well, I've got a sony NWZ-E436F mp3 player, but my music were downloaded so only some of them can be searched by artist or title etc. most of them are in the folder "unknown" on the MP3 player.... On the player there is also a function of showing the album art... again, works on some of them but not others... on the one that works, its just a jpg in the folder with the songs... why then doesn't it work with the others? ? Is it to do with "tagging"? How can I organise my music properly??? Your help would be most appreciated!
What are you using for an audio manager? Most of them have tagging utilities. The sources are the file name or an internet database. Many rippers used to put the artist and album in the folder name and name the file the title. I like mp3tag as a general tagging utility. This is quite effective for collections of albums if the albums folders are origanized under the artist folder. You would open the artist folder grabbing everything on the artist. I select all files and tag them with the name I want them all to display. I have opted to go for consistance vs accuracy. If there are mutliple artist I put the other artists in the comments. This is sloppy but it makes it handy because the audio managers keep the tunes together. Then I fix any album tag an album at a time. After the artist and album are correct, you can use the source to fill in the titles. I can do a collection of 15 albums in less than an hour. mp3tag can do the file name source but I have had much more success with Media Monkey using the file names. It shows you want you will get in contrast to what you have. You can fiddle with your extract statement until you get the statement right.
You can use the excellent free utility TagScanner to fix the tagging on all your music files it works very well. To make the album art show up in most mp3 players, the album art jpeg needs to be embedded into each mp3 file you can easily do this in TagScanner too.
zonedout, try mp3tag. I like the UI of tagscanner but mp3tag is more powerful. I rairly use/recomend tagscanner any more.
Thanks I'll give it a try, I've been using TagScanner for a long time though so Im kinda used to it now, how long since u last tried it ? It maybe be better than it used to be since he's been regularly updating it. I tried Tag and Rename for a while but went back to TagScanner because I prefer its interface.
My current version is months old. I concur the UI is the best and maybe you figured out how to work through the sticky spots better than I. It is a bit slower than mp3tag, if I remember correctly. Where mp3tag rocks is: 1) your tunes are organized as artist/album/tune your artists are not uniform you open at the artist level you browse through the artist tags and click on the one you like the tag info is editable at the left you copy the good tag then block copy all the tunes paste the artist tag back and save I have done a huge set of over 1000 tunes in 10 minutes; the save took most of the time. 2) you have artist and album but nothing else click on autotag or something like that and select freedb as the source you specify search using artist and album you pick from a list of artist / albums you see all the tag info it will stuff into the tags you have some options of moving things around or only selecting some of the tags info. I have never used this feature because either it is good or it is wrong, so I do not know how well it works. You can do an album like this in about a minute if you take your time but pick a good album the first time. Sometimes you have several album+artist matches (the match list contains all artist matches and all album name matchs) and sometimes your pick comes up with the wrong album. This often happens with a US and UK releases of different albums with the same name. This can't be helped.
