So after some 20+ years, Ive decided to begin the arduous task of organizing my music library. To an extent, it's somewhat organized but what I really need is an app that can do the bulk of the work. Essentially I'm looking for something that can auto-organize files, retrieve album art and tags, rename, etc. Ive downloaded and in the process of trying several already (MusicBee, MediaMonkey, AIMP, PerfecTunes), but I'm hoping to get some suggestions of apps I may be overlooking.

 

I remember seeing an ad that always came up where Biz Markief was talking about this music app that organized your music library the same way. I can't remember what it was for the life of me though.

 

First step: Organise your library physically in correctly named folders. Artist/Album or whatever suits you.

Second step: Tag all your albums independently or en-masse with specialized software, don't use a player/displayer for tagging.
Once everything is tagged and cleaned and organised every player/displayer will be able to list your collection with ease, especially if you keep the file size down on the covers. My collection is over 1.5 tb all full albums with correct artwork and mediamonkey and itunes display everything fine, I use filelocatorpro to only add the mp3's to the player (skipping jpg's, txt, nfo and any other files which may be in the album folders)

My toolkit: mp3tag, mp3diag, better file rename 6 & FilelocatorPro then the internet: Discog's or blogs for whatever info mp3tag can't automatically find. Photoshop for custom covers.

 

I am not convinced there is any application that is a one-size-fits-all for everyone.
However, Tidy Tag Editor has a batch processing feature that is pretty good. While I do not use it, I believe Media Monkey is reasonable. As I mentioned, it's different for everyone, because we all like to see and access anything within our own levels of comfort.

 

Tagscan is VERY fast. Mp3Tag's scripting tool is awesome, take some time to learn how to use it and you can automate several operations.
The same applies to Foobar2000, but the scripting can be quite complex, at least for me.
MediaMonkey has been great to put some order in the chaos. It comes by default with a "folder" for classical music which organize your albums by composer, which for me is fantastic, and I seem unable to do the same with MusicBee or even Foobar. I found AIMP lacking in most aspects, really, but some folks seem to like it.

 

It depends on how big the collection really is. As long as it is just a few hundereds songs, the several solutions named above will do the job.

But when you need to organize thousands of songs most lightweight apps will get really slow.
The best manager for huge amounts of songs that I found was Helium Music Manager. You can find it on sister.

HMM leaves the songs where they are (no need to sort by hand into disk folders or sth) and just builds a database (you can choose several database engines) with all tags the songfiles contain.

As with every other database you can sort, filter, analyze as you like. Really powerful app.

> 100.000 songs and more is no problem to handle it for HMM, the limit is the db engine only.

 

I just switch't from Foobar2000 (Using It For 10+ Years) to MusicBee.
The reason for that is, the playlist handling in FB2000 is utterly, a time-wasting hazard that I don't want to deal with anymore.
Two weeks ago, on a Sunday, I had a run and made about 20 playlists(About 6 Hours) and the damn thing hard-crash't on me like win95.
And instead of recovering my work, it just asks me like a steep child of windows, if I want to restart in "Save-Mode"..., I mean, WTF!

The issue was, that FB2000 uses a database with all the playlists, instead of saving those one by one.
That means, when it crashes, then you are out of luck, because it is not able to write it in the database anymore!
The other issue (Like twoheart Stated) is, that you only have one database per instance of FB2000.
That means for me, that I had to use several portable installations to circumvent that...., yea, I know!

With MusicBee, that's a thing of the past(At Least For Me).
I can have as many databases as I want, even on several locations(Files>Library>Create New Library(Easy)).
And the playlist handling is one of the best I saw so far.
They use their own Dynamic-playlist format, which updates itself as quickly as you alter the playlist(Yay).
It saves every playlist as a separate file, even with relative paths(Just A Checkbox In the Popup Dialog).

I don't know if that is something of your interest, but I am Happy so far!

 

Last edited: Jun 9, 2021

I have tested many softwares and the best ones which i used was one of these three (sorry cant remember which one i exactly used but surely its one of these (guessing its picard since it has scripts to rename the folders and files including tags) or a combination of them:

MUSIC BRAINZ PICARD https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
METATOGGER http://www.luminescence-software.org/en/metatogger
BlissHQ https://www.blisshq.com/

I was able to identify and sort the songs-artists-album-release date etc... according to how i need them.
You can customise it the way you need to sort. I prefered this method of sorting it into folders eg: Genre>Band/Artist>Album name with year> and song title. There was a script I used to had it sort this way. Let me see if i can find it.

The only difficult thing is sometimes the same song title appears in other albums like compilation CDs or Re-released albums, thats when you might need to figure out which album its from and then manually fix it. But these softwares did a good thing as my music collection was all over the place. Doesnt matter where the files were, i put all mp3 into one drive and sorted the whole damn thing. (It does take sometime though, software has to go online to check the acoustic id of the song and get relevant details)

One advice before sorting your music is to remove duplicates first based on the bitrate/type of song mp3/wav flac/ etc... use something like
http://www.similarityapp.com/ or https://www.dbpoweramp.com/perfecttunes.htm

 

Thanks everyone for the input and suggestions.

After testing out several of the suggested apps, I decided on MusicBrainz Picard and MP3tag. I found the combination of the two has given me the best/fastest results. Thanks again!

 

You don't say your platform, but on Windows to me smartly organized folders + foobar2000 for tags/playback and everything mapped to a shortcut keycombo has worked for years.

Also goes for samples and what have you.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jun 14, 2021