Music File Display Questions [PC]

The Dude With Herpes

I don't want to clutter up the android thread so here goes.

I'm currently in the process of going through my music collection and culling out crap I never listen to and trying to better organize my tags and other things.

I've noticed in various album folders there are image files for said album.

However, they're not always internally consistant.

For example, in one album folder there is a file called "AlbumArt<nonsense>" and another called "Folder". Then in another folder there won't be an AlbumArt file, and there'll be maybe a few thumbnails that have ZuneArt names on them which I'm sure the Zune software attached to it.

In the case of the former, the art for the album is applied to each song in the folder; they all have that thumbnail. In the case of the latter, there is no art on the individual songs, just the default media icon; but there is the thumbnail I want in the form of the "Folder" image file.

The AlbumArt files all have totally nonsense filenames which I'm sure is somehow related to linking them to the songs.

My main question, for this post (I'm sure I'll have more later), is: Is there a way to manually (or automatically) apply the folder icon to all the songs in an album and have that image "set" as the default for that album?

I constantly have had issues in Windows Media Player and Zune with my albums missing their thumbnails or having the wrong thumbnails. I've downloaded many a album cover off google to replace the ones that aren't correct. But that seems to have, now that I'm diving into my files, caused more problems than help; as I have some folders with tons of image files, some missmatched, or in the wrong folder or attached to the wrong album.

For instance, in my Echoes folder for disc one, one of the songs has the album image from Pulse, when there is no Pulse image in the folder. When I look at the tags for the song they all look like they're set up correctly but for whatever reason that song wants to be "owned" by the wrong album and I can't figure out how to fix it.

This is giving me a headache. If anyone has any advise as to how to do this right, or to automate it, I'd really really appreciate it. I have thousands and thousands of songs in hundreds of albums that I've ripped from my CD's and over the years things have just gotten shit all over it and I don't know where to really start.

EDIT: Changed the title.

The Dude With Herpes

Some googling led me to this "guide" here:
http://lifehacker.com/#!397258/find-and-embed-album-art-in-your-mp3-collection

which is being pretty useful.

It looks like the program MediaMonkey will do exactly what I'm looking for here.

I'll try it out but I'm curious if anyone has tried it?

EDIT: Also Windows Media Player supposedly can do what I want, but it's a manual thing; if this does it automatically and correctly/accurately, I'd be crazy pleased.

I'm sick of having my music data not carry over from Creative > Zune > WMP > Phone > other PC's. The more I can imbed in the music the better.

The Dude With Herpes

Alright, this Media Monkey thing seems pretty ace so far. It is "fixing" all my dorked up tags that I've mangled over the years, adding all the artists and info that either wasn't there or I had stupidly removed in previous attempts to "clean up" my collection.

Not due to the software, there's some oddities in syncing my phone with WMP not transferring over some data. I'm not entirely sure what the deal with that is.

Now I just need to remove my Zune database after this is all done and see if it takes in all these changes correctly.

The Dude With Herpes

MOAR POAST!

Well I spent about, I'd say, 10 hours since finding Media Monkey last night meticulously going through my music collection, culling out the trash and updating the actual tags of all my music to include all the proper album information including the correct album art for every CD I own and imbedding them into each song too.

I'm pretty pleased with the program. I have some obscure music, mainly a bunch of celtic and new age stuff, on top of my general popular stuff. The former it couldn't find most of so I had to go back and hand enter all the album information off the CD's, and I have collected album art over the years for most all of those; that was the tedious stuff. The latter of which, the common music, Media Monkeys search function usually found many versions of each of my CD's, be it reissues, imports or what have you. It was nice because I could pick and choose which information I wanted; I could get a quality album cover off one version, but pull the track info off another, with just a few clicks.

Now I'm just sitting here dreading opening up my Zune player and finding out that it doesn't give a shit about all that work I did and have it give me the finger. :P

Also, I cleaned out all the absurd amount of extra art information that it (and windows media player) had stuffed into all my folders; and I don't want it to go back and add all that shit back in. Hopefully it shouldn't need to since all the information it should need is in every album but I doubt it'll be that smart.

Anyway, if anyone is interested at all in needing something similar to me here, Media Monkey is great. There's a pay version, but the free one is more than good enough for what I needed. Also it works as a perfectly functional media player itself.

EDIT: Figures. It is showing virtually all of my albums but it is like it just arbitrarily choose a couple dozen of them and decided it didn't feel like loading the art even though it's all right there just like every other album. Stupid Zune software.

EDIT EDIT: Heh, I wrote down all the albums that weren't showing and it hit me after a bunch that they were the albums that, in the windows folders, already appeared to have had their art applied before I touched them so I didn't do anything to them.

Manually adding the art again, from the art that is already there, fixed it. Kinda odd.

Conclusion: media tags are f'ing retarded.

Muppetman

Just lost half a day organising with Media Monkey - thanks

The Dude With Herpes

Yeah I'm finding I quite like it.

I still use my Zune software for listening to music and managing my Zune itself; but for managing stuff, setting up playlists, and syncing my Droid X, I'm just going to use Media Monkey.

It's not nearly as "slick" as other programs, it is mostly just raw information; but sometimes that is just better for the task.

Abracadaniel

Another excellent music tagger/renamer/organizer is MusicBrainz Picard

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard

uses their user-generated database of music to match stuff, lets you set up a custom naming scheme, has some plugins for downloading cover art. been using it for years, works great.