Best MP3 management software?

[coomarlin]

I have about 15k mp3's. Most of them have been ripped from my old cd's in windows media player. Up until recently I've just played them in media player and most of the tag info looks correct. But I recently have been loading them onto my android phone and have noticed that the tag info is not optimized completely. For instance I have

AC-DC
AC/DC
All-American Rejects
All-American Rejects, The
Allman Brothers
Allman Brothers Band, The

You get my drift? So when I want to play my Allman Brothers band collection I have to add both spellings to my playlist.

I'd like to clean these MP3's up so that my collection is cleaner and easier to use. What is the best software for this? A friend of mine recommended Media Monkey but I wanted to get some advice before I commit to certain software.

Any recommendations?

Edit: Would also like to have the ability to have the software scan my collection and find duplicate songs.

 

[MrChad]

MP3Tag does this very well.

 

[cvrefugee]

Mp3tag is great. I've been using it for years and the latest version is perfect.

 

[smitbret]

I have about 15k mp3's. Most of them have been ripped from my old cd's in windows media player. Up until recently I've just played them in media player and most of the tag info looks correct. But I recently have been loading them onto my android phone and have noticed that the tag info is not optimized completely. For instance I have

AC-DC
AC/DC
All-American Rejects
All-American Rejects, The
Allman Brothers
Allman Brothers Band, The

You get my drift? So when I want to play my Allman Brothers band collection I have to add both spellings to my playlist.

I'd like to clean these MP3's up so that my collection is cleaner and easier to use. What is the best software for this? A friend of mine recommended Media Monkey but I wanted to get some advice before I commit to certain software.

Any recommendations?

Edit: Would also like to have the ability to have the software scan my collection and find duplicate songs.

WinAmp is awesome for this particular task.

 

[coomarlin]

Does MP3Tag or winamp have the ability to scan my collection and show me a list of problematic songs? Or will I have to just sort by name and then scroll through 15k songs and try to spot them by eye?

 

[smitbret]

Does MP3Tag or winamp have the ability to scan my collection and show me a list of problematic songs? Or will I have to just sort by name and then scroll through 15k songs and try to spot them by eye?

I've got something like 30k mp3s of foreign musci and I've had the same kind of thing with AC-DC or AC DC and other band/artist names as well as consistency with genre. Can't speak for MP3Tag, but WinAmp will scan your library and you can sort by album, title, artist, genre, etc. by clicking the related header. Then you can simultaneously select as many of the tracks as you feel necessary, <right-click> "View File Info", change whatever field you would like and it will globally apply that tag to all of the selected files. It might seem cumbersome till you do it, but it's really not difficult at all.

Media Monkey is better at cataloging and has a few auto-tagging tools that are awesome, but for this particular task, I've never used anything easier than WinAmp. Media Monkey will tag everything automatically, but there's no guarantee of consistency outside of manually tagging each file in batch.

 

[tcsenter]

Moral of the story: do them as you go. Five minutes per rip twice per week for two years is the same amount of time and energy as 1040 minutes once every two years but one approach is more easy to digest/manage.

 

[Seeruk]

Media Monkey is also excellent for this - and yes it will search the library and filter for problematic tags, duplicates, similars etc etc.

http://tf.erzz.com/2006/06/07/drop-itunes-media-monkey-rockbox-is-the-perfect-marriage/

 

[coomarlin]

I downloaded Media Monkey last night and tried it out. The interface is a little busy but I was able to sort by artist and fix some issues. I was a little confused at first because it showed the same exact song twice. I guess based on differences in ID tags. It was nice I could raname a single subgroup (like Artist) and changes were imediately applied to the Artist portion of the ID tag for all songs in the subgroup. I read about some additional functionality I haven't gotten a chance to play with. Like filling in album, genre, info based on information from amazon. I'll have to read a bit more in order figure all of these tricks out. Seems like powerful software though.