How i organise my mp3's

[Novalak]

On another forum people asked how i organsie my mp3's. I typed how i do it so i thought i'd publish here

i am very anal when it comes to my mp3 collection

1. All my collection is in artist/album
2. All mp3's are labeled %track - %artist - %title
3. All mp3's are normalized to 92
4. All albums have album cover
5. All mp3's are tagged with the correct year, title, album, artist and genre (genre is in the eye of the beholder)
6. All covers are named Folder.jpg

Tools i use are...

Covers
    Album Art Downloader (http://sourceforge.net/projects/album-art/)
    Jukebox Cover Manager (http://home.online.no/~llindga)

Mp3 Tagging
    Tag And Rename (www.softpointer.com/tr.htm)

Normalization
    Mp3Gain (http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/)

Mp3 Management
    Helium Music Manager 2009 (www.helium-music-manager.com/)

Jukebox Program
     Freebox Version 4 (http://www.freeboxjukebox.com)

How i use this...

Jukebox cover manager goes through the directories and downloads walmart, buy, amazon and album exchange covers. I pick the one i want rename it to Folder.jpg and delete the rest

For the ones Jukebox Cover Manager does not find, i use Album Art Downloader, which i search manually across about 20 different sites

Once i have all the covers, i use tag and rename to correct tagging, i make sure all mp3's have the correct year, title, album, artist and genre (genre is in the eye of the beholder)...oh also i save the album cover inside the mp3. Once the tags are complete i rename all files to %track - %artist - %title

I then mp3 gain all mp3's to 92

Now they go into the collection for Freebox. I do use Helium Music Manager 2009 for doing searches, just incase i forgot to remove certain names ie (Bonus Track). I run this process every month or so...not all the time...

[kizer]

Mine is close to yours. I only do
Track number - title

Mine are all normalized to 89db only because I started and realized that the setting was default and could of changed it.

[Barcrest]

I have not normalised mine, i guess i really should.

[kizer]

Hahaha, that would take you years to do that.

[Sparky23]

LOL!  He said anal!     

I do mine pretty much exactly that way too.   

[goldie]

hi

so is it best to embed the cover into the actual mp3s and not bother using folder.jpg?

thanks

[fordman]

Wthin your Where music is stored>artist>album folder, have it structured like this:

c:\music
c:\music\artist
c:\music\artist\album1
c:\music\artist\album1\song1.mp3
c:\music\artist\album1\song2.mp3
c:\music\artist\album1\song3.mp3
c:\music\artist\album1\cover.jpg
c:\music\artist\album1\coversmall.jpg

c:\music
c:\music\Aerosmith
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\Dream On.mp3
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\Toys In The Attic.mp3
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\Love In An Elevator.mp3
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\cover.jpg
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\coversmall.jpg

All ID3 tags have Aerosmith as artist, Greatest Hits as Album and the proper name of the song. If you want to use E-Touch's genre filter, the genre on the ID3 tag has to be set as well.

I hope this helps! 

Fordman

[goldie]

cool thanks!

so would embedding the cover into the mp3 not work to well ? ive done that on a few of them so far whoops

what program is best for for resizing and what sizes for the cds cover images?

Thanks

[eist1]

ETouch Jukebox does not support embedded images, so the only way to get album art is to put an image in each album folder named cover.jpg. There have been a few mentions of some people having issues with MP3's that have art embedded in them but I have not had any issues. Also, by not using embedded images your MP's will be smaller.

[goldie]

hi

thats great thanks for the explanations!

is it okay to call it template as thats the default when im using tagandrename? im using 500 x 500 is this okay?

Thanks very much

[Barcrest]

YOu might be better having the track number 1st in the filename to keep the original album track order.

[goldie]

thats what im doing keeping the track number, what do i set the cover size to is 500 x 500 okay? and is it ok to leave this called folder.jpg?

[goldie]

and what do you do about cds that have multiple cds and are product by the same company, do you just just put them in a seperate folder?

[fordman]

You can call the .jpg anything you want as long as its named the same in every folder.

Example:

c:\Music\ACDC\Back In Black\acdc - 01 - song1.mp3
c:\Music\ACDC\Back In Black\cover.jpg   <--- Big album cover here. 400 X 400 recomended.
c:\Music\ACDC\Back In Black\coversmall.jpg   <--- small album cover here. 170 x 170 is a must.

c:\Music\ACDC\Highway To Hell\ACDC - 01 - song1.mp3
c:\Music\ACDC\Highway To Hell\cover.jpg
c:\Music\ACDC\Highway To Hell\coversmall.jpg

The cover.jpg is shown in the song selection menu.
the coversmall.jpg is shown on the main selection screen and help make the scrolling through albums alot quicker! I use Irfanview www.irfanview.com to resize the album art. Its FREE and easy to use.

By the way, have you checked out this tutorial? http://www.freeboxjukebox.com/Forum/index.php?topic=1404.0 It should answer most of your basic questions, although I dont mind helping!


Fordman

[Novalak]

I do this


c:\music
c:\music\artist
c:\music\artist\album1
c:\music\artist\album1\01 - artist - song1.mp3
c:\music\artist\album1\02 - artist - song2.mp3
c:\music\artist\album1\03 - artist - song3.mp3
c:\music\artist\album1\Folder.jpg
c:\music\artist\album1\coversmall.jpg

c:\music
c:\music\Aerosmith
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\01 - Aerosmith - Dream On.mp3
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\02 - Aerosmith - Toys In The Attic.mp3
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\03 - Aerosmith - Love In An Elevator.mp3
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\Folder.jpg
c:\music\Aerosmith\Greatest Hits\coversmall.jpg