Organizing my digital music
Now that I have my digital photo collection under control, I had to tackle my music. I usually ripp my Jazz CDs with Exact Audio Copy so that I can listen to them wherever I go. The problem here is that I have to edit the tags manually and that takes some time. Inspired by my photo organizing work I did the last weeks, I went out googling around for a similar tool set I had put together for my picture.
In the past, I tried a tool that indexes you music (like Picasa for photos) and I gave that a shot first. It is known as Mediamonkey and the latest version is really very nice. It works with my new Vista PC and I can skin it so that it blends into my desktop nicely. The free version does almost everything I need to do right now, but there is also a Pro version that will set you back $19.95, but this one has a few really interesting features, like automatic library updates, unlimited mp3 encoding, virtual CD previews and advanced filter. With the free version, you can synchronize iPods or mp3 players, manages playlists, convert between formats, rip CDs, level volume while you play your music and does the most important thing, it manages your entire collection! You could even get it to work with Winamp plugins if you need to.
While I was looking for this, I stumbled upon a nice batch renamer and tag editor, Tagscanner is very similar to what FotoAlbum 6 does for my picture collection, but for ID3 tags. You could select several files and and set tags for all of them at once, like album title or artist. Once you got all the tags with the right data, you could rename the files using them the way you want. It uses metavariables to do that, just like Siren for my pictures. It has a ton of other features that complement very nicely Mediamonkey.
Now I’m ready to get my music organized!
