My Music Collection doesnt work well with Freebox

[cadis12]

I would be in love if there was some way to set up Freebox so it supports my music collection.  My music is set up as follows:

Music A/Artist Name/Album Name/.mp3's
Music B/Artist Name/Album Name/.mp3's
and so on......

For me it would be AWESOME if Freebox used the Artist Name and Album Name when displaying the music instead of using the mp3 tags.  My collection is SO SCREWED UP in Freebox when it builds the database via the tags.  Plus there is often blank albums cause some of my stuff does not have tags at all. 
If there is a way to build the FreeBox database so it lists by folder names PLEASE let me know.  I like the look and features of Freebox a lot but this database structing is a pain for me. 

[eist1]

It's alot of work, but getting the ID3 tags on your music is the best way to have everything work in Freebox. Without tags, not only the artist and album name won't work, but genre and year lookups won't work either. And these are some of the best features of Freebox. There are many of us on here that have felt the pain you're feeling, but in the end it is worth it. There are many programs out there that can do alot of this automatically, although the info is not 100% correct at least it's a start. I'm sure others on here can give you an idea of how they updated their libraries, I know one software I've used is Tag & Rename, or Zortam and a ghood free program to add album art is Album Cover Art Downloader 1.6. It would probably be less work for you to tag all of your music, than it would be for Barry to add that feature (if it could even be added). But good luck and welcome to the forum.

[kizer]

This is what I've used for nearly all my albums. Its work, but man its well worth it. I've ran that program on 1300+ ablums. Of course I do them one at a time just to make sure it doesn't screw things up.

http://www.magic-tagger.com/eng/index.php

[draginit]

and i myself am a huge tag and rename fan.... thanks to barry for suggesting it.

- http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm

-hmmm, so many choices.. but as they said, it is way worth it in the end to have your music organized and tagged properly. and makes it extremely easier to add new music to your collection later on.

[Barcrest]

Right if you tags are really really bad you can start off with this...

http://www.musicip.com/mixer/index.jsp

Music IP Mixer. If you run that on your library it tries to tag them all by checking your files against a database of know files.

WARNING it will alter all the tags on the files you point it at.

You might be better making a small test subset and letting it work on those. Once it's done it's thing you will then want to use something like tag & Rename (30 trial is fully functional) to check it all looks as it should and tidy up anything not quite right.

WARNING it will alter all the tags on the files you point it at.

In tag & Rename you can get the tags from amazon as well as long as you know the artist and album name. Click the blue tick to highlight all the files in that album then go to tools and select get infrom from amazon. It will fill in the artist and album boxes if those parts are known otherwise fill them in and let it get the info. It will offer a few choices hopefully pick the one that matches your album then click get info. It lets you preview the infor before applying and will also save the album cover as a jpg to the folder for you.

Basically you have to go through this. I know it's a pain but you could do it a bit at a time and slowly move your albums across to a tagged folder like i did. Eventually you will be fully tagged up and working fine.

[cadis12]

Wow....although I am disappointed with your responses it sure does sound like the consensus is to have the mp3's tagged properly.  I guess I will start the long journey of tagging.  This should be fun.  Let me good grab a case of beer....I think this is going to take awhile!

Thank you for your input guys!  Looking forward to getting everything set up on my newly built juke box so people can come over and try it out. 

I'll try to keep you informed on how it goes. 

[Barcrest]

You might also want to post up some pics in the show us your jukes secion

[kremmit]

I'm always pushing Media Monkey for stuff like this.  Best all-around music software I've found. 

If your stuff is all in it's proper folders as you describe, the tagging process isn't going to be so bad.  Media Monkey (and Tag & Rename, and several other programs), can use that folder/filename structure to generate the tag data.  As long as you're confident that your folder/filename structure is consistent across your whole library, you should be able to convert the whole thing pretty much automatically.

[cadis12]

Thanks again guys.  I will be posting pics soon.  As with my Mame arcade machine, I am discovering that after I finished building my jukebox the software component can take just as much time setting up as building. 

Last night i tried a few of the programs mentioned above on small sample of my music collection.  I was pretty impressed!  Now I just need to decide which program to actually purchase since the trial versions will not cut it for my large collection.  I have about 20-30% wma files.  I am finding out that some of these programs are strictly for Mp3's only.  Also, I like how some of them pull in the album art too!  Too cool! 

So, I guess I am going to have to take the plunge and risk buying something that I hope I will like.  I still have to purchase FreeBox too!   

[Barcrest]

You will want to use media monkey to convert those WMA's to mp3's... Frebbox doesn't read all WMA tags correctly due the to the many different ways those tags are made up.

[cadis12]

Is it me or is media monkey not that great at batch taging your music collection? 

[Barcrest]

Kermit is the media monkey guy i just used it to convert a tone of WMA's to mp3 

[draginit]

yea, i gave up on my WMA's a long time ago! but now that ive seen this im glad i saved them all in a seperate folder. i had no idea i could convert them. actually im still not sure how the quality will be..64 vs 320. wma's sound like ass anyways IMO. but im gonna check it out.

[kremmit]

But of course, removing DRM would be naughty, and we can't condone that around here.  It's a public board, you know.   


re:  Batch Tagging your collection:
How are you going about it?  How is your collection organized right now?  Maybe I can help.

As for the WMA -> MP3 conversion, you can set it to produce mp3s that sound good as long as your wmas sound good, but it can't make them better.  GIGO.

[cadis12]

Well, for some reason I decided to purchase the Zortam product.  I am starting the long journey of tagging tomorrow night.  If you don't hear from me in awhile you'll know what I am doing.  I'll be back with pics.  Wish me luck!  I've got a freaking huge collection of music to go through!