Untagged mp3 finding them organizing them

[jaysung]

Hello,
I happen to have got a huge collection of mp3-files which are not correctly tagged.
There might be a file named
metallica-nothing-else-matters.mp3
Now when I enter "metallica" in the server's search field the server won't find the file.
This is due to bad tagging. Yes. But isn't it possible to search for parts of file names?
And once I found them... How would you go about to tagging these files?
Thanks a lot.
Jeronimo

[Mnyb]

Hello,
I happen to have got a huge collection of mp3-files which are not correctly tagged.
There might be a file named
metallica-nothing-else-matters.mp3
Now when I enter "metallica" in the server's search field the server won't find the file.
This is due to bad tagging. Yes. But isn't it possible to search for parts of file names?
And once I found them... How would you go about to tagging these files?
Thanks a lot.
Jeronimo

Use a program called mp3tag or tag&rename or any other such software .


You can load your whole library in mp3tag if you want and sort by filenames for example .

Before you fix the tags ,backup everything just in case.

[aubuti]

Just to expand a bit on Mnyb's response. If you load your library in mp3tag you can easily find missing tags by sorting on a particular tag, such as Artist. Then all of the tracks with missing (or null) Artist tags will float to the top. Likewise for Album, Genre, Track Number, or any other tag.

For tagging the files, you have a few options with mp3tag.

1) Semi-manual tagging: You may find it more efficient to work with subsets of your library. For example, if the physical organization of your files is in a typical folder structure such as artist/album/tracks you could right-click on the Metallica folder in Windows Exploder and load only the albums and tracks in the Metallica folder into mp3tag. After verifying that they are indeed all Metallica, you could select all of the tracks and fill in the Artist tag with Metallica using one of mp3tag's mass-tagging options. I happen to prefer using Alt-T to bring up the extended tags dialog, even for normal tags. Then you could sort by pathname, and go album-by-album to fill in the Album tags for each of your Metallica albums. Filling in other metadata, such as track numbers, may require more manual operation.

2) Use existing databases: Alternatively, mp3tag is able to look up info in several tag databases, such as Amazon, discogs, freedb, and MusicBrainz. I have never had to resort to this, but if you have a lot of tagging to do, it may be the way for you to go.

3) Pattern-matching on filenames and folder names: If your files and/or folder names have a consistent naming pattern, such as [track #]-[Artist]-[Track title].mp3 then you can use mp3tag's conversion facility to write the information in the file and/or folder names to tags. Obviously this will only help you for metadata that appears in the filename, so you won't get a track number out of "metallica-nothing-else-matters.mp3". In fact, you probably can't even parse Artist and Title in that example because you-use-the-same-separator-for-every-word.

And as Mnyb says, be sure you have a current backup before doing any mass-tagging operation.

[jaysung]

Hello,
very enlightening thank you guys a lot!
Will try mp3tag then.
Does it do flac for a chance.
Great help here.
Cheers

[aubuti]

Yes, despite the name, mp3tag works very well with FLAC. Good luck, and remember to have a current backup before you start. And if you end up needing to do a lot of manual tagging, just be patient and slog through it slowly and methodically. It will pay dividends for your SB experience in many ways.

[audiomuze]

If your tags are a complete mess it'd probably pay you to have Picard do the first run of tagging for you and fine-tune manually from there.