Digital Music Frontier

So now that you have found some new music and amassed a terribly large collection of Mp3’s (in my case, 80 GB’s worth), the question becomes, how do you organize and listen to all those songs?

I have a few suggestions to help you organize all that data into something listenable.

Note: The first-first step when doing anything with your Mp3’s, should be to back them up. External hard drives are cheap and easy to use. Don’t be scared. Go get one and hook it up, before doing anything else. Also, I use iTunes, so many of my suggestions are iTunes-centric, and may or may not work with some other player/libraries.

Part I: Fix the tags - In most cases, you’re probably going to have some tag issues. You don’t have all the album artwork, your songs have incorrect track names, etc. This is probably the hardest part of organizing your collection. There really isn’t an easy fix to this problem. You will, at some point, have to go in there and make some changes. (Arrrgggghh!!!) There are, however, some ways to make this process a little less time consuming and frustrating.

Download Media Monkey - Now. I mean right now! Okay, this is only a solution for PC’s, but even if you use iTunes on your PC, download this. Trust me, it will make things a lot easier. You can run it in addition to using iTunes. With Media Monkey you can find files that need fixing a lot easier, as well as using the automatic track information lookup feature to grab all those missing album covers that iTunes couldn’t. Yay!

Tip: I used Media Monkey before moving all my songs over to my new iMac. If you’re planning on making the switch to Mac anytime soon, I recommend doing this first. And if you can’t use Media Monkey because you are already on a Mac, I will talk about some different ways to go about this in my next post. So stay tuned.

Get Rid of The “Unknown Artist” and “Track Number 2’s.” There are some programs (like MusicBrainz ) that will lookup track information based on the length of the song and any other information you may already have and then make a recommendation as to what song it thinks it is. Personally, I wouldn’t bother. If it isn’t already tagged, and you can’t tell right away what it needs to be changed to, it probably isn’t worth trying to figure it out. Save yourself some time and cut the cord. (I know, it’s hard. And you might even lose some good tunes, but remember that we’re trying to organize here.)

Tip: As I mentioned earlier, back up your Mp3’s. Not only will this protect you in the event of a catastrophe occurring, but it will also free you psychologically to make what might otherwise be difficult decisions.)

Part II (Optional): Let iTunes Organize Your Music Files - Since you have already backed up your music files (Yes?), and backed them up a second time, in a new folder, after having cut a few loose and fixed most of the tags, you can now feel secure in letting iTunes move some files around on your hard drive. This step isn’t absolutely necessary, but it does organize things a bit, and may help you out in the future. Go into the iTunes preferences section and select “Keep iTunes Music folder organized.” It might take a little while if you have a big collection.

Now’s a good time to breathe, shake out your fingers, and close your eyes for a minute. We’re getting there, I swear.

I’m going to stop here for now, but my next post will cover some more helpful (and hopefully less painful) steps including, “Using Smart Playlists,” “Using Mp3 Gain,” and “Editing Tags in iTunes.”

But if you just can’t wait, Lifehacker has some great ideas that might help you out.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re on a PC, there is a new way to get rid of that pesky iTunes DRM.