Most computer users have collected music for some time, and chance is that the music came from different sources. Those sources may have included music CDs that have been ripped into mp3 format, Internet radio recordings, P2P downloads or trades with family members and friends.

The different sources often make use of different naming and tagging conventions, and programs like The Crab make sure that this mess is sorted into a unified format.

the crab

The Crab, unlike other music collection organizers, concentrates on music albums only. The Open Source program comes with access to various music data sources, including the popular databases Amazon or Discogs. The concentration on albums makes it not the best program for processing large music collections, as it can only process one album at a time.

Albums are loaded into the program by clicking on Open and selecting the folder the music album is stored in. The Crab will automatically search the available music databases to find the album and its information. Search results are displayed, with each listing the album’s name, artist or band, and links to retrieve additional information and to select the meta tags for the music album loaded into The Crab.

A click on the more link displays all tracks of the selected album in the database, which can be used to compare the tracks with the ones stored on the computer.

The information are automatically added to the album that has been loaded into the program. They are however not saved until the Apply button is pressed. It is possible to edit the information presented before doing so.

music collection

Songs that do not belong in the album can be removed from it easily in the main interface. The Crab will automatically tag the mp3 files, create a playlist file and rename the mp3 files.

The settings offer options to prevent some of the features from being executed. Here it is for instance possible to disable the renaming of files, or change the naming templates. The Crab supports not only mp3 files but also ogg, flac, wav and wma.

The Open Source tool can be handy to process single albums in an efficient fashion. It would have been nice if the program would offer a batch mode to process multiple music albums at once.

The Crab is available for download at the Sourceforge project page.

The first method is a search that can be used to find exact matches for artists, songs, albums and so on. Youtube has one of the largest collections of music videos and it usually is pretty easy to find the music that you are looking for. Music that has been discovered can be added to playlists which can be saved after a free account registration at the official website. This is a great way of creating lots of playlists that cover all the songs and genres that the user likes.

The second option that is offered by Muziic is pre-generated playlists that can be accessed from the sidebar of the music player. Those playlists are sorted by genre. About 30 or so genres are available which do contain one or multiple playlists that can be selected for playback.

The video going along with the song can be displayed in the music player if that is something that the user wants to view as well while listening to the song. Besides the playlists that are offered users can import so called channels that have been created by other Muziic users into the application. Channels are also categorized in genres making it easy to pick a suitable one.

The music player is quite interesting as it uses a concept similar to cloud computing to provide access to a large collection of music to users. Users benefit from this by being able to search and access that large database and by saving disk space as virtually no local disk space is required. The only possible drawbacks are the quality of the songs which are definitely not high (but acceptable) quality and the chance that songs vanish if the videos get deleted on Youtube.

The interface does look a bit overladen at first. It is driven by four tabs at the top that let you transfer filenames to tags, tags to filenames, multi tag files and query the online CDDDB database for tags. The tag to filename option is very handy if the files are already properly tagged but the filenames are not in the format that you want them to be. Five Replacement shortcuts exist that can be applied, not only in this menu though. The five entries are artist, album, number, title and year. It is therefor possible to create a filename that would contain the track number, artist and title.

Other mandatory options are to replace spaces with _ and to change the capitalization of the filenames in a number of ways. Multiple files can be selected at once but it normally does not make sense to select more than one album. Toe Tag is directory driven which means that only the files of one directory are displayed at a time. If you want to change tags or filenames of your music collection you are in for some manual labor.

The biggest missing function in my opinion is a way to automatically pull information from an online database and apply it to all of the selected mp3 files. Since this is a very early version this feature might be implemented in a later version.

Other important features are already available. Covers can be added to the files, the volume can be normalized which is a very nice feature. The tags are saved in ID3 format.

That is, until I decided to level the volume for all mp3 files and get rid of this problem. I’m performing the same operation for every new mp3 file that I add to my collection before I add it. This ensures that I can always enjoy the same volume level on all of my mp3 files.

The best program in my experience is MP3 Gain. Usage is straightforward. Select files or folders and add them to MP3 Gain. Once they have been added you click on Track Analysis. MP3 Gain analyzed all selected tracks and displays information about them in the program interface.

Once the analysis has been completed you simply click on Track Gain to level the volume of all analyzed tracks. The volume will be adjusted on all tracks. Make sure you update your mp3 collection on your mp3 player as well.

Once installed you should see the plugin icon running in your system tray. After that you can access your Winamp collection from any Internet browser using the following url: http://www.orb.com/winamp/index.html ; just enter the username and password that you have chosen during registration. Using the Internet website is pretty straight forward. The left side displays the directory structure of your my music folder. You can access anything by simply clicking on the albums or tracks. Clicking on a track starts the playback of that track.

found: zeropaid