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Organizing a large mp3 collection

post #1 of 9
1/25/09 at 7:59am
Thread Starter 
I have a large collection, around 21,000 songs. I would like to create sort of a "culled" version of the full collection for carrying with me that would include only hits, released singles, fan favorites, band favorites, and personal favorites. As for the last category, it would require personal intervention. However, I am wondering if there is a database that can be compared to an mp3 collection to help automate this process.

Anybody have any leads on something like this?
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post #2 of 9
1/25/09 at 8:54am

Re: Organizing a large mp3 collection

Do you have ITunes?

Itunes' ver8 "Genius" function will create playlists from a single song. You might try that- go through and pick a song of each type, and it will automatically select songs it thinks you might like, based on what other users have done with their playlists.

??
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post #3 of 9
1/25/09 at 10:39am
Thread Starter 

Re: Organizing a large mp3 collection

Actually, I bought a Zune to avoid iTunes. I have heard about this particular playlist function.

I know WMP can find album art on the web. I'm wondering how much farther it would have to go to, say, find chart positions, single release dates, and apperances on compilations, and put that information in the comment tag area. That way, one could use a tag editor to sort the songs and remove what you don't want to carry.
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post #4 of 9
1/26/09 at 12:04pm

Re: Organizing a large mp3 collection

Are you saying that your music tags are not correct (or complete)? Fixing this would be step #1 (and will take awhile, even with a tag editor). I don't know of an automated 'tag fixer'. When ripping, good tags require a lookup license (AMG, etc.). Other software will parse Amazon and other sources (but quality is much lower).
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post #5 of 9
1/26/09 at 6:06pm

Re: Organizing a large mp3 collection

Many years ago I used Music Match Jukebox. While I did not like using it as a player, it had a great TAG look up and repair feature. Once the TAGs were repaired they worked in other players. It also looked up the artwork and the genre. It also gave the options of the album the song came from. Once you have the genre, it might help with the sorting.
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post #6 of 9
1/26/09 at 7:34pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Organizing a large mp3 collection

I've edited my tags and they are great.

When I was looking for album art, I would find a lot of it on Wikipedia. Wikipedia also usually had chart positions and information for single releases, etc. I'd like for some software to be able to sort through my mp3s and identify which songs were hits and released singles, perhaps tagging them in the comment field, so I could then put only those files on my portable player.
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post #7 of 9
1/28/09 at 1:14am

Re: Organizing a large mp3 collection

Check out Media Monkey. I use it to handle my 1600+ albums. It links to Amazon to get album info and artwork, as well as freedb. I don't know of anything that will pull chart positions for you. I'm not even sure there's a single database for that. But MM is user customizable with scripts that could do that for you should one exist.

And Media Monkey can be configured to import to portable players.
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post #8 of 9
1/29/09 at 4:34pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Organizing a large mp3 collection

Unfortunately Microsoft is picky about what software it allows to work with the Zune, which would be the Zune software. (Ironically, the Zune software does NOT run under Win XP Pro x64. Argh!) Media Monkey is good stuff and worked with my Zens.

Probably the best way will be through...go through each folder and delete all the songs I don't want. At 21,000+ songs I don't relish the idea, but once it is done, I can tackle it one new album at a time.
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post #9 of 9
1/29/09 at 7:27pm

Re: Organizing a large mp3 collection

Amazon's music wiki, Soundunwound.com, sometimes has better artwork than what appears on Amazon itself. Sometimes it is the same file, but sometimes it is a higher quality scan provided by the public that contribute to the wiki.

The only hassle is that because the larger versions of Soundunwound's cover art appear in a pop-up lightbox, you have to be kind of clever to grab it. (On Firefox, start right clicking as soon as the pop-up lightbox starts to appear and most of the time you'll manage to get the "Save Image As" option. But if you're too slow, you miss it.)

When I was adding artwork to it, I added everything as 600 x 600 scans whenever possible. Even that is kind of small -- 1425 x 1425 is becoming more common for cover art -- but it is better than Amazon's current 500 x 500 limit. (Plus Amazon's own scans were scanned by monkeys -- terrible quality most of the time).
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