by monday-friday » Mon May 26, 2008 4:42 am
Hi!
My library was totally out of control at the end of last year... so I understand how you feel. Here is how I did it:
All my tracks were on one HD, so it was a little bit easier for the first step...
1. I scanned the drive(s) to find all the files.
2. I checked all the songs which had missing artist and album, which luckily were in a folder with at least the artist name. I filled the information as accurately as I could but in a fast way.
3. I deleted the library, and rescanned with auto-sort. It moved all the files in folders according to artist name and album name.
That is when the real nitty-gritty work began.
4. Then I moved all the artists in alphabetical folders, changing the names if needed, to allow me to scan only a part of the library at a time. Like only artists beginning with A or S, and I put all the compilations in one separate folder. Made also a filing system by record label.
I also put all the tracks by format, mp3, aac, flac, ogg, ... in a different part of the library, dealing first with mp3s.
5. I deleted the library again, and scanned letter by letter, deleting it after each letter. I used the auto-tag from web for each album, filling the blanks and adding manually the album art if needed. - very useful to use the "clean Id3vxx tag" function. -I had also contradictory information there.
6. I checked in Mp3tag that all the tags were written in the same format, also removing comments and things I hadn't taken care of, and checking that I didn't have twice the album art embed in the tag.
7. I rescanned the whole thing many times, looking for unknown artist-unknown year and so on until it looked... extremely well organised.
I am REALLY happy I did it... it took me approx. 6 weeks doing it a little bit every evening, I really felt overwhelmed at the beginning... (20k files to process!).
Now I am using an auto-sync program which makes automatic updates of the modified tracks only on a second hard-drive. - could be useful if you are multi-users. It is also in case the first drive crashes! I couldn't imagine doing it again.
Well, I would be really interested in how other people would do it.
I wish you good luck!
Hi!
My library was totally out of control at the end of last year... so I understand how you feel. Here is how I did it:
All my tracks were on one HD, so it was a little bit easier for the first step...
1. I scanned the drive(s) to find all the files.
2. I checked all the songs which had missing artist and album, which luckily were in a folder with at least the artist name. I filled the information as accurately as I could but in a fast way.
3. I deleted the library, and rescanned with auto-sort. It moved all the files in folders according to artist name and album name.
That is when the real nitty-gritty work began.
4. Then I moved all the artists in alphabetical folders, changing the names if needed, to allow me to scan only a part of the library at a time. Like only artists beginning with A or S, and I put all the compilations in one separate folder. Made also a filing system by record label.
I also put all the tracks by format, mp3, aac, flac, ogg, ... in a different part of the library, dealing first with mp3s.
5. I deleted the library again, and scanned letter by letter, deleting it after each letter. I used the auto-tag from web for each album, filling the blanks and adding manually the album art if needed. - very useful to use the "clean Id3vxx tag" function. -I had also contradictory information there.
6. I checked in Mp3tag that all the tags were written in the same format, also removing comments and things I hadn't taken care of, and checking that I didn't have twice the album art embed in the tag.
7. I rescanned the whole thing many times, looking for unknown artist-unknown year and so on until it looked... extremely well organised.
I am REALLY happy I did it... it took me approx. 6 weeks doing it a little bit every evening, I really felt overwhelmed at the beginning... (20k files to process!).
Now I am using an auto-sync program which makes automatic updates of the modified tracks only on a second hard-drive. - could be useful if you are multi-users. It is also in case the first drive crashes! I couldn't imagine doing it again.
Well, I would be really interested in how other people would do it.
I wish you good luck!