Organizing and tagging music (mp3) collection

[jared]

Quick question for you guys.

I'm in the process of trying to organize my giant MP3 collection and I'm trying to find the fastest/easiest/most efficient way to do it.

I used to use ID3 Tagit (http://www.id3-tagit.de/), and it's still my favorite, but it isn't very automated and takes a good amount of time to get everything in order.

Initially, I was very anal about how my collection was organized. I only would collect full albums (no single mp3s) and everything was organized as
/Artist Name/Album Name/01 - Artist Name - Song Title.mp3
/Artist Name/Album Name/cover.jpg
... with all the correct ID3 tags set and album art embedded in the songs.

Now however, I've given up on being able to keep up with that by hand. I have about ~60gbs that is properly organized and filed away, but over the years I've fallen behind and now I have another 80gbs that is unsorted and in typical torrent/newsgroups naming schemes.

So, with that said, what's the easiest way to take my 150gb music collection and get things organized.

Ideally I'd like to have the proper ID3 info and album art put in each track and rename the files into some sort of decent name.

I know iTunes for example can do this, and it could be what I end up going with. I just wanted to ask and see what my options are since I don't have the time or patience to maintain my collection by hand any more.

cheers. :jared:

[Black Hawk]

MusicBrainz (http://musicbrainz.org/)

[patrickcabenjamin]

Tag&Rename? (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.html)

[troll]

Tag&Rename? (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.html)

Dead link...

[troll]

I also use Tag and Rename, works great. Still a lot of manual cleanup though...

It's that damn iTunes that brought all this on... :)
I didn't give a rat's about "Proper ID3" till I got that iPod...

But you have to be diligent about it with each new addition, it's the only way...

Nothing I like better than to dump a discography into iTunes and have every song as it's own album... Then there are those two songs that you have checked the tags on a dozen times but still will not go where they belong.... Prune all the tags off the set recreate from scratch and boom, all slides into place... Go figure...

[Thrax]

MusicBrainz (http://musicbrainz.org/)

[patrickcabenjamin]

Here's a link to a forum about it, a lot of people are saying musicbrainz (http://ask.metafilter.com/46685/Organizing-My-Music-MP3s)

[ardichoke]

Old thread, I know... but I figured I'd put in my 2 cents. I swear by this little program I found quite a long time ago. It doesn't look like it's been developed much lately but honestly I don't think it needs to be

http://www.cyberpunk.gr/tgf/

The Godfather.... as far as Windows goes this is the swiss-army knife of music organizing.

On Linux I like EasyTag

[chrisWhite]

Nice, I'm working on doing this right now, been just using iTunes but it's a pain the rear.

[ardichoke]

The GodFather takes a little getting used to at first. Once you get how it works down though you can really do some powerful things with it.