Following on from my recent post about downloading our complete CD collection from YouTube Music, the next part of the puzzle was to re-tag and reorganize the files my adding back the majority of the missing mp3 tags, and re-organizing them again into their own folders by Artist and Album.
While the YouTube Music Google Takeout worked fine, the zips of downloaded files have lost their enclosing folders, and in most cases most only have a filename and no mp3 tags. Which is odd, because when we originally ripped our CDs in iTunes I thought they were tagged as well, but apparently not. Or at least something was lost during the import to Google Music, the migration to YouTube Music, or the Google Takeout process.
Anyway, realizing that organizing 40GB of files is not a trivial task, I looked around to find mp3 tagging tools that could help me out. The most recommended seemed to be MusicBrainz Picard which does exactly what I need: it identifies files, adds missing tags, and also moves the files into appropriate folders.
From the source folder of all my downloaded files, you drag the untagged files in to organize and press Scan:
Once a track is scanned (and you can load multiple files for processing in one go), on the righthand side it lists what album the track appears on, base on it’s audio fingerprint. While in most cases it works great, in some cases if a track exists on multiple different releases it might suggest something that’s is correct but maybe not the actual physical disk that you ripped it from. In this base ‘Bad Medicine’ by Bon Jovi is showing as coming from a 4 track record called Bad Medicine, maybe an EP:
Tool has also highlighted where there is a difference in track length between the scanned file and what is on this disc:
In this case, pressing the ‘Lookup in Browser’ button takes you to the MusicBrainz website where you can browse all the identified albums where this track has been identified:
Knowing this track was from my ripped copy of New Jersey, pressing the Open in Tagger icon copies this album into the tool:
Now you can drag the identified track from the misidentified album to the correct album:
Press Save and the file is correctly tagged and moved to it’s correct folder.
While most files seem to be correctly identified, this tool is a massive help to recategorize everything again!
Good stuff!
I use Picard a lot and just wanted to mention that if you have half decent existing tags you can avoid scan, which can make a bit of a mess. Your first port of call should be cluster, then lookup.
Scan (which ignores existing tags, and ‘listens’ to the file instead) is still excellent for matching files with no tags, or incorrect tags.
You can also right click albums, once they are in the right-hand panel, to select from different editions of releases.
Awesome, thanks for the tips!