Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[luker0]

So long story short: iTunes is a POS and messed up the tags for thousands of my MP3 when I originally encoded.  A specific version had a broken MP3 tag editor it appears and this was not found by me till I started using other tools/devices to play these MP3s.

Currently in my MC Library under Audio --> Artists --> Unassigned I can see all the files that have improper tags.  I want to get these updated properly so that MC can use the tags properly, but more importantly other devices can display the information correctly (Android phone and my Chev truck primarily).

So far I have tried the following:
1) update tags in MC using Library Tools --> Look up track info from online database.  This has been mostly unsuccessful as if I'm lucky 2-3 tracks per album come back with valid info, and even then the data is inconsistent, e.g. Genre is different for the songs that come back.  There was also a "bug" in my portable install that didn't update the file tags themselves, which has been fixed in newer version, but basically caused me to redo a bunch of tag updates.
2) re-rip the CD.  This has been almost 100% successful but is time consuming and I likely have a couple of hundred discs to do.
3) use an external MP3 tag editor which is maybe 80% successful as it uses more mainstream data sources (discogs, amazon, etc)

If anyone has any other suggestions to make this less painful that would be great.

[blgentry]

Is the information you want in *any* of the tags?  Or are all of the tags garbage?

Do the file and folder names contain any metadata you can use?  (Album, Artist, Song title, etc)

Brian.

[luker0]

Is the information you want in *any* of the tags?  Or are all of the tags garbage?

Do the file and folder names contain any metadata you can use?  (Album, Artist, Song title, etc)

Brian.

Tags are complete garbage and reported as "Bad MP3 Tag" in the external editor.

For the most part all the files are in a structure like the following:
Artist --> Album -->  ##-track name.mp3

It's not 100% as some of the tracks in a compilation or various artists folder at the root.

[blgentry]

^ Well that file structure is good news!

You can use the "fill properties from filename" feature to populate tags based on the file and folder structure.

Highlight some files > (right click) > Library Tools > Fill properties from filename

Edit the directory and filename templates and you'll see the changes that MC will make based upon your template.  Adjust it until you get it right. 

You can run this on an album or two to start and see how it works.  If it works well, you can run it on hundreds or thousands of files at once.  I'd recommend starting small and working your way up from there.

Good luck!

Brian.

[luker0]

Awesome, will give this a try.