HELP: Organizing huge collections of music files

[forrie]

I've been collecting MP3s and music since the 90s. I have been working to consolidate a lot of these collections some of which are older iTunes backups, my own stuff, etc. The risk of duplicates is high, but the programs I've seen that purport to help organize don't really do that -- for example, they're not using file signatures, etc.

Anyone know of a good solution to help me make sense of all these thousands of Music (and some video) files on MacOS? I'm running Big Sur.

Thanks!

 

[HDFan]

Where are the files? iTunes normally maintains its files in Music/iTunes Media/Music/Artist Name/Album name.

 

[AxiomaticRubric]

You need Doug's Scripts: https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php

He has hundreds of Apple Scripts you can use for different tasks. These are easy to plug into iTunes. Instructions are provided on Doug's web site. Among these scripts are duplicate song finders but he has others you may find useful for easy collection maintenance.

Keep in mind that some of the scripts no longer work in Big Sur. Where this is the case it will be noted, but you shouldn't have much trouble finding what you need.

 

[forrie]

Some of my archives are older iTunes structures; others, just directories of lots of MP3s.

As there are years of files here, almost certainly there will be duplicates -- or, even different versions of the same song, such as lower and higher bitrates.

Some may not have proper ID tags, too.

It's a challenge!

 

[Partron22]

First thing, sort your stuff by file type, or size, and copy all the videos elsewhere. Delete the original, scattered files.
That reduces the dimensionality of the problem, which makes things easier.
Oh, yes. This is bad advice if you mean music videos. I was thinking of movies.

 

[forrie]

What I may end up having to do is pool ALL my music into one location, including my Apple purchases, and start all over again with iTunes (importing it). I prefer to have my content sorted by "date added" but I've found that to be (in the past) inconsistent in iTunes.

 

[sracer]

What I may end up having to do is pool ALL my music into one location, including my Apple purchases, and start all over again with iTunes (importing it). I prefer to have my content sorted by "date added" but I've found that to be (in the past) inconsistent in iTunes.

The struggle is real.

My music collection is in excess of 30,000 tracks. They're rips of CDs, vinyl records, cassettes, and 8-Track tapes. The thing that I found most helpful for me was to use two methods for organizing the collection.

First, is to leverage the operating system's filesystem to physically organize the files. How you want to do that is whatever makes sense for you. A hierarchy involved folders for artists and albums should factor into that. (so yes, your idea of pooling all of the files into one location is going to be helpful to you)

The second, is to use metadata tag information (for logically organizing the files). Standardize on one metadata format (I chose ID3v2.3) and use a good and flexible tagger to go through the process of tagging each file.

Back-in-the-day I owned Microsoft Zune devices (still have my Zune HD) and they were notorious for being strict with regard to how it used metadata tags for organizing tracks in the desktop software and on the device. That got me into the habit of being meticulous about tagging.

 

[lostom]

Take a look at Song Kong.
paid app, maybe free trial, V.good.

 

[forrie]

What would also be useful is a program that can detect duplicates /and/ determine the bitrates -- for example, you have two copies of song X, but copy Y is a higher bitrate, so you'd want to keep that.

 

[mk313]

I'm probably not the right person to ask as I don't listen to much music, but I do buy some for when I go running & there tend to be a lot of repeat songs in various compilations.

If it were me, I'd import everything into one iTunes file & then go from there. If you are importing a lot of different iTunes folders, IIRC, it tells you if you are entering duplicate songs & do you want to skip those. Then once everything is into one iTunes file, you can use the 'Show Duplicate Items' selection from the menubar to create a large list of all duplicates. From there, you can select the various attributes of the files you want to see (bitrates, etc) and pretty easily see which copy of a file you want to keep & delete all the rest. Obviously if you have thousands of duplicates, this process won't work, but that's how I'd go about it if it were my collection

 

[lostom]

What would also be useful is a program that can detect duplicates /and/ determine the bitrates -- for example, you have two copies of song X, but copy Y is a higher bitrate, so you'd want to keep that.

take a look at Jaikoz.

Jaikoz Audio Tagger

Jaikoz is a powerful, yet easy-to-use audio tag editor. It has been built from the ground up to support large music collections

www.jthink.net

this may be a solution, it’s pretty powerful.

 

[forrie]

I wonder if there is a program like this that uses audio fingerprinting so that it can take improperly tagged or untagged audio and grant proper media tags?

 

[forrie]

take a look at Jaikoz.

Jaikoz Audio Tagger

Jaikoz is a powerful, yet easy-to-use audio tag editor. It has been built from the ground up to support large music collections

www.jthink.net

this may be a solution, it’s pretty powerful.

Thanks for this reference! I will have a look.

 

[forrie]

Someone referred me to mp3tag, too. I've read some reviews of this and Jaikoz, people complaining about the UI (eye roll), I just want to accurately tag my data, I don't care about the other features.

 

[forrie]

I'm loading up one of the programs in Trial mode... I have a lot more than I imagined: 23K songs! LOL

 

[AdamInKent]

I’ve used MediaMonkey for years to manage my library for use with Sonos, iPhones and my PC. I see it’s also available on MacOS so I intend to use it when I buy my first Mac (one of the new iMacs). It is able to identify duplicates by title or content:

MediaMonkey 3 Help

The standard version is free. If you have a large colletion and want to be able to do things like transcoding when copying music to devices then I recommend the paid version.

 

[forrie]

MediaMonkey has been a Windows/Andriod application -- I don't see MacOS on their website, but it looks like a good product.

 

[forrie]

From MediaMonkey Support:

This is planned for the future, but the current focus is MediaMonkey for Windows 5 and MediaMonkey for Android 2.0. With MediaMonkey 5 work has begone on a cross-platform version, but it will still be a while before we can release a MacOS version.

Sincerely,


Martin Warning


the MediaMonkey Team

 

[AdamInKent]

From MediaMonkey Support:

This is planned for the future, but the current focus is MediaMonkey for Windows 5 and MediaMonkey for Android 2.0. With MediaMonkey 5 work has begone on a cross-platform version, but it will still be a while before we can release a MacOS version.

Sincerely,


Martin Warning


the MediaMonkey Team

Oh, that’s disappointing 😯. Sorry for the misleading post: for some reason I was under the impression that it could run on MacOS. So it looks like I am going to have to learn how to use iTunes. (Fortunately, I don’t have any unwanted duplicates, but it looks as though I am going to have to convert lots of FLAC files to ALAC.)