An OCD Guide to Tagging Your MP3's

Hucker, put your name and/or your blog name on that document.

This is awesome! Thanks for putting it together. VERY much appreciate your sharing.

I 2nd Neurorad's comment, you dont want it to be stolen and claimed as theirs

Very helpful write up, I am still trying to get my albums sorted.

Very nice doc hucker.

I quite tagging my music after starting a few years ago. Your document is inspiring me to start again. I have all my music in my music directories. It is backed up but organization is more like a art picture splat.

Its funny because I don't listen to CD's anymore but rather just rip them and put them away. (think "old" count was 500 plus - now not worth counting).

Mostly like to see the MP3 tags while I drive and MP3 CD player shows them differently than the computer in the car.

Sometimes have gone back to tag some directories (a few years ago) and found this program - very nice, old and free - was called ID3-TagIT....liked it ...easy to use...

As stated / time spent writing / it would be beneficial to write your name on the doc.

I don't listen to CD's either. I pop them in the computer and then rip them and then play them digitally on one of our many players.

There are many good tagging tools out there but it really seems like they haven't *really* thought the problem through so things just work.

OK I put my name on the doc. Not sure why it really matters. It's not like I really care about the credit.

Excellent doc - this is going in the refrence file!

Awesome... need something similar for DVD's and pictures. Help us all get organized Hucker

I'm trying to figure out DVD stuff right now...

Hucker,

Why change the file names like you did in section 9.3? Couldn't you just put the "same" filename as it was, in a sub dir. as you have it?

When I "mix" a bunch of files together on my portable music devices, without opening the file, I find it hard to know what 09 - Crazy train.mp3 is (Obviously that one I know who it was, but can't necessarily remember the Album).

Is there an advantage to what you are doing? Just track / Song name?

Or, do you not mind so much, as the Album art tells you all the rest of what you need, when you open the file?

As for DVDs, I do:
All movies are under:
d:\movie\<First letter (not including "the")>\<Movie Name>\<filename as movie title><extension if necessary>

Then I use dvd collections from the homeseer forums, heavily modified. And DVD Profiler to get all the meta data.

Using this, a straight DVD rip is
d:\movie\<First letter (not including "the")>\<Movie Name>\Video_Ts
an Avi is:
d:\movie\<First letter (not including "the")>\<Movie Name>\<filename>, The
d:\movie\<First letter (not including "the")>\<Movie Name>\The <filename>
d:\movie\<First letter (not including "the")>\<Movie Name>\<filename>

My play script figures which one it is.

This way I don't need to care about cover art. It's all included as part of DVD Profiler's grab and then displayed in a nice format on a HS webpage, generated by the XML data.

I did notice that when the XML gets too big, it slows down WAAAY too much...so I was considering figuring out how to import the XML from DVD Profiler into a database like SQL...but in the mean time, I'm just splitting the XML into XML files that match the movie's first letter. REALLY sped things back up, and was a quick easy band-aid.
Awesome writeup!

Thanks!

--Dan

droz:

Don't really ever throw files in a folder by themselves so that problem doesn't come up, but I can see how it could of your player only supported a flat file system. I tend to try to do things hierarchically. The play lists that I have tend to point to files all over the place and I never really care about where the files actually reside. That would make it hard to copy the list and the files. What player do you have that needs a flat file representation? If that is the case then there are naming collisions to worry about as well.

For those who would rather do things that way, it is a simple matter in tagscanner to rename every file on your system to be album-track-song or better maybey year-artist-album-track-song? Dunno.

I will have a look at DVD profiler. Can it's output be integrated with SageTV? I'm really considering Sage right now.

Chuck

It's not so much the player, as the user. I'll cherry pick files to stick on my portable. Put them all in one directory then just hit playall on shuffle. It was annoying that a LOT of my files did not have meta data, so I started using the file name. If I do that, it's hard to tell what the song is by looking at it.

IF I were to get all the meta data in, then I can see changing over to your setup, as when I copy the files over, I just use the player to tell me the files.

I just don't want to make a whole hierarchical file structure on my PDA, just to listen to a few songs...

Regarding SageTV, I think so. I was looking for a way to use SageTv to replace my DVD Collections...but I think I was asking the wrong question...

In my poking around, I think there IS a way to import DVD Profiler information.

--Dan

Thanks Hucker,
I've tried many times over the years to organize my collection but always gave up after a couple days.

-Dom

Will it also help to combine two or more lyrics? What are the processes?

Dwana
Data Recovery Services

Any progress on the OCD guide for DVD?

I'm working on the DVD version. DVD's are even more screwed up, but I'm learning. Give me a month or so.

Hucker - The link doesn't work for me - is it just me?
Thanks

Edit: It works now, must have been my problem.

Love the guide, It is not OCD it is just the want to know what you got.