I have this collection of mp3s from the 90s-2000s from before the streaming services era. Back when people used Winamp or XMMS to listen to their music. I backed up my music files in two places and they’re both organized differently.
I need a tool to go through the whole thousands of files, find out what each track is (artist, album, track title, track number all that meta data), rename the file accordingly and apply all the metadata, then move the file in a certain directory structure.
Are there any music organizers out there that can do this? Or do I have to implement my own script?
UPDATE:
Musicbrainz Picard ended up doing exactly what I wanted. It identified all the songs using fingerprinting, updated all the tags and it moved all my files to a proper directory structure (artist/album/tracknumber - track title) into my Music folder.
Thank you @[email protected] for the recommendation! 😁
Try MusicBrainz Picard. I’ve had good experience with their recognition quality.
Huh. I’m not that old, but now it makes sense why it gives the “ancient tech in a candywrap” vibe. I like the thing, though.
lol!!!
Nice! Does it actually reorganize the files as well as adding tags and metadata and such?
It can recognize tracks based on a profile of the audio content in the file, so even if they’re not labeled properly it can (usually) identify them. The biggest problem I’ve had with using it is that many artists have re-released or rerecorded songs, or released the same album in different years in different countries but maybe with one track missing or with the tracks in a different order, and sometimes Picard will pick an album release that you know is incorrect. It will reorganize the files, and there are lots of options for controlling how it does that (e.g. file renaming and tagging, output to the same folder or a different one, automation of bulk processing). But you may have to guide it a little, especially if you have many albums from the same artist because then you’ll have overlaps.
I’ve found the best approach to handling this is to work on one folder/album at a time and make sure it picks the correct release year for metadata reference.
Awesome! I’ll check it out as well. :)
Hey just wanted to give you an update.
Musicbrainz Picard ended up doing exactly what I asked for. Thank you so much for the recommendation!