I’ve spent a lot of time cleaning up my MP3 collection recently, and it’s come to remind me of a scene in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity. Rob, the obsessive music fan narrating the story, has just been dumped by his girlfriend. He proceeds to regain some control over one aspect of his life the only way he knows how: He reorganizes his record collection. This is no typical reorganization, mind you. Rob arranges his records by the date he bought them–a sort of personal music fandom biography.
Of course, now that music’s gone digital that “Great Reorganization” can be done in one click of the date-added tab. Sorting by genre, release year, artist name, or even track length is just as simple. Or at least it can be, provided your MP3 collection is in good shape to begin with.
Organizing a collection of records or CDs is time consuming, but at least it’s unambiguous. MP3s on the other hand, have metadata, file names, and directory structures. Unless you’ve ripped your entire music collection yourself using the same program, you’re likely to have some tracks that don’t fit your naming scheme or that don’t have all the correct data associated with them. This month, I’ll show you how to whip your music collection into shape, discussing tools to help you perform your own Great Reorganization.
Get It Together
ID3 is not a summer blockbuster movie title; it’s the most-used format for storing the additional data that goes with your digital audio files. The ID3 tags in a file store the year the album was produced, what genre the music belongs in, the track number, and a bunch of other metadata. Unfortunately, those tags have gone through several versions, and MP3 ripping programs don’t fill them out consistently. My collection at work, for example, has track numbers in a couple different formats, and the year field is blank for over half the tracks.
Super Tagging does come with a couple caveats. First, when a song appears on multiple albums, the tagger can get a little confused. For example, you’ll see different album art for tracks from the same album. To fix this, you need to click “More…” on the screen where you review the matches to pull up a list and choose the right one. You’ll have to spend some time tweaking the tagger’s recommendations, but it’s much quicker then entering all that data yourself. The second and more important caveat is that Super Tagging needs at least some information to get it started. If you’ve got a folder of files named “track1,” “track2,” “track3” without ID3 tags, you won’t get good results.
If, after all that, you’re up for some extra credit, check out a program called MP3Trim, which was recently featured in one of Laura Blackwell’s Download This columns. The program detects and removes big pockets of digital silence, like the ones inserted before hidden tracks at the end of a CD. It can also clean up extraneous ID3 tags and strange info found in MP3s. The Pro version even normalizes your songs so you don’t get big jumps in volume between tracks.
In Heavy Rotation
Not Your Grandmother’s Cardigans: Before you start hearing this one everywhere, I should mention that The Cardigans‘ new disc Long Gone Before Daylight is worth a listen.
Songs With Exceptional Lyrics: Normally, I don’t pay too much attention to lyrics. It’s a failing of mine, or perhaps a defense mechanism. Call it what you will, but if I’ve noticed the lyrics on a song, it’s likely that they’re either amazingly good or bad. For my favorite example of the former, check out Magnolia Electric Co. by Songs: Ohia. Track 1 contains the line “Mama here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws.” Yeah. It still gives me chills.