![]() ![]() I had them sorted into different folders. I didn’t want to lose that sorting. Two files could have the same name and/or they could have the same contents. Windows would have detected any duplicate filenames, if all my MP3s had been in the same folder. There were two ways of being duplicative. It was what I preferred, and I think it probably avoided some problems as I went along. First, I made sure that I didn’t have any duplicative files. This may not have been essential. My first step, in the present project, was to see what information the MP3 file tags contained already. These instructions come from a Windows 10 system the situation may be somewhat different in other versions of Windows, or in Linux. It would be wise to read through the following discussion before attempting to imitate it. In this post, as in that one, I would be making some mistakes. Note that I was not an expert in ExifTool the previous post merely described the steps I took, and the same was true here as well. jpg files, as that post did, before turning to this. The best way to follow that tutorial was perhaps to try working with some. The previous post provided something of a tutorial for those who weren’t familiar with that. Thus, in this post, I would be entering commands on the Windows command line. (It tentatively appeared that FFmpeg would have been a worthy possibility not considered in the previous post, but there did not seem to be as much FFmpeg-related material on the specific tasks I would be undertaking here.) So while this post discusses various topics that may be of interest to anyone attempting a similar file renaming and/or tag cleanup project, the focus here is on ExifTool.ĮxifTool was a command-line tool. Now, for this MP3 project, after a brief search for alternatives, I decided to stick with ExifTool. As detailed in that post, I looked at various tools and decided to use ExifTool. As suggested by a source cited in the final paragraphs, it was possible that ultimately I would get the best results from a paid rather than free service for this purpose.Ī year earlier, I had written a post working through various problems with tags for. The post also admits that I continued to learn about MusicBrainz and Picard throughout this effort, and that the fault may ultimately have been mine, insofar as I did not care enough about tags to master this subject and become adept in the use of these tools.Īfter the efforts described below, as indicated in that final section, I decided to wipe out the files that I had changed, restore my backup, and postpone this effort for a few years, in hopes that MusicBrainz, Picard, or some other tool or database would develop, by then, a more reliable, comprehensive, and automated solution. The final section of the post concludes that the MusicBrainz database contains errors, and may require some refined familiarity to use effectively. In summary, this post explores the use of ExifTool and Excel to obtain and analyze MP3 tags, and the use of MusicBrainz Picard to automatically or semi-automatically revise tags for a large number of MP3s. This post describes the steps I took in those directions. In the process, I thought I might also try to clean up relevant tags in the. ![]() Make sure to enable Options > Tags > Write tags to files if you want the tags to be updated.I had a bunch of MP3 files, with names in this format: “Beatles–Yesterday.mp3.” I wanted to add the year to the filename, like this: “Beatles–Yesterday (1965).mp3” - using, perhaps, what I had previously learned about putting metadata (a/k/a “tags”) into filenames. If you don’t want to change your folder hierarchy and file names, disable both “Move files when saving” and “Rename files when saving”. Whether Picard creates folders and how files and folders are named is controlled by the settings in Options > File naming. Of course you can also keep the files on the left pane and manually edit the tags, but Picard’s main purpose is to update the tags using data from MusicBrainz. For details please see the following documentation: ![]() The recommended workflow is to first cluster the files, the try “Lookup” and use “Scan” for the difficult cases. To get the files to the right you have to match them to a MusicBrainz release, either by using the Lookup, Scan actions or manually via searching. You can use the “Cluster” button to organize the files by album. Those are by default in the “Unclustered files” category. That is just how Picard organizes the files in its user interface: On the left you get files you loaded into Picard that have not yet been matched to a release n MusicBrainz. The “Unclustered files” you see is not a folder on your hard disk and Picard won’t create it. ![]()
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