Rationalising a big music collection??? Any progs that will do it safely??

[Fanum]

I have a very messy music collection.

The folder (on a dedicated hard drive for films and music) is running at a bit over 450GB

When I've ripped any of my old CDs, Vinyl or just added downloaded stuff, I've just dumped it in there, so I have many many tracks, many folders that are the contents of a CD or downloaded collection, and lots of crap that's just called 'Track1, track2, track3' etc etc......

I've also got quite a few different formats in that folder, from low bitrate MP3 files that came from ripping vinyl on an early USB vinly interface thingy, up to lots of flac files.


This means that if I create a play list, I can end up with stuff that sounds absolutely perfect with my custom settings on a 7:1 speaker system, with my own ear's preferences tweaked up on bass etc, but then the next track can sound utterly totally shit because it's in a different format and way too trebbly (made up word alert) or bassy.

I rather doubt that there is anything that will help, but I thought I'd ask......I suspect I'm going to have to separate the different formats out and pick playlists only from within those, with their own equaliser settings per group

Is there anything that will consolidate my music, re-categorise it and remove all the extraneous info, maybe even add detail from an online DB, do the whole job to a degree where it at least improves the total mess I have at the moment?

I have a terrabyte or so I can use as backup still, so don't mind experimenting with stuff, and if I can find and delete genuine duplicated copies (only by hash file comparison, not by name etc......I want to keep the remixes of stuff that might have the same name but are in fact very different tracks) that'd be good too.



Is such a Utopia possible?

Is there such a prog?



PS I have searched for it, and have tried 3 or 4 progs that claimed to do roughly what I need, but none came close to doing it really.
I'm sure I'm far from being the only person with this problem, so there must be a decent, tested answer

 

[cookie]

dunno about the EQ issue, but i've tried a few programs to bulk edit and download metadata, even paid for a couple, and they've all been rubbish.

IME they run a very real risk of screwing up what's already there and making things worse

 

[Clive]

Throw them at http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard

The "Scan" facility (uses an "Audio fingerprint") can be useful if they are a decent rip and can't be identified e.g. when missing filename or tags.

EDIT: If you use WMP I find that the "Classic Disc Numbers - Reverts to pre-NGS (aka "Classic") behaviour by adding (disc X: discTitle) to release titles into separate tags (discnumber and discsubtitle). " plugin is quite useful.

 

[Madamot]

I used a program called Tag&Rename. It can download album metadata by either manual searching or scanning a CD. It then automatically renames the tracks once you're happy and even adds album art.
I used it to sort about 120GB of music. Took a while, but a fantastic program for me.
Once I had everything sorted, I then paid Apple £21 for a years subscription to iTunes Match. This let me match about 75% of my collection and download the poor quality stuff at 256kbps file sizes from Apples servers.
Tag&Rename is one of only 2 windows program I still run on my Mac. Worked great for me. Might be worth a look.

 

[Micky]

Well I can't help ya Bill, but would just like to say Hi to Madamot

Welcome to UKGSer, thanks for chipping in with your help for Bill (Fanum) and well done for coming straight in as a subscriber

 

[chad]

Well I can't help ya Bill, but would just like to say Hi to Madamot

Welcome to UKGSer, thanks for chipping in with your help for Bill (Fanum) and well done for coming straight in as a subscriber

ill drink to that

 

[Madamot]

Thanks for that guys, nice to be here!

 

[Coolcarbon]

What did you end up doing, you sorted now Bill..?