creating reports and there is no iPad version. Concretely, when I am in a shop looking at a nice CD, I sometimes doubt whether I have the CD already or not. I want to use a report or app to quickly see whether the album is already in my collection. For the moment I use a customized MM report that generates an Excel that I use on my iPhone. However this doesn't work very comfortable.

Very good alternative for MM is by the way the JRiver software

Iver

There are several add ons available for MM4 which create a web server front end. Just setup your broadband router to accept and route web server access and bobs your uncle!

I have a lot of live Grateful Dead releases (Dick's Picks, Dave's Picks, etc.).  A single concert usually spans 2 cd's.  On my server I turn these 2 cd's into a single 'album.'  It greatly unclutters my Naim App views.  

Was there any George Martin genius in releasing the "White Album" on 2 lp's?  No -- all the music simply did not fit onto one.  

Media Monkey is great but one downside is that you can only use the English alphabet and cannot tag with accented letters.  You can enter, say, Ø, ö or é when tagging but your streamer (Naim, Sonos, whatever) will see this as @~#* like a swear word in a comic book.  dBPoweramp is better in this respect.

Somewhat related to this topic, are there any Qobuz subscribers who are troubled by the way their "Favourite Artists" and "Favourite Albums" are listed in the Qobuz Desktop, Sonos or any of the other streamers?  Anyone found a way to change it?  In my own database, I always list my artists surname, first name because (at my forgetful age) I'm more likely to remember the surname of someone I want to hear.  I'd like to do the same with my Qobuz favourites but I suspect it's not possible.

Great idea - as a fellow deadhead I will do the same. I have almost 50 Grateful Dead CDs and a lot of them are double or even triple. And indeed it was hard to find what I want in nStream

I know I keep on banging on about MM4 but that has scripts to automatically merge multiple CD albums and update the track numbers accordingly.

I found it is getting better over time with HDtracks and Naim downloads now coming in (almost always) perfectly from a tagging perspective. But I just check each one on import and catalogue manually if required.