MP3 QUESTION. What's a good program to rename and catalog .mp3 files...

[SKKY]

...according to the supper-tagging information? I used to use Music Match, but since Yahoo bought it, it's garbage. Can anyone recommend a good program for doing this?

[Duer 157099]

1. I've never used Music Match, so won't know how this compares, but

I use two programs to get my mp3 naming conventions all straightened out:

http://www.mp3tag.de/ (mp3tag)

http://www.den4b.com/ (ReNamer)

They are both small, excellent utilities, and while the first might be able to do everything you need, I know for sure that the second one is limited (I wanted to batch convert the id3 title tag to pull from the file name) which is why I needed to get the first.

These won't do any cataloging, but will do every sort of batch renaming (including id3 tags) that you might be able to think of.

[SKKY]

2. Sweet! Thanks much for the info!

:hi:

[Duer 157099]

3. Forgot to mention that they are both FREE

which makes it even better!

But both are truly excellent and are so powerful you can do almost any kind of batch renaming you can imagine.

I'll be curious to hear what you decide to use for cataloging -- I'm going to be getting to that point soon.

[Duer 157099]

4. Since you brought this up, now I'm thinking more about it

I have recently started listening to alot of audiobooks, so these are new-ish issues for me. I'm finding that I can't really decide on the best set of rules for naming. I like to use the lowest-tech denominator in terms of portable players, so even if they have a built-in function, I'd still rather that the file name/id3 tags be all consistent and workable.

What I have found is that sometimes even if the file name is ok, one player I use takes the id3 title tag as it's primary source, and those can be very generic "Disk 1 Track 1" so that there are multiples and the system keeps wanting to overwrite the extras (if that makes sense).

So, I'm renaming everything so that the file name and the id3 title tag are identical, and so that they will all be unique ("booktitle 01 of 75" for example).

Am I making this harder than necessary? Has anyone come up with a foolproof system they use for naming, that works for every device?

The way I'm doing it now, is I drag everything into ReNamer and make all the file names consistent -- then drag them into mp3tag and use the "Convert" function to convert the id3 title tag to what the file name is. And then adjust any other misc fields (genre, author, etc). This way, when I import into my portable (non-ipod -- will never use such a proprietary platform) player, all is well.

[SKKY]

5. What I really miss is Music Match...

...I would look up the Tag for the song, or a group of songs, and then rename them all to "Artist - Album - Song" It was very easy, and I could do the entire Prince catalog in about 20 minutes. Something like that is what I really need. Luckily, the vast majority of my stuff is already do, so what I'm doing now are the onesies and twosies that were left straggling.