# Organizing lots of mp3's.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/organizing-lots-of-mp3s/382255>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 29, 2006, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/organizing-lots-of-mp3s/382255 "2006-11-29T22:20:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Belrix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ed655f/32.png) [@Belrix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Belrix)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2006, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/organizing-lots-of-mp3s/382255/1 "2006-11-29T22:20:47Z")

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I’ve got 1000’s of mp3’s, wma’s, etc. Most all ripped from our 400+ CD collection.

The trouble is that they’re horribly disorganized on my hard drive. I’d like a utility that’ll find the files, read the artist, album, etc. tags & allow me to organize them in the directories like C:\some\_path\music\artist\album\file.mp3.

I remember a jukiebox player of some sort that would do that but I don’t remember the exact name and it’s been long enough that features are probably different anyway.

So - any suggestions?

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**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2006, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/organizing-lots-of-mp3s/382255/2 "2006-11-29T22:31:25Z")

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ITunes will do the job, if you go to Preferences - Advanced and check both ‘Keep iTunes Folder Organised’ and ‘Copy files to iTunes music folder’.

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**Author:** ![Belrix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ed655f/32.png) [@Belrix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Belrix)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2006, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/organizing-lots-of-mp3s/382255/3 "2006-11-29T22:40:20Z")

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[QUOTE=GorillaMan]  
ITunes will do the job, if you go to Preferences - Advanced and check both ‘Keep iTunes Folder Organised’ and ‘Copy files to iTunes music folder’.  
[/QUOTE]

I thought iTunes was unfriendly to wma files. Yes? No?

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**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2006, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/organizing-lots-of-mp3s/382255/4 "2006-11-29T22:44:05Z")

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Ahh, good point. Try [Media Monkey](http://www.mediamonkey.com/).

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**Author:** ![Baron\_Greenback](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baron_greenback/32/48_2.png) [@Baron\_Greenback](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baron_Greenback)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2006, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/organizing-lots-of-mp3s/382255/5 "2006-11-29T22:52:10Z")

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If you are minded to experiment, try [Songbird](http://www.songbirdnest.com/) . It’s only at v0.2 (but it is stable). It has the potential to be the open-source media player that has the entire WWW as its playlist. It’s based on VLC and Firefox (with some Winamp in there) so it theoretically handles all the formats you’ll ever be likely to need.

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**Author:** ![lazybratsche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ba8739/32.png) [@lazybratsche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lazybratsche)\
**Post date:** [November 30, 2006, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/organizing-lots-of-mp3s/382255/6 "2006-11-30T00:21:00Z")

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I really like [MusicBrainz](http://musicbrainz.org/). The tagging program has some quirks, but it’s pretty good at automatically identifying, tagging, renaming, and sorting music the way you want. Point to your music folder, it gives you a list of what it thinks your music is along with a match probability, and you either let it tag or correct the wrong identification. Their newest program also supports .wma and other formats, though I haven’t used it.