Hi, I was wondering if someone could tell me what is the best free program for fixing all of my music file names that are cluttered up.
For example, I have a file that says, 09-bjork-declare_independance and I would like it to say, Bjork - Declare Indepenence, but I would not like to go through the thousands of song files I have accumulated and do this by hand.
I tried using a program called Picard from Musicbrainz, but found it far too complicated and almost as tedious as going through the songs by hand. Thanks for any help.
I also use Musicbrainz and found it very very useful. I would stick with it. I found it very easy to use. The only problem I had was adding a few songs at a time because adding my whole folder would cause it to look to long.
Try Picard again. It’s actually your best bet. You just have to accept that it can’t get every file and that you’ll have to do the remainder by hand. You also need a decent workflow.
First, put all your crappily tagged files in one directory and create an empty directory for the fixed ones. Configure Picard to automatically rename and move files to the new directory. Start opening files in Picard; if you already have them in directories by artist, that’s a good way to do it. Once a directory has loaded into Picard, first hit the Cluster button to group any existing albums together.
At this point, I do files in stages. First, I run Lookup on the clustered files. Then I spot check the results and save them. Next I run Scan on the clustered files, check, and save them. Then I do a Lookup and Scan on the unclustered files. You can a Lookup on everything and then a Scan on the remainders, but if you have duplicate songs and a lot of live versions, it’s more work to make sure the results are correct if you do them all at once. Because clustered songs are more likely to be right and complete, spot checking them is a lot faster. Either way, you’re going to see live songs that end up as the album version or originals that get listed as a compliation and other levels of wrongness. To the extent that it’s important to you, clean it up and move incorrectly assigned songs back to the left side.
There’s a button that will let you manually look up a file on the MB web site, so if the auto-lookup is stupid, you can load the correct album data into the right side and drag over the appropriate files. At certain point, though, there will still be songs that aren’t in the system. That’s when I close Picard and manually drag those remaining files to a manual sort directory. Someday, I might actually go through them, but not anytime soon.
Brilliant piece of software, should easily do what you want.
Edit: The above program will only help you if the files have some mp3 tag with the artist and song title though. Without that, then something like the posters above mentioned would indeed be better.
Tag and Rename has always done the trick for me. My version is a couple of years old, and i don’t know if they’ve added any functionality since then, but the old version still works great.