Organize Your Music
Having an organized music collection has many benefits. It allows me to make better playlists, take advantage of iTunes’ Genius features, and find any song very quickly. This was not an easy thing to do and it does require a great deal of patience. It took me about 3 months to finish organizing my music collection. This includes making sure every song is named correctly, has embedded album artwork and has a genre if available. Here’s how I did it.
The first thing I did was made a backup copy of my music. I did this just in case I messed something up and couldn’t go back. I highly recommend doing this if you have the space. Once you have the backup, you’ll want to go get Mp3Tag. This is a free program that I used to “tag” my music (this is a Windows only program. If anybody knows a Mac equivalent, please mention it in the comments). The reason it is called “tagging” is because every MP3 file has an ID3 tag. This ID3 tag contains all of the information about the MP3 file including artist, album, title, genre, etc.
Once Mp3tag is installed you should know be able to right click on each of the album folders in your MP3 collection and select Mp3tag from the menu. It will load the current album into Mp3tag and you’ll then be able modify the songs in that album. My favorite feature of this program is the ability to scan your album and find all of the ID3 information from Amazon.com’s music store. This will correctly label your files and embed the album art into your files. To get a better idea of how to use the program, check out the author’s website.
This is a very time consuming process but it was definitely worth it. There are some pieces of software out there that claim they can do this automatically but I did not have good luck with them. I was able to make sure everything was perfect and now when I get a new album, it doesn’t take long to properly tag it.
Even the people that I share my music with appreciate how organized my collection is. Feel free to ask any questions via my Twitter or Email. If anybody has any other ideas for doing in a simpler way, please share in the comments.
