gHacks technology news » mp3 collection http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Diagnose Your Mp3 Collection With MP3 Diag http://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/20/diagnose-your-mp3-collection-with-mp3-diag/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/20/diagnose-your-mp3-collection-with-mp3-diag/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:17:55 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=15562 microsoft windowsThe motivation to create MP3 Diag was born out of frustration with existing solutions to diagnose and tag a mp3 collection properly. The developer did a thorough analysis of many existing mp3 taggers and came to the conclusion that many used non-standard ways of storing data. These errors were still tolerated by most mp3 players but could cause lockups or even crashes on others. MP3 Diag can analyse a mp3 collection and perform the following operations on each mp3 file:

  • Adding / fixing track info, including album art; information can be retrieved from several sources: Internet, clipboard, file name, local files, and (obviously) keyboard
  • Correcting files that show incorrect song duration
  • Correcting files in which the player cannot seek correctly
  • Converting characters for non-English names
  • Adding composer name to the artist field, for players that don’t handle the composer field
  • Renaming files based on their fields
  • Changing word case for track info

mp3 diag

MP3 Diag makes it easy to identify and fix issues with mp3 files. It can also be used to make changes to the mp3 files. Issues that can be detected by the software program are for example:

  • broken tags / headers / audio
  • duplicate tags / headers
  • incorrect placement of tags / headers (ID3V2, ID3V1, LAME, Xing, …)
  • low quality audio
  • missing VBR header
  • missing track info / cover art
  • broken track info / cover art
  • missing normalization data
  • character encoding issues (for languages other than English)

The user needs to select one or multiple folders that contain mp3 files at the beginning. The program will automatically scan and analyze all mp3 files and display its findings in the main program interface. Each mp3 file is handled separately. It is possible to fix issues individually which could take a while depending on the size of the mp3 collection and the amount of errors found or to create a custom list that is fixing multiple errors (if they exist) at the same time.

mp3 tag editor

Mp3 Diag comes with a tag editor that can query online databases like MusicBrainz or Discogs for information about selected songs or albums. Other nice to have features are a file renamer, sorting options, mp3 backups before making changes and extensive options.

Mp3 Diag is an excellent tool to scan and fix a mp3 collection. The open source tool is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux computer systems.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/20/diagnose-your-mp3-collection-with-mp3-diag/feed/ 13 Add Album art to your mp3 collection http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/26/add-album-art-to-your-mp3-collection/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/26/add-album-art-to-your-mp3-collection/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:25:46 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/26/add-album-art-to-your-mp3-collection/ Many mp3 players support album art, showing it to the user in the display. Several software players support it as well, for instance the Itunes Control plugin that I wrote about earlier this week. I don’t know a single application however that can process a entire music library automatically and add album art to it.

Apple’s iTunes does it almost. You can select an option in iTunes to download album art of all selected songs using the iTunes store. That downloads lots of artworks, the main problem however is that this artwork is not added to the mp3 file directly but to a database only. If you use another application like Windows Media Player or XBMC the artwork will not be displayed.

That means that I won’t be using iTunes to add album art to my mp3 collection. The best way that I discovered is to use Media Monkey. It’s semi-automatic. You select all mp3s of an album, right-click the selection and select Auto Tag From Web or press CTRL + L instead.

album art

It can take some time if you have a large collection of mp3 files but it is definitely worth it. The process does not only add album art to the mp3 collection but also tags the files properly. It takes about 10 seconds per album.

I sorted my collection by album in Media Monkey at the beginning and began to work the mp3 collection from top to bottom selecting all songs of an album each time.

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