music – Kev's Development Toolbox

September 6, 2024September 6, 2024

Re-tagging and re-organizing mp3 collection by Artist and Album folders using MusicBrainz Picard (after Google Takeout)

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!

August 28, 2024August 28, 2024

Revisiting CD rip quality from early 2000s

In past years I would always buy physical copies of CDs and then rip them to my PC, for transferring to players later. Nowadays I usually only buy digital copies of albums, but I wanted to go back and move my previous mp3 library to my current desktop.

All our prior CD albums had been ripped and uploaded to Google Music, which in recent years is now YouTube Music. With Google Music you could upload and download as you wished, but with YouTube Music there is no download option anymore, the only way to get copies of your uploaded files is to request a Google Takeout request.

After downloading 20x 2GB zips for our entire CD collection, I stumbled across this realization that some of the CDs had been ripped with a shockingly low bit rate:

Luckily most tracks were at least 128kbps (even that’s low by current standards where I wouldn’t normally rip anything less than mp3’s 320kbps maximum rate), but there is still around 400 tracks at various rates below 100kbps, and some as low as these, around 50kbps.

At various points in the past years I had considered selling or just donating all my physical CDs but I never actually got to the point of committing. In this case I’m glad I still have the original discs so I can re-rip them and get better copies. I’m sure most people with large audio collections have gone through the process of comparing bitrates to see if they can tell the difference. The only reason I can think that some of these were ripped at such a low rate was to get the lowest file size possible for playback on a portable mp3 player. Nowadays storage is large and cheap that filesize of music files is really not a concern, even with lossless formats. I’ve bought albums in recent years in hi-res audio formats from HD Tracks, so ripping these again at either 320kbps mp3s or even as lossless flac is definitely an option.

I’ve gone through the exercise of comparing bit rates before in the past to see if I can tell a difference. I can just hear a difference between 128kbps and 320kbps on good headphones (e.g. my current 11 year old Audio Technica M50S), but the files I have here in 50kbps sound incredibly muffled and are lacking any definition at all, so it makes sense to re-rip them again to something better quality.

Reading around it seems Exact Audio Copy is the current ripper of choice. I followed this guide to setup for ripping mp3s, and this guide using flac for lossless.

Comparing the same tracks in 320kbps and flac I can barely tell the difference, there may be some clearer treble on cymbals in flac, but it’s barely noticeable to my ear. At least now these lates rips should be good for another 20 years or so… 🙂

November 16, 2011

Google’s Music Store announcement today

Google will be having a press conference today at 2pm PST to announce something related to an online music store. cnet will be live blogging the announcement here, and live streaming will be here.

There’s been some speculation which of the major labels are on board, ranging from only one to all but one. Have to see how it pans out this afternoon. It’s obviously going to be linked in with their existing music.google.com service which allows you to store all your music online and stream to your desktop or Android device, but have to see if there’s any more interesting features that haven’t been announced yet.

The most interesting rumor is that the major labels have agreed to let users of Google’s service share music between their friends, which would tie music in with Google+?