So, I fail at sorting my music collection.

Tayrun

Greetings there, good gentlefolk of the H/A forum.

The music collection on my pc is a mess. A big mess. One of those "I'll sort this out" and abandon the project when it's half done, four or five times over the last decade, looks like it was randomly backed up several times by different people, spread out over several drives and temporary folders kind of messes.

I have decided to sort this out. Unfortunately, I'm clueless when it comes to this modern stuff used by the kids these days with their mp3s and their hippity-hop.

I'm currently using windows media player to play my music, and also as the method to sync stuff to my mp3 player - a Sansa Clip+. I find its interface unintuitive.

I'm getting a lot of errors of the "unknown album"/"unknown artist" variety when transferring stuff to the mp3 player, which I understand is some sort of metadata/tag issue?

I can't find a good way to alter tags easily for multiple tracks at once in WMP.

So I guess what I'm after is for someone with a clue, who is a proud owner of a large and perfectly organised music collection, to come in and say: "I have used the following software and decided that X is the best player, Y is the best for syncing, Z is the best for sorting metadata, etc. Here is what you should do to sort yourself out..."

Ideally I'd like to be using just one piece of software to deal with everything. Something streamlined and efficient. Like a dolphin.

Thanks H/A!

Tav

I use MP3tag for sorting out my music, which is free software for batch editing MP3s. Using it you can get individual song titles for an entire album from Amazon/MusicBrains/Discogs and then batch edit album artist/album/genre/comments/year/song numbers. It's a great little piece of software...

TychoCelchuuu

Musicbrainz Picard for metadata tagging, foobar2k for playing, dunno about syncing but foobar might do that.

L Ron Howard

I came here to post about MP3Tag as well. I highly recommend it, as for whatever fucking stupid reason, lots of my MP3s mysteriously lost their stupid fucking tags. And most of mine that lost the tags were ripped by my from the CD I own, and at one point I know that they had the correct tag. I can't even stress how angry I am the the ones I got from Amazon magically kept all their tags, but the ones I've made lost theirs.

mere_immortal

I use MediaMonkey for tagging and filenames.

Being able to change the filenames of your entire library into whatever format you want with a couple of clicks is great.

Page-

Seconding mediamonkey. The only reason I still have it installed is because I have like 35 gigs of music and I need to resort it every now and then. You can make it sort into any folder system you want as well as tags, so you could have separate folders for every genre or whatever else you feel like.

shutz

Thirding MediaMonkey. I already had my music collection fairly well-sorted, but I needed something that would do file conversions the way I needed it to, and also provide me with what I describe as a "jukebox" interface, such that I can actually just setup my laptop plugged into a nice set of speakers, off to the side when I have people over, and they can easily browse my music collection, or do simple searches to quickly find something and queue it for playing.

I actually paid for this one in order to unlock the encoding/transcoding components, because it precisely addressed something I needed to do which would have otherwise required me to create my own solution.

But just for organizing your music collection, the free version works great.

Also, I used to have a Sansa Clip, I now have a Sansa Fuze (the one that looks like an iPod Nano, but with a microSD slot.) I find it easier to just access it directly through Windows Explorer, dropping the files I want to put on "manually". I've never used music player software to "sync" music to a portable player. I'd rather manage the music on my player directly. That's why I'll probably never get a real iPod.