Organising a music collection
Also guessing missing metadata
January 3, 2020 — June 14, 2021
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 in bulk, en masse.
Still, no one agrees on how to do this, possibly because of the brief hegemony of iTunes, which did an adequate job of this before we realised that Apple was going to deprecate it.
There are many nerd feelings about this.
1 Linux tempo detection
This is not super hard, but a little esoteric. 🚧TODO🚧 clarify the following options
2 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.
3 beets
beets. A nerdy option that can do anything but 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.
- supports acoustic fingerprinting!
- Also analysing via echonest. Why yes, I would like to be able to index my music by “danceability”, “energy”, “liveness”, “loudness”, “speechiness”, and bpm, whatever they are, why not?
- …and key detection
- sync metadata to iTunes or Amarok.
- Basic GUIs via web or MPD
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.
4 Keyfinder
Keyfinder (macOS) is another analysis engine. Plush lookin’ (former) student project that classifies things by musical key, not to mention other intermediate details; it can visualize chord structures, melodies and key changes too. Open-source. Free. There is also a command-line wrapper for easy bulk analysis.
5 beatunes
beatunes (USD35) is a GUI for tune analysis and automated playlisting with optional iTunes integration. It includes machine listening and online database-backed tunes identification techniques. It even has an API so you can load your own script in Java/Jython/JavaScript.
6 Mp3tag
mp3tag (Windows) has a similar feature set.
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 do the job based on the Python media metadata library mutagen.
11 Mediarage
A collection of powerful tools for media enthusiasts with a Macintosh using Mac OS X. Media Rage can read and write information stored in MP3, AAC/MP4, FLAC, AIFF, WAVE, BWF, and Ogg Vorbis audio files as well as EXIF (read only) tags in digital images. Media Rage can assist you in cataloguing, organising, sorting, and updating thousands of audio files with ease. (USD29.95)
I suspect it to be discontinued.
12 Managing and indexing samples
See sample management.