Newbie wondering if mediamonkey can fill his needs.

[lvirden]

I am looking at mediamonkey, trying to figure out how well it might fit into the wide variety of needs that I have.

My situation:
0. My collection resides on a small laptop computer disk as well as a single external hard drive. The drives are nearly full right now... due to the rest of my problems...
1. 20,000+ mp3 without any consistent organization.
2. Duplicates - both intentional and unintentional. The intentional, of course, are in "best of" situations, or samplers, etc. Unintentional occurs when one of the kids rips something that I already had ripped, or downloads a "free track of the day" from itunes, amazon, google, whatever and we already had it.
3. Tracks called "Track 1" that I'd love to identify
4. Tracks that I would love to find lyrics for and add to the tracks.

Currently, this collection is a mess - there are mp3s in itunes, there are mp3s in a variety of back up directories created before we had itunes, copies in a backup copy of itunes made to try and save us from loss, etc.

What little bit of structure we have is that some (many) of the files were saved in Artist\Album\track.mp3 format. However, due to the vagarities of those who entered the data, sometimes the folder (or even the metadata) has mis-spelled band, album, or track names, etc.

The dream is some way to organize the external drive so everything is stored consistently, with duplications only where necessary, and where names are corrected consistently, resulting in significantly less disk space being used.

It would be wonderful if I also had the option of pointing to the itunes library, and could say "if anything in here is not on my externally organized collection, please copy it to the appropriate location".

Is there some portion of this needed clean up possible with mediamonkey?

[MPG]

MediaMonkey will meet your needs, but it is going to take some work.

You can locate tag information via the web lookup.
You can organize all of the data into whatever structure you want using the Organize capabilities. Ctrl+R
You can find duplicates very easily between the built in playlists and the phenominal(sp?) Magic Nodes Add-In
As for a spell check...you might be on your own for that.
There are a variety of lyric add-on scripts. Look in the Add-On forums for what's available.
For those songs that are porrly tagged and named, you can try a tool called Shazam that will help identify the songs. It's available for most smartphones.

Good Luck.
MPG

[Forrykook]

MM will certainly help but I reckon the first thing you have to do is put all the music in one place, manually. Use windows explorer to find them all and drag & drop into one place such as your music folder in libraries. It's like packing your car for a camping trip. Everything you plan to take has to be there right by your feet to organise it in the car.

Once it's all there and you set MM to monitor that particular folder then it will just be a time consuming operation to check id3 tags, rename & relabel as necessary.

The physical organisation of the folders within the music folder depends on your type of collection. I only do albums. So my collection is C:\Users\Andrew\Music\Artist\Album and I have no individual songs just floating around. If you do have songs floating around makes the physical organisation a bit harder but they will still show up in the MM library just the same.

ps: personally I think itunes is a rabid dog and is part of the reason your collection is a mess.