How to organize music files ? - Please suggest.

[kingajit]

Here, I meant ID3 tag in mp3 files. I used media monkey (sometimes winamp) to do the job. Both in win7.

Thanks for the clarification..I am looking for some solutions to organise original Indian Music CD's mainly gazhals ,OST's and Artists albums...cheers

 

[girish_sutar]

Hey Guys,

Does Media Monkey allow editing a playlist, because i recently started using MP3tag and suddenly realised you cannot edit a playlist i.e. remove song from one of the playlists.

Probably i dont know how to do it on MP3tag

 

[swami]

Mediamonkey (MM) is the way to go. It is free and highly versatile. You can view songs according to their tag properties. You could also automatically rename, move, organize files using MM. Moreover you can set winamp as the player in MM. All the functions you are searching for available in it. Here is how i organized my 16k+ mp3 songs.

1. Do not put all your songs in one folder. It will make loading of the folder very slow.
2. Set aside a dedicated partition for songs
3. Create folders for languages (I created English, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Devotional etc.)
4. Create folders for albums/movies (You can create folders named 'A', 'B' etc and put album/movie folders there)
5. Put songs in the corresponding folder
6. Rename song file names. Track numbers are not necessary. Capitalise all the first characters to have better look.
7. Tag them properly. It is very important. Use mp3tag or MM for this. Interested fields are Title, Artist, Album, Year, Genre, Composer, Lyricist.
8. You will need to search the internet for indian album or movie details. google will come handy.
9. For malayalam songs you can visit MalayalaSangeetham | MSI | MMdb | ??????????? ?????????????* to get album details. (very nice. They have compiled almost all malayalam movies there! I think no such database is available for other indian languages)
10. Use '/' between multiple artists, lyricist, composers, genres etc in a song if using mp3tag.
11. Use '; ' between multiple artists, lyricist, composers, genres etc in a song if using MM. (Actually MM puts "/" which is not visible)
12. Scan your entire collection using MM.
13. You can add album art to mp3 tag or the folder using mp3tag or MM. To get album arts use google image search.
14. You could also arrange songs according to their tag values using MM automatically, if you have already put all your songs in one folder or they are in various locations. You don't need to create all the folders manually. Pls reply if you want to know more how this is done in MM.
15. Most importantly you would need plenty of time and a willingness to edit the tags.

The Idea of genre is not suitable for Indian movie songs. I use Hindi Film, Hindi Album, Tamil Film etc. If needed I can put in another genre like dance, classical etc. using media monkey as it supports multiple genres using the ; separator.
For artists just type the singer names separated by ; Each will be treated as independent artists. There is another field Album Artists which also is irrelevant for movie songs. You can put this as empty or 'Various'

Regarding separator / or ;

I use foobar on my PC (and itunes too), ipod and symbian mobile on the go, sometimes a USB for car audio, burnt CDs for car and home audio too. So, in these variety of players I have observed that the separator doesn't work. For example my hindi song can have two singers which I can add with separator, but the song only shows the first artist name. I have never tried media monkey, and probably it does display individual artists, but due to my variety of usage in terms of media players, I do not think I can stick to a single player viz. MM.

My workaround is to enter album name in the artist name field as well, and the multiple singer names go in parenthesis in the end of title field itself. Foobar searches the artist name from title field and the same is displayed in car audio as a ticker too!

Not sure if this is a good/bad way but I am sticking to this method for last 2 years or so.