Organising a music collection

Also guessing missing metadata

January 3, 2020 — February 10, 2025

computers are awful
faster pussycat
making things
music
search
signal processing
standards

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Figure 1

I make music and DJ, and I would like to bulk edit and search my media using my own criteria, especially when it comes to dealing with the crappy media metadata that other artists give me with their tracks. In general, I am interested in managing the affiliated artwork and various media artefacts, en masse.

Still, no one agrees on how to do this, possibly because of the brief hegemony of iTunes, which did an adequate job before we realised that Apple was going to deprecate it in favour of cloud services.

There are many nerd feelings about this.

1 Most DJ software is also a media manager these days

See DJ software.

2 Lexicon

Lexicon (USD17/month) is the most full-features music organiser (“DJ Library Management”) AFAICT and beloved of my geekier DJ friends.

3 Musicbrainz Picard

The flagship Musicbrainz client is Picard, which is a quirky but effective online-DB-based analyser (i.e. AFAICT it fingerprints your music and looks it up online rather than analysing it using local machine-listening). If you are working with music that comes from real albums, this works pretty well. I think there are some plugins and things? I confess I gave up on it because the UI is baffling and it does not seem to care about DJ-relevent metadata like key and bpm.

4 beets

beets. A nerdy option that can do anything, not necessarily well and might require hacking.

A Python library: “The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogues your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.” In particular, it organises and files music. Free, in every sense.

A GUI cousin of beets is ex falso, the metadata-managing end of Quod Libet, the media player. OTOH, Ex Falso doesn’t seem to organise files for you.

5 Keyfinder

Keyfinder (macOS) is another analysis engine. It’s a plush-lookin’ former student project that categorises things by musical key, and it can visualise chord structures, melodies, and key changes too. Open-source. Free. There is also a command-line wrapper for easy bulk analysis. It forms the analysis engine for Mixx and beets.

6 beatunes

beatunes (USD35) is a GUI for tune analysis and automated playlisting with optional iTunes integration. It includes machine listening and online database-backed tune identification techniques. It even has an API so you can load your script in Java/Jython/JavaScript.

I own Beatunes, and can report that it was amazing but is getting updated decreasingly frequently, and has been left behind by more advanced alternatives. Probably abandonware-ish.

7 Mediamonkey

All-singing, all-dancing media manager/player/playlister (Windows). (Freemium, USD25)

8 Easytag

Easytag I think a Linux/Windows equivalent of the Windows-only mp3tag?

EasyTAG is a utility for viewing and editing tags for MP3, MP2, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and Opus, MP4/AAC, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio and WavPack files. Its simple and nice GTK+ interface makes tagging easier under GNU/Linux or Windows.

Currently, EasyTAG supports the following:

  • view, edit, write tags of MP3, MP2 files (ID3 tag with pictures), FLAC files (FLAC Vorbis tag), Ogg Vorbis, Speex and Opus files (Ogg Vorbis tag), MP4/AAC (MP4/AAC tag), MusePack, Monkey’s Audio and WavPack files (APE tag)
  • can edit more tag fields: Title, Artist, Album, Disc Album, Year, Track Number, Genre, Comment, Composer, Original Artist/Performer, Copyright, URL and Encoder name
  • auto tagging: parse filename and directory to complete automatically the fields (using masks)
  • ability to rename files and directories from the tag (using masks) or by loading a text file
  • process selected files of the selected directory
  • ability to browse subdirectories
  • recursion for tagging, removing, renaming, saving…

9 Yate

“Yate was developed for people who are serious about tagging and organising their audio files. The application was designed from the ground up for Mac users. It is a 100% Cocoa written application and uses its own tagging library. Yate will tag mp3, m4a, AIFF, wav, dsf and FLAC files.

Yate has a long list of features, including an innovative scripting system called actions. The app also supports integration with Discogs, MusicBrainz, AcoustID and iTunes.”

USD20.

10 DIY

Minimal Python script to organise music files based on the Python media metadata library mutagen.

11 Mp3tag

mp3tag (Windows) has a similar feature set.

11.1 Linux tempo detection

This is not super hard, but a little esoteric. 🚧TODO🚧 clarify the following options:

12 Managing and indexing samples

See sample management.