Managing Your Music
Music Management basics
Everybody loves music(well almost everyone i know) and we all have loads of mp3s and wma's on our computers.Sometimes managing a lot of files becomes very difficult especially when you don't have the right information about the track
For example suppose I have a song by the beatles say 'yesterday'.Now the file name of the song is 02-beatles(say).Now whenever I search for the file in my searchbox(locally ofcourse!) I would obviously search for 'yesterday'.But I wont get the results because of the name of the file being such.
Lets take another example,if I open the same file(02-beatles) in windows media player or itunes or any other player it may show some other data.Like it may also show the album name,the year recorded so and so.Why???
The answer lies in ID3 tags which are used to store metadata in your mp3 files(yes! in the file itself).This means that you can store the album name,artist name,album art,year,genre,comments etc.This allows you to organize your music in a better way.
Well the best part about this is you get to see the album art while listening to your music(works with almost all music players these days).I have given an example below of how well this ID3 tagging helps in organizing music and enhancing a music lover's experience
Well now you have seen the importance of music management lets see how to do it
Managing the music
First and most important step is putting the music files in particular folders.Most of us have a habit of putting every song we have in a common folder called mp3 or music or whatever which is a very bad habit because although the media player will organize files but while selecting/deleting individual files we may find it very time consuming
The best way to do this is first create a folder called 'My Music' in any partition which is having ample space.Then suppose you have songs from beatles,bob dylan and eric clapton.Then in the 'My music' folder you created ,create 3 folders called Beatles Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton.Put the songs of the artists in their respective folders.Some people do prefer naming folders like A,B,C,D..which is a good method but not as simple,easy and organized as the above one.So this will help you organize your music better and save lots of your time.
Adding Album art and other metadata
Well this can be done in many ways but I have explained the best ones here
The first way is very simple:Using Windows Media Player(10 or 11 both are great).Then add the files to the library by monitoring your My Music folders(add volume levelling if you have some extra time).Then right click on any song or album and click on Find album info.Then if the artist,album and song data are correct it will find the proper album art.If the song info is stored incorrectly you can manually edit the data by right clicking on any song and clicking on advanced tag editor.Same can be done for albums too.In WMP11 you can drag and drop album arts which is very great.WMP10 doesn't display album art by default for each track but you can view it by clicking on Now Playing and changing the visualization to Album art.But I still think WMP11 is way better than WMP10.
Note that you can download artwork for free at albumart.org
The Problem with the above method is Windows media player(any version) stores the album art in separate folders which are located on the same folder on which music is stored.This does not sound problematic but when you play the same files on itunes or ipod or any portable device or even another music player(like winamp) it wont show the metadata as it is not stored in the mp3 files.Fortunately we have an alternative to this problem.
Now comes i-tunes which has a very good ID3 tag editor and you can download the artwork very easily but the problem is that you need an apple account(requires credit card no) for downloading album art.So I guess this option is ruled out.
So finally(thank god!) we have come to great and a one easy way solution to this problem...
There is a great software(free) for managing ID3 tags(though may are there but I found this as the best and easy to use).The software is called Media Monkey which embeds ID3 tags directly to the file.Its a music player like WMP11 and i-tunes but many great features which I wont discuss here you can check the site here.I'll directly come to the point
Steps for ID3 editing using MediaMonkey
1)Download and install MediaMonkey from the link :Download
2)Now on the top toolbar click on file and then click on Add/Rescan tracks to library OR simply press INS key on your keyboard
3)Check the folders where you have stored your music files and click OK
4)Now that the tracks are added on the left pane expand library and you'll see the locations you had selected before.Click on the location where you store your songs and then click on All and the right pane will now show you the whole library
5)So far so good,now sort the library by artist name/album name by clicking on the corresponding in on the right pane
6)Now the ID3 tag and album artwork downloading part...Connect to the internet and then select a set of songs which you think belong to same album (use Shift click)
7)Right click and select "Auto Tag from Amazon" OR press Crtl+L on your keyboard and voila you are presented with all the data on the song(if the song/artist and album name are correct).Click on auto tag and then done!
8)If at all you don't find it correctly try searching in the bar at the top of the window with the correct artist and album name.Switch to Amazon.uk/.fr for international search.The amazon artwork provision is sufficient enough and it also contains artwork for some popular hindi albums too! Enjoy!
9)Music Monkey embeds the artwork and other metadata to the file so even if you view the same file on i-tunes/i-pod you'll see the artwork and other metadata
Now That You're done
1)Now you have a very organized library of music
2)Your songs have all the info including artwork
3)You can see the artwork and other metadata on your i-pod or mp3 player(if color) or ur music edition phone too!!
4)Revive the magic of looking at the cd-cover while listening to the album
5)Save a lot of time as well as get quality music
6)Search/Edit/Delete/Burn any track easily
7)Show-off your collection to friends instead of showing them mp3 files
8)And Finally curse me/praise me for writing such a long article ;-)