Rating your music in iTunes easily, but thoroughly

Have you wanted to rate your mp3 collection in iTunes, but never got round to it? It's another one of those all consuming tasks that just seems too unwieldy for a 25,000 song collection. It would take ages.

I have been on a little odyssey to clean up my collection to make it easier to listen to. After all, there's no point having lots of music and letting it all fester. I realised, that after finding that iTunes was my answer for a media player and MediaMonkey was my answer for my tagging needs, that I also needed to put in the leg work on rating my music before it would become user friendly.

Obviously, this is a very personal thing as no one will have the same likes and dislikes as anyone else on the planet. Therefore, firstly you need to come up with your rating strategy. Here's mine:

5 stars - absolute favourite tune and I will never get tired of it
4 stars - a good tune that gets rises above the rest, but isn't one of those that I absolutely adore
3 stars - my neutral setting: all of these songs are neither like or dislike much
2 stars - these are songs that I don't really like but can tolerate if they came on
1 star - I hate these songs and never want to hear them again, but can't get rid of them as they are part of an album or compilation
No stars - either new songs that need tagging or music that needs deleting

Once the rating system is in place, I set every single track (assuming you haven't started yet) to 3 stars. This is the neutral setting, and in any case, will form the bulk of the collection.

The next step is the long and arduous journey through the entire collection. I recently committed myself to listening to my entire music library, trackable with iTunes playcount feature. This is going to take an absolute age and I had already listened to a significant amount of music before I decided to go ahead and rate tracks. Furthermore, I wasn't about to sit at my computer and rate music as each track passed. I work in an office and listen on my iPhone there. At home, we broadcast music with AirTunes. So I had an inherent problem as I was never listening to music directly in iTunes.

Fortunately, this problem drove me to find a solution that fitted my listening habits and how to rate tracks. Simply put, the iPhone is actually an excellent tool for rating music on the fly and iTunes is an excellent way of rating music retrospectively. Also, the crux of my process is that every track starts at a neutral position; the idea being that this cuts down on the amount of rating that needs to be performed.

Here's what I do…

Whilst listening to music on my iPhone at work
If I am listening to music on my iPhone, I keep it on the iPod application, specifically on the track listing screen. You access this by pressing the button at the top right when you're on the album art:

The top of this track listing screen gives you the ability to rate the current track by simply pressing the number of stars you require:

Keeping your iPhone on this area whilst listening to an album gives you quick and easy access to the rating system. If you keep the iPhone plugged into the power, you'll also save the need to unlock each time. This doesn't disrupt work too much, since I only need to rate a track if it's better or worse than neutral. Otherwise, I just let it play.

Whilst listening to music at home using AirTunes
Similarly to listening on my iPhone, I can rate tracks directly from my iPhone at home by using the excellent Remote app and the rather spiffing AirTunes.

It works in exactly the same way (the interface is identical) and only requires rating when a track is better or worse than neutral.

Catching up on the music I already listened to and was fresh in my memory
I had listened to a considerable amount of music which I hadn't rated, which meant doing it retrospectively. The best way to do this, if the music was easy enough to remember, was to use iTunes.

I simply placed a rating column in the track listing as so:

Then whenever you highlight a track you can simply tag the amount of stars you require:

You can do this in bulk very quickly if you are still familiar with the music and track names you have listened to. I caught up on half of what I had already listened to in about 3 minutes.

Catching up on the music I already listened to, but wasn't fresh in my memory
On the flipside, there were a number of compilation albums where I wasn't familiar with the track names or the music and it required listening again to choose a rating.

What I found here was that it doesn't actually take a long time to ascertain whether you like a track or not. You don't need to listen to the whole thing. A simple way to do this is to scrub through the track, stopping to listen about 5 times for a few seconds. This gives enough time to work out what the track is and whether you recall it enough to deem it a four or five star, or a two or one star. Otherwise, it remains at three and you don't need to do anything, since this is neutral and it is already rated as such.

I found it easiest to dump a group of tracks on to my iPhone and go through albums. After a few tracks, you get used to the process or scrubbing, listening then either going to the next track or flipping the screen to rate it. I did slip a few times and activate the Genius function, but it was easy enough to remedy. I think I could get through about 10 to 15 tracks a minute this way, which meant I quickly caught up on my backlog.

No doubt, you could just as easily do this in iTunes - I just found that my iPhone suited the circumstance for me.

Granted, I have only really just started on my rating odyssey, but at least I now have a system in place and it will only take as long as it takes me to go through my collection - not any longer. I also caught up on everything I had already listened to over the last couple of months in less than an hour.

If anyone has any tips and hints on how they go about this, I would be very interested to hear about it. Any pieces of software that make this even easier or your strategies for rating your music would be of particular interest.

Adopting iTunes for the uninitiated

Have you grown tired of Windows Media Player's clunkiness, MediaMonkey's interface or [insert your music software here]'s something or other? I was and decided to go and give iTunes a try. I was afraid of letting iTunes rule my collection (see my previous post on how I got there), but have been happily using it ever since I got over this.

In terms of how I went about adopting iTunes, here are the main steps I went through.

1. Read this iLounge article

This is all the research you need to do as it gives a great overview on how iTunes handles your files and where data is stored. I found it invaluable in getting my head round my personal transfer, even though it was adopting iTunes and not moving my library.

2. Back up your entire collection
Just go ahead and copy your current music folder somewhere safe. You never know, you might not like the change and rue the day you read this article. Always backup your music library so that you never have to weep into your pillow. Also, this is a good time to make sure all of your music files are in the same place as it means you won't miss importing any into iTunes when we get to that step.

3. Decide where your library is going to be (don't move any tracks yet!)
All your music is going to be in one folder, so decide where that's going to be. I chose to put everything on a portable external hard drive as I wanted to move about with it. I also chose this so as I wanted two identical collections (see my post on syncing two iTunes libraries). The important thing I learnt from the iLounge article was that wherever the library is, it need to have the same drive letter and path inside that drive (therefore, both my computers access the library in the X: drive). One other thing of note is that during the transition, you will need room for two versions of your entire collection, so you might need to use an external drive at some point if you are gigabyte-challenged. For this very reason, I would also suggest that you don't make the new library location the same as your previous one as you are eventually going to delete the old one. Having them in the same folder could get confusing.

4. Point iTunes at root folder
Open iTunes and navigate to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced. Change the 'iTunes Music folder location' to your chosen drive and folder in step 3.

5. Set iTunes to manage your library
On the same tab, check the boxes near the top called 'Keep iTunes Music folder organized' and 'Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library'.

6. Let iTunes help you sort your compilations
Whilst you're still in the Preferences window, check the box named 'Group compilations when browsing' if you have a lot of compilation and soundtrack albums as this will make navigating your library a lot easier. See this post for how to let iTunes know which tracks are part of a compilation.

7. Let iTunes move your music for you
When I say move, this is really a copy, so don't worry too much (in any case, you should have a backup from step 2 as well). This is also why I warned you in step 3 that you will need twice the space your collection takes up - don't ignore this or the process will stall on you. Navigate to File -> Add Folder to Library. Choose the root folder that has all your pre-iTunes tracks in it (the folder you backed up in step 2).

8. Leave iTunes to build your library
Press 'OK' and then leave iTunes to run. Depending on the size of your collection, this could take a while. Remember, iTunes is copying your entire collection into the new library location, creating a new folder taxonomy based on artist and renaming each track. If you have tens of tracks, check your email; if you have hundreds, make a cuppa char; if you have thousands, order a pizza and watch a movie; if you have tens or hundreds of thousands, go to bed.

9. Check it has all worked
Be a pedant and check everything. Have a browse through iTunes and have a look in the new folder to see the automated taxonomy. The best check is to compare the folder sizes of the old and new. They should be pretty much identical, unless you have given iTunes the go ahead to convert (not something I am covering here). My system has always been to convert to mp3 first (see this post on how I do this), so I never had a file format issue.

10. Delete your old folder
Providing everything was successful, you now have two versions of your music, plus a backup. Go ahead and delete the original version to free up the space, unless you want two backups.

10. Sort compilations tags
iTunes will now have organized your library the Apple way. You have to accept this from now on. Before you look at the iTunes folder and panic that there are squillions of artists, you need to do the next step of the compilation tagging process. It's a manual activity, but is well worth it in my opinion, and it doesn't take too long. I have already written a post detailing how it's done, so have a look here.

Congratulations! You're pretty much there now. You are now an iTunes user. The next steps (for me at least) were to add lyrics (see this post) and create some playlists (see this post for some ideas). I will post in the future about using the grouping tag and smart playlists, which I think are relevant here.

You may also be interested in how to deal with new music, how to perform everyday tagging on your new tracks, and making sure your tags are consistent.

Automatic mp3 genre tagging: is it possible?

Genres are a tricky business and crawling the web has shown that listeners either love or hate them. Right now, I haven't formed a final opinion on whether I like them or not and if they're worthwhile, but I haven't fully committed to using them on my collection yet.

However, I have done a fair bit of research on the matter, and that's what I want to lay out here as it may save some of you a lot of time to get to where I am (still without a solution, but a lot wiser nonetheless). Apologies for the length of this particular diatribe, but it can't be made any more succinct.

My previous posts on mp3 tagging have focused on processes, software and automated ways of beating mp3s and tags into shape. After processing my entire collection, I sat back and saw that two things that were still missing:

• Consistent genres
• Ratings

I am not dealing with ratings here - there's a whole post in itself.

I wanted to get my genres into shape, not because of my crusade against badly tagged mp3s, but because they have the potential to help hugely in coordinating my listening and building playlists of similar types of music. This would be a necessary step in reaching my mp3 nirvana.

As a first foray into genre tags, I thought I would start by looking for an automatic method for populating the field. It made sense to me that with all the tagging software and mp3 databases out there, there should be a successful solution. Not so. However, here's what I did find...

POTENTIAL GENRE SOURCES

There are a number of good databases out there that genre population could come from. I thought these ones could do the trick if there were a way of getting the data into an ID3 tag:

• Gracenote (formerly CDDB)
• Freedb
• Discogs
• iTunes store
• Last.fm
• Allmusic

I did a test to see which was best, looking at the legendary Led Zeppelin as a case study. I thought there was sufficient ambiguity in how to classify their music to generate quite a varied set of results. And I like them quite a lot. And I'm English.

So following the order of my bullet points above, I set about going through each of these sources starting with the old CDDB, Gracenote. This one did not help me much. I couldn't find a way of seeing the genre, even when I chose an album (Led Zeppelin I):

Hence, I decided this was not a great database for genres. I guess this is fine since it is mainly designed as a database of track info, not a method for organising individual music libraries, so I'll let it off.

Freedb wasn't a hell of a lot better than Gracenote. I found that I could only get a genre returned by disc, not by artist or track:

Also, it was not consistent between different instances of the same disc. Under the same album (Led Zep I), I got rock, blues, misc and even reggae! The only reggae-ish track I can think that the Zep did was D'yer Maker - not on this album. So, not too impressed here, but again, this is more a database of track info rather than for structuring your music in any way.

Discogs is a nice site, but once again, I could only get results returned by disc rather than artist or track. However, I noted that it was split into first Genre and then Style:

I was pretty happy with the simple set of results it returned as well - Rock as a genre, then split into Styles of Classic Rock and Blues Rock. Not bad.

I was sure the iTunes store wouldn't disappoint too much, and sure enough it did an alright job, returning quite a few applicable genres:

However, the more genres that get returned, you start thinking "well, which one do I choose for my tracks". This was starting to look like a very complicated idea, hence why no one has put together a bulletproof method or database yet.

Next was the mighty Last.fm. On first impressions, it looked promising, with 5 applicable results returned as 'tags':

However, on clicking the 'See more…' link, I was shocked to find a massive cloud of tags. It was apparent that this was heavily influenced by all the users tagging tracks and creating a muddled mass of genre information:

'awesome', 'dance', 'favs', 'indie pop', 'punk', 'yeah'? Give me a break…
So, suffice to say, I was not too impressed with Last.fm as a tagging source for genres.

Finally I came to Allmusic, sometimes known as AMG (All Music Guide). This was quite impressive. Firstly, artists are broken down into a Genre and then subdivided into Styles, just like Discogs had gone for. Good and applicable ones too:

Allmusic went one step further, though and put together 'Moods' and 'Themes' as well. Although there were a lot of moods, I began to think that these could well be useful in generating playlists. These are the moods and themes for the Led Zep I album:

Furthermore, just take a look at this link to see the pretty comprehensive breakdown of their Pop/Rock styles.

I thought that I could use the Genre, Styles and Moods in my ID3 tags as follows:

• AMG Genre maps to ID3 Genre (there is only one)
• AMG Styles can go into the the ID3 Comments, with underscores instead of spaces and separated by a space or a period (I am currently using Comments for artist bios, but I have realised I never look at these)
• AMG Moods can go into the ID3 Custom 1 field in MediaMonkey for the moment

Therefore, I think I might have found a winner in Allmusic. Now If only I could find a way to get this data into my mp3 tags without any huge manual effort…

AUTOMATIC GENRE POPULATION

I searched for quite some time on this, so I think I can safely say without any doubt that there is no way to automatically populate your mp3 genre tags directly from Allmusic.

It seems as there used to be a solution called the Allmusic ID3 Tag Fixer by KRKeegan, but it seems as though Allmusic changed their terms of service back in 2007 which has prevented anyone from using the data. Humbug!

I also found that the well respected Mp3tag used to have Allmusic as one of its web sources framework (meaning you could select it as a tagging source), but with the terms of service this stopped working in 2007 as well.

Lastly, I found a post about a script that a chap called Steegy had written for MediaMonkey called Web Sources Tagger that could access Allmusic which has since disappeared.

How I wish I had a time machine…

So my plans were scuppered at the first hurdle. So I looked at what else was available. I found that Mp3tag could use amazon, discogs and freedb as web sources, but having seen what Allmusic had to offer, I decided not to proceed as I would always be left wanting.

I went a bit further and found another Media Monkey Script by Trixmoto called 'Last.fm genre script' and gave it a shot for a laugh. It did exactly what it was meant to, but if you cast your eyes up to the Last.fm results above, you can imagine the mess my genres were left in. The idea of this was to get something consistent going.

I think I ended up with many, many more genres than I had originally - 1047 in all, including such gems as...

• Brutal Death Metal With Nordic Influence And Guest Vocalist Satan
• Candy Ravers Rules The Universe
• Existential Saturdays
• Have Other Music by This Artist
• I-feel-oh-so-classy-music
• Jangly American Guitar Pop
• Plunderphonics
• Sing Yer Wee Heart Out

…and those are just some of the clean ones!

A great script, though - if only Trixmoto could apply it to Allmusi. Unfortunately it seems as though our hands are tied in terms of access to the data. My collection remains tagged like this, but I'm not bothered as I don't use the genres yet anyway - I need a solution.

So, still no success, and my dream of automatically tagging my genres was quickly fading [if I have missed anything, I would love to know about it, so please comment with your feedback below].

Hence, I set about seeing if anyone had any guidelines on how to do it manually without too much bother...

MANUAL GENRE POPULATION

I went trawling the Internet again to see what I could drag up. The most useful thing I found was a great post by Daniel R Stout called 'Organizing iTunes: Simplify your genre list'.

I won't repeat everything that Daniel says here - you can read his blog - but as a synopsis here are the main points:

• Less genres are better
• Have a basic list to choose from
• Use smart playslists to filer music on genre to sturcture your listening
  

He also suggests a quick way of manually getting your genres into shape:

"It’s an easy thing to change the genre on many songs. Create a playlist that sorts by existing genre data. You can find out what genres are in your music library by doing a Get Info on any song and then clicking the dropdown menu for the genre of that song. So create a playlist that grabs some genres that fit under, say, Alternative & Punk. Then highlight a bunch of songs together and do a Get Info and change the genre for all of those songs. In my case, it took less than an hour to get my 20,000 song library into shape."

He then provides a list of 25 basic genres to start with. Which he further breaks down into sub-genres, if needed. This does end up as one long list which can be a little difficult to digest, so I have created a handy table in Excel that you can find here. Apologies for the Excel pastel colours.

This should be a useful lookup tool for anyone wanting to go ahead and manually tag their genres. I may go ahead and adopt this method of genre tagging, but I think it would take me longer than the hour suggested for 20,000 tracks. I just need to sum up the courage.

I would also like to credit the commenters (Lucas, amazon_blonde and Nick) for this post of mine on organising your iTunes library. There are some useful insights and another list of genres from Lucas that may suit you better if you are going the manual route.

THE FINAL ANALYSIS

As I think I have shown, there are no bulletproof ways to automatically tag your genres consistently. At least not yet.

Also, genres are a very personal thing - one person's 'Prog Rock' is another person's 'Cheesy Listening'. Hence it may be best to just take the plunge and manually tag them with something bespoke that simply works for you. The problem is that this takes time; and time is a resource many of us are not blessed with.

Another point to consider is how much detail do you put into it? Or, to coin a phrase, what is your 'depth of genre'? Is it best to have 25 basic all-encompassing genres, or to go to town like the Allmusic system and have a genre broken down into multiple styles and moods?

You can also argue over whether individual tracks should have different genres, or if genres should be grouped by album or artist. I think that single track genres would be best if you are going the detailed route, but artist grouped genres would be superior for a 25 genre system.

Lastly, one might put it out there that genre tagging is a complete waste of time and will only bring me closer to my own 'Stairway to Heaven'.

Personally, I think this post is using too may of my little grey cells and I'm going to sit on it for a while and see what debate it generates. Over to you...

Lyrics in iTunes and on your iPhone - the easy way

UPDATE 5th August 2009: it seems as though the music industry has thwarted us again for no particular reason. They have imposed a ban on the iTunes Lyrics Importer application detailed in this post. Now, when you run the plugin, you get the following returned in your lyrics tag in place of the actual lyrics:

Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions from some of the major music publishers we can no longer return lyrics through the LyricWiki API (where this application gets some or all of its lyrics).

The lyrics for this song can be found at the following URL:
http://lyricwiki.org/xxxxxxx

(Please note: this is not the fault of the developer who created this application, but is a restriction imposed by the music publishers themselves.)

A real shame. Here is the original post, nonetheless:

I read somewhere that the iPhone can display song lyrics if they're included in your ID3 tag. I thought 'I gotta get me some of that' and went about finding out the simplest method.

One thing I had never done with my ID3 tagging was to add lyrics. I thought it would be a time consuming and manual process. I also thought the benefit was outweighed by the tedium of getting it done. Hence I never thought about it until I heard about the iPhone's function. Now I can take music with me and see lyrics whilst I'm mobile [cue images of the tippopotamus singing along to music in the middle of a mall, or not, as the case may be].

This is what it looks like on the iPhone when you tap the album art during music playback:

This process assumes you have no lyrics included at all to start off with. Once you have some lyrics, you then need to be able to find all the tracks which don't have lyrics included. This covers all that as well.

Firstly, you need to download yourself a copy of the simple, yet effective iTunes Lyrics Importer (or iLyrics as it is also known).

Here's the process for getting your library all lyric'ed up…

1. Ensure you have iTunes running

2. Fire up iTunes Lyrics Importer

3. Highlight the all the tracks you want to search for lyrics

4. Press 'Get Lyrics' on the iTunes Lyrics Importer window

I would strongly suggest ticking the box called 'Update Automatically', especially if you have a lot of files to go through - otherwise it will ask you to confirm every track. If you already have some lyrics in your library, leave 'Overwrite' unchecked. I checked it as I had none and wanted to start completely from scratch.

5. Wait while the program accesses LyricWiki and finds if your tracks have lyrics there. If they are included, the software adds them to the Lyrics area in your ID3 tag

For my 25,000 track collection, I left it going overnight and it ran perfectly. A lot of the obscure songs did not get populated, but that was a foregone conclusion. Just over 1000 tracks out of about 25,000 did not get lyrics tagged to them, which is, frankly, amazing. Especially when you realise a lot of them are instrumental tracks.

Now, if you add new music to your library, after following the new music protocol described here and correctly tagging your tracks as shown here, you can simply pick the 'Recently Added' automatic playlist in iTunes and run steps 3, 4 and 5 above.

If you want to re-check the LyricWiki database after some time has elapsed to see if you can get any more lyrics for those tracks it missed first time round, you need to create a playlist of all the tracks without lyrics. Thankfully, that is easy using this iTunes for Windows script from the 'Everything iTunes' website.

Simply download the *.js file and place it somewhere (I put it under my chosen iTunes music folder).

Double click on the file you downloaded and it creates a new playlist in itunes (i.e. it magically appears) called 'NoLyrics'.

This playlist contains every track without the lyrics section of the ID3 tag populated. Hence you can just run steps 3, 4 and 5 of the process above to run a LyricWiki database check again.

You may find that you don't need the lyrics that much, but to be honest, the process is so simple that you might as well give it a shot.

MediaMonkey scripts to make your mp3 tags consistent

Hi there all you Lifehacker visitors! Thanks for popping into the Tippopotamus.
If you enjoy this post, you might also like this one on getting lyrics into iTunes the easy way and this one on how to process new music.
I [will be posting later this week] have now posted on music genre tagging and how it can be used to structure your listening.

I hate it when tags don't match up. For example, depending on where your tag data has come from you could end up with a host of different artist names:

• Guns and Roses
• Guns n Roses
• Guns N Roses
• Guns 'n' Roses
• Guns 'n Roses
• gunsnroses
• GnR
• GnFR

There are a plethora of different things that can be wrong with tags - missing track numbers, no album art, volumes and disc numbers - the list goes on. These bother me, but may not irk you. If you are like me, correcting this sort of mess is something that would require a lot of manual tagging work, since finding the files is difficult and correcting them is a labourious process.

Or so I thought.

MediaMonkey comes with a few built-in functions and scripts that can help you to tame your mp3 collection. However, the real power comes in the scripts nice people have written to solve tagging problems. Here follows a synopsis of what I have found useful…

1. Built-in MediaMonkey Features

Firstly, you can search for missing data very easily. Under Library -> 'Files to Edit'...

...you can find folders that will display all tracks with:

• Unknown Title
• Unknown Artist
• Unknown Album
• Unknown Genre
• Unknown Year
• Unknown Rating
• Unknown Album Art

These are great for finding tracks and albums that need to be tagged. Follow my previous post that shows you how to tag tracks using MediaMonkey to get these all sorted.

2. Built-in MediaMonkey Scripts

Next, MediaMonkey has a couple of built-in scripts that can help with some menial tasks. These are found under Tools -> Scripts.

Auto-increment Track #s

This one takes the tracks you have highlighted in the main window and gives you the opportunity to number the tracks in chronological order, starting at a track number you specify.

This is useful when the tag editor your have used to automatically tag your mp3 album has used a different version (e.g. US to UK) which has bonus tracks missing or tracks in a different order. This script helps sort this out without having to try and find the UK version of the album or re-numbering the files manually.

Swap Artist and Title

I find that automatic tagging sometimes uses data that has the artist and track title inverted. This script simply swaps them around. Believe me, I wish I had found this one earlier as I have wasted enough of my life swapping these manually.

3. User Created MediaMonkey Scripts and Plug-ins

The real powerhouses for getting your collection tagged nicely are these three scripts that MediaMonkey fans with the skills-to-pay-the-bills have written specifically to help out. There are many more out there, but after extensive searching, these are the ones I found to be the best:

'Find Missing The' script by Trixmoto

This will search through all the tracks you have in the main window (I make sure I have my whole collection displayed) and finds where you have artists with 'The' in front in some cases and without in others. It also looks for those that have a comma and The (i.e. ', The') as a suffix. It brings up a confirmation box before you have to accept the changes. This was useful for bands like The Beatles which I had in three different ways ('The Beatles', 'Beatles' and 'Beatles, The').

A word of caution, though - it also looked through the track title fields as well and where a song name matched an artist that needed changing, it also wanted to change the track title (e.g. 'The Jam' as a band and the track 'Jam' by Michael Jackson resulted in the track being renamed 'The Jam'. this required a little bit of remedial work to correct these track names, but a lot less than correcting all the missing 'The's in my collection.

The detailed description can be found here and the download can be found here.

'Case and Leading Zero Fixer plug-in by Bex

This plug-in is hugely useful in getting your upper-case and lower-case use in sync with each other. I used it mainly for its secondary function, namely adding or removing leading zeroes to the track number. It was by far the simplest way to do this and made everything look nicer in iTunes. Once installed, this one is found under Tools -> Options -> Library -> Case & Leading Zero Fixer.

A full guide on its use can be found in the MediaMonkey forums here. The download is here.

'Tagging Inconsistencies' plug-in by Bex

This is the grandaddy of them all and is the one you can't do without. It's a bit too complicated to explain all here, but suffice to say, it does what it says - it fixes tagging inconsistencies. It searches for inconsistencies by Album, Folder, Person, Track and Genre and retuns them for you to correct. The correction must be done manually, but believe me, 99% of this particular job is finding what needs correcting. If you think you have a beautifully tagged collection, run it through this and you will be surprised!

When it has been installed, the 'nodes' it uses to retun the inconsistencies can be found under your tree on the left hand pane of MediaMonkey: Library -> Files to Edit -> Tagging Inconsistencies.

Again, there is no point in me writing a huge guide for this as there is plenty of information on the MediaMonkey forums here. However, I found that the most useful way of learning how to use this was to actually just get into it and start experimenting. The download can be found here.

As a post-note, I would always suggest backing up your collection before you start on a festival of tag editing. You never know if something might go wrong or if you might prefer to have it the way you previously wanted it. I have never had a disaster, but there again, I tried and tested these on a duplicate before I got into using them properly. Good luck!

iTunes compilations and Album Artist

In a bid to make large music collections more manageable, iTunes introduced a tag called 'Part of a compilation'. On reading around, some people love it, some people hate it. I happen to really like it since I have a plethora of compilation and soundtrack albums.

Chronologically, I would have already passed my tracks through MediaMonkey to get to this stage. Details on how to do this are shown on this post and the overall process I use for tagging can be read here.

The 'Part of a compilation' tag makes searching for music a lot easier and practical because iTunes essentially ignores the artist field for compilations in its tabular format. This means every track that is tagged with this is grouped together by Album rather than by Artist and all your compilations show up in one group rather than scattered through the huge table.

Coupled with a well populated Album Artist field, searching your iTunes library becomes a doddle. I tag most of my compilations with Album Artist as 'Various Artists' unless there is a specific DJ or host for the album.

A useful point to note here is how to edit multiple tracks at one time - i.e. to tag a whole album as 'Part of a compilation' and with the same Album Artist. It seems like a simple step, but it took me a while to find it.

1. Highlight all your album's tracks by left clicking on the first track and the holding down Shift and clicking on the last track

2. Right click anywhere within the highlighted tracks and pick 'Get Info' from the context menu

3. Add your 'Album Artist' on the first tab called 'Info'

4. Choose the tab called 'Options'

5. Change the dropdown box named 'Part of a compilation' to 'Yes' (the check box automatically checks when this is changed)

6. Press 'OK'

Your album will now have an Album Artist and be noted in iTunes as part of a compilation. What this physically does to your files (if you have iTunes manage your music automatically) is to move them from separate artist folders into an album folder instead. If you need to find the tracks, you can locate the album folder under another folder called 'Compilations' which is, in turn, under your main iTunes library folder.

The major things doing this improved for me are as follows:

• I can easily sort my iTunes library in the List view as I can now sort by album, artist and album artist.
• When using the iTunes Browser (Ctrl-B), I don't get a huge and unwieldy list of artists - I only get my normal albums. At the top of the artist box in the browser is 'Compilations' which lets me go right into them so I don't miss anything
• My iTunes music folder is much easier to browse if I am trying to find a piece of music to share with someone or to transfer somewhere (beforehand, compilations were split into multiple artist folders)

Everyday tagging with MediaMonkey

MediaMonkey is IMHO the best tag editor out there. It's not necessarily as good looking as iTunes, but for bulk tagging of new tracks, it can't be beaten.

In my introductory post on dealing with new music, I showed the process involved in getting new tracks from the moment you get them to finally having them in iTunes with the rest of your library. This one will deal with the individual steps within MediaMonkey, but assumes you have read that post in order to get to this point.

The tag editing works on an album-by-album basis (or track-by-track for single songs)...

1. Click on the your album folder in the tree on the left hand side

2. In the main pane on the right, highlight all the tracks in the album by using Edit --> Select All or the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-A.

3. Right click on any track and select 'Auto-Tag from Web' on the context menu. You can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-L if you prefer.

This brings up a new window.

4. Depending on the popularity of the album you are looking up you may get immediate results. I find I often need to hone the search a little. I do this by typing something more specific about the artist in the search box at the top left of the screen.

Here is an example after trying to tag 'Hotel Costes, Vol.8'. MediaMonkey went straight for the album artist, which returned no results:

By typing in 'Hotel Costes 8' I immediately got some results:

You can choose the best fitting results by looking through the search results with the dropdown function on the search box. In this case, only one result was returned. You can often find better album art and artist commnetary if you browse through a little bit.

5. Make sure you have all the checkboxes ticked to start with. Anything in your track tags that will change is highlighted in bright yellow so that you don't miss it.

6. Do a good check of the data that is going to be changed to make sure you are happy with it. Worth checking here are:

• The right number of tracks
• Are tracks names and artist names interchanged (this sometimes happens with compilations)?
• Are track names and artist names combined in the same field (again a problem with compilations sometimes)?
• Are the track numbers changing significantly?

Most of these can be changed manually after you have been through this step, but if there is another search result that gives a better fit, it will save you time.

7. Press the 'Auto-Tag' button at the bottom right (or press 'Close' if you don't want to accept the tag results).

8. You should now be back in the main MediaMonkey window. Check the results again to see if you need to do any manual correcting. I often do a little bit of tweaking so that the results fit with my naming convention in iTunes (e.g. for Volumes and First Name-Last Name etc.). You can do this by right clicking on individual or multiple tracks if you want to edit information for all the tracks together) and choosing 'Properties' at the bottom.

You are presented with a new window showing all the available fields to populate. Notice the tabs at the top which give more options. Specifically, if you could not get results with album art and you have managed to find a jpeg elsewhere, you can embed it in the tag using the tab called 'Album Art'.

9. At this point, I used to go ahead and rename the files with the 'Auto-Organize Files' context click or the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-R, but I no longer do this as I have iTunes manage my files. It is actually a great relief as I eventually realised I never used the filenames for searching. I only ever used my folders and now I just use iTunes. If you are an mp3 file naming convention junkie, like I was, you can go to town with this function, but I would strongly suggest asking yourself if it is actually worth the time and effort…

That's it - that's all I do to commission files within MediaMonkey. Unfortunately this is where I unceremoniously dump the singing simian. There are some other whole-library tagging adventures I have had with MediaMonkey that I was very impressed with, but I will post about those in the future as they are gargantuan one-off efforts. This should allow you to get quality and consistently tagged tracks feeding into your collection, regardless of the software you use to play your music with.