Need a good MP3 organizer

Personally, I find MediaMonkey to be like AOL... i.e. all intrusive and "I know best what you want, and how you should do it". Not for me. I use individual programs that provide the best of functionality for just what I want of it.

For a wonderful organizer/player, I use Jaangle.

Straight music player: Winamp.

Wonderful "visualization" for Winamp, because I like to "watch what I'm listening to": G-Force Platinum.

Tagging functionality: MP3Tag.

Production of my own MP3 and FLAC files from my own CD's: Audiograbber.

Best MP3 encoder (invoked by Audiograbber): LAME

FLAC encoder (invoked by Audiograbber): FLAC

dsperber said:

Personally, I find MediaMonkey to be like AOL... i.e. all intrusive and "I know best what you want, and how you should do it". Not for me. I use individual programs that provide the best of functionality for just what I want of it.

For a wonderful organizer/player, I use Jaangle.

Straight music player: Winamp.

Wonderful "visualization" for Winamp, because I like to "watch what I'm listening to": G-Force Platinum.

Tagging functionality: MP3Tag.

Production of my own MP3 and FLAC files from my own CD's: Audiograbber.

Best MP3 encoder (invoked by Audiograbber): LAME

FLAC encoder (invoked by Audiograbber): FLAC

Funny, I never found Media Monkey to be intrusive or inflexible. It does have a learning curve, however, same as any other complex program. I use it exclusively for ripping CDs to mp3s, tagging, organizing my music, and playing it without any problems (once I learned how to use it).

I use foobar for tagging music. It has tons of plugins you can get and it's free and easy to use. foobar2000 it can also play music, encode music from flac to mp3 and others and it can play music including FLAC and other formats.

boohbah said:

IE i have track number, track title, artist.
i dont bother with the album title as its on the folder, and shows in the info on winamp when playing.
you can aslo change the string value in winamp,

But if you copy your music collection to a portable music player (e.g. my Cowon J3) which supports logical browsing by tag fields, unless you store album in the tag you will not be able to browse by album.

Sure, you can also browse physically by folder/file and thus find the albums (assuming your collection is like mine, and is \Music\Artist\Album), but it is not as useful as logical browsing by tag. The J3 has two "drives" (32GB internal storage and 64GB external microSDHC card storage, providing me with a total of 96GB of capacity) and physical browsing is like with Windows Explorer, i.e. down from the "drive letter" so you can only see folders/files on one storage class at a time. But if you do logical browsing through the tags database, it allows you to find/play music anywhere transparently, on either storage class.

I feel there's no harm in storing album tag data to match folder name. It's all done automatically by Audiograbber when I produce the MP3/FLAC files in the first place and requires zero extra effort on my part. I also review the album/year/artist/genre/title data retrieved automatically by Audiograbber from FreeDB before "producing" (i.e. ripping, encoding, tagging) the results. Any spelling errors, or incorrect sequence of "The" etc., I just edit and correct on the Audiograbber CD/track info presented by Audiograbber before letting it do its thing.

The problem I have with autotaggers is they get their information from websites that depend on users to upload the information which is frequently (more like usually) inaccurate in some way, inconsistant in format, has missing info, etc. I autotag as a starting point but, more times than not, I wind up fixing the tags.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

The problem I have with autotaggers is they get their information from websites that depend on users to upload the information which is frequently (more like usually) inaccurate in some way, inconsistant in format, has missing info, etc. I autotag as a starting point but, more times than not, I wind up fixing the tags.

Precisely.

Audiograbber goes up to FreeDB (as opposed to Grace Note) to get whatever data might be up there, i.e. uploaded by other users (including myself) when a new CD is read that does not yet have prior information up there. Actually, even if there is data up there a user can upload duplicate info for that CD, which of course can be just as accurate or inaccurate as the existing entry(s). Or, you might just have a different set of naming conventions (e.g. "..., The" as I do) than whoever posted the CD info previously.

No matter. The retrieved FreeDB data is just the starting point, presented by Audiograbber on the display as the starting point. I look at it, and edit as appropriate (or leave it alone if it's acceptable as-is). Certainly much less work for me to have something pre-populated as a probably pretty close starting point, than to have to type in everything myself manually.

I then simply correct as needed using Audiograbber before letting it "produce", or if I forget to change something BEFORE I make the files I just use MP3Tag after the fact to do further editing directly to the tags AFTER I've made the files. Not a big deal.

There's nothing conceptually wrong with cloud-based databases that are user-maintained through contributions, which for the most part are quite accurate... though possibly not quite perfect, or at least not exactly how I would have spelled something or capitalized something or punctuated something. I don't expect perfection... I only want it to save me lots of time and trouble for the most part.

boohbah said:

say what you like but winamp uses gracenote for its autotag metadata, and its has only ever been unable to find one tracks info for me, it has never been incorrect and i have 380gb of music on a couple of drives.
i dont auto tag every album but i do use it often

I used to use a CD cataloguer that used Gracenote (instead of Freedb which Media Monkey uses) and it tended to be a bit more accurate than Freedb but there were many times it failed to have the metadata for a CD or the information it did have was inaccurate. It depends a lot on the genre and popularity of the track/album being searched.