Sorting messy metadata and folders

Mediamonkey is pretty good for bulk editing, and free as well.  It's all I find I need to keep things tidy.

Richard

You should handle the meta-data upon ripping and never deal with it again.  Unless you are going beyond:

- Artist

- Album

- Genre

- Year

The I would recommend Tag&Rename for any kind of bulk or individual tagging you want.

Agreed, unfortunately learning how the metadata interacts with file naming and so-on is an iterative learning process!

At least I've got most of it correct with a PC and dBpoweramp.

The UnitiServe that I borrowed a little while ago just did its own thing (like i-tunes) which would be fine if the metadata and album art was any good, but in 10 discs (not obscure) it got one completely wrong and couldn't find the artwork for another.

Thanks to yourself and trickidickie on the metadata editing suggestions.

I'm thinking (and I'll try on my back-up folder) to edit the metadata with dB and then let i-tunes loose renaming sub-folders and stuff. Good plan? Horribly misguided?

I haven't used anything but EAC for years but most rippers should allow you to do two things:

1) Write the basic tags (track #, track name, artist, year, genre) and maybe more.

2) Specify the naming scheme of the resultant files.  I use "%N - %A - %T" i.e. "01 - John Zorn - Aleph.extension" or "%N - %T", i.e. "01 - Aleph.extension".

Typically I use the former on Various artist albums.

Then use an Artist>Album>Files folder method.

Using the filenames to extract tagging info is as difficult as the software you use to do so.

B.

Maxi Me - I think you must have been very unlucky with your sample. There are many opinions on the UServe but what definitely is not in doubt is that it does wonders with metadata.

My experience is that the UServe provides metadata that is incredibly granular ( performers, composers, album credits etc), is great for classical music (if that's your thang), and is easy to edit (data and album artwork via NServe on the iPad). In over 300 rips (including some quite obscure material) c90% have required no amendments - those that have simply required a couple of taps on the iPad to correct.

In short, prior to using the UnitiServe I found the whole area of tagging / album artwork a royal pain in the arse. These days I no longer waste my time faffing on my PC and never have files "sprayed all over my music folder"

Hey,

I think it has all been said on tagging. For moving files and directories around "Total Commander" is

a marvelous and super powerful. I warn you it does not have the easy reversibility of some approaches. 

Cheers

When I had a similar issue and realised I'd sprayed tracks across dozens of directories ( mainly compilations albums where dBpoweramp wanted separate artist folders ) I used Tag&Rename to get the metadata right, then used the standard Windows Explorer search to find then cut and paste tracks into a new target directory. I then found a utility to delete all the resulting empty directories.

I took a while, but I now have everything as I want it.

Thanks all. Works OK for the Sonos, so not too worried. It's actually only a few compilations (especially classical) and shouldn't take too long.

Dave, with regard to dBpoweramp and it wanting seperate artist folders for a given CD.. This is easy to fix... When the meta data is retrieved,  check to see if the 'compilation' check box is ticked.. If not click to open the metadata edit window and manually click on the 'compilation' box. This will force all artists on the album to be associated to a single album and stored in a single folder.  All done.. and hugely easier than dragging files around and manually updating wav file metadata.

Dependining on your preferred metadata source, sometimes this value is not correctly set for some rarer CDs.

Simon