• Missing or incorrect artwork
• Badly labeled tracks (misspellings mostly)
• Bad ID3 tags
• Track numbers incorrect
• Incorrect filenames
• Inconsistent genres, makes playing music by genre on the iPod funky
• Album Artist not specified, so “Greatest Hits” ends up being one huge album
• Low quality tracks that need to be re-ripped – I at one time thought that 128 kpbs was just fine…
• Tracks that have bad audio (usually ripping a badly-scratched CD will do this) – need to re-buy the CD

Here’s my solution to clean up my library, feel free to use it for yours.

Tools Needed:

• iTunes
• Album Art Downloader
• JJ MP3 Renamer
• Google (aka the All-mighty Goog)
• XnView (or some other image editing software)
• Patience
• An extreme attention to detail

A couple of things to do while doing this process:

• Keep it fun! Don’t try to do a ton in one sitting
• Listen to music that you might not have listened to before (I don’t know about you, but I have a ton of CDs that I’ve never even played)

First off, come up with a standard filename convention for your music and stick to it Here’s what I use:

c:\Music\Album Artist – Year – Album Name\## – Artist – Title.mp3

This makes it so that everything stays nice and neat. A couple of special cases:

• For multiple disc sets, tack on ” – disc x” on the album name
• For various artists, use “Various Artists” as the album artist

Before you begin:

Create a working directory structure — something like this:

• c:\Music_new\
• c:\Music_new\Work\
• c:\Music_new\Todo\
• c:\Music_new\Good\
• c:\Music_new\Backup\

These should be self-explanatory. Put the stuff you’re currently working on in the work directory, the stuff you’re planning on doing in Todo, and extra crap that you don’t plan on using into the Backup directory (like bad albums).

Next, close iTunes, and open your iTunes data folder (C:\Documents and Settings\$user\My Documents\My Music\iTunes). We’re going to save your existing iTunes library (much easier to work with it when it’s clean) — skip if your library is empty.

1. Create a folder called “old library” or something
2. Move iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml to this folder

Open iTunes — you should now have an empty library. (You can always move the 2 files back to have your old library back — just make sure to close iTunes before moving it’s files around ) I use the following fields to see everything that you need on one screen (right click on the bar to add/delete them)

• Name
• Artist
• Album Artist
• Time
• Year
• Genre
• Bit Rate
• Album
• Track #

You might have to move things around to get them to fit logically. I also change the view to Album View or Cover Flow View (under View menu) to be able to see the albums more logically.

Ok, now you’re ready to begin!

1. Pick an artist you want to work on – I find that working on an artist at a time helps to make sure naming is consistent.
2. Copy all of the artist’s albums to the ‘work’ directory
3. Rename the folders appropriately (use Google to find out the appropriate year or spellings if needed) — While doing this process, you might realize that you need to change the folder name — make a note of it, but don’t change it while working, or iTunes will lose the files and freak out. Fix it later on (I’ll mention a good time for this)
4. Drag everything from the work folder to your iTunes library to import them
5. Highlight all of the tracks from the album, right click, and choose “Get Info”
6. In this page, there’s one thing you need to be very aware of — when you click the checkbox, that will change that setting for all of the songs you have selected, so don’t go nuts when editing fields for multiple files.
7. Set Album Artist – For some albums, choosing an album artist might be difficult. This mostly comes up when there’s a CD with 10 tracks on it by 1 artist, and 2 of the tracks feature someone else — I consider that as still being the artist’s album (not those that are featured), so I just use the artist name as album artist. For Various Artists albums, use “Various Artists” for Album Artist.
8. Set Album – for multiple disc albums, set all discs to have the same name for the album name (see disc number below)
9. Set Year — this can be tricky to figure out which year the album came out — I would just make sure it matches the folder name.
10. Set total track number (the one on the right, the one that says of ___
11. Set disc numbers if it is a multi-disc set
12. Set genre – I have come up with a standard of using only a few genres to keep things simple – use whatever you want here, but keep things consistent. For things like soundtracks that have multiple genres, I just use Soundtrack – you could consider setting genres per song, but that might be even be too anal for me LOL.
13. Comments – I had some rippers that put comments there and I wanted to strip them, so I deleted them by checking the box and making sure there’s nothing in it.
14. Check Compilation if it is one
15. Check Gapless Album if it needs it (usually live albums that you don’t want spaces while listening to the whole album)
16. Click OK when done.
17. Now, go through each song and make sure the Name and Artist fields are correct. Usually this can be quick, but sometimes you get a stubborn disc where the artists are all wrong (like set to “Various” or something) Something I like to do during this stage is to name the titles according to good Title capitalization rules. It can be a little daunting at first, but Google Music usually does this correctly, so you can use this as a guide.
18. Once everything looks good with titles and artists, take a look at the track #’s — it should say “x of y”, where x is unique for the album and y is the correct total # of tracks.
19. Take a peek at the bit rate for the songs — is it of the level that you want? If not, add it to the list of CD’s to re-rip and move on.
20. Once everything looks good, highlight all of the songs, and right click-> Convert ID3 Tags. Choose ID3 tag version 2.3 and click ok so that it converts the files to ID3 version 2.3. I think by default iTunes uses ID3 v.2.4, which a lot of other programs barf on.
21. Once everything looks good in iTunes (except artwork, which we’ll be getting to in a moment), select all of the songs in the album, and hit the delete key (Don’t worry, it won’t delete the file, just the entries in the database)
22. (Now would be a good time to rename the folder if you found something that needed to be changed.)
23. Drag the folder(s) to JJ’s from your work folder to load them in
24. Under convert tools, click Next till you see “ID3 tag to filename”
25. For output format, put in what you want the filenames to look like, using fields like *Artist for artist and *Title for the song title. For my naming convention, I use “*Track – *Artist – *Title.mp3″
26. Select all of the files you’ve imported in the list.
27. Click the Convert! button to fix all of your filenames
28. Look in the album folders — they should all be nice and neat now.
29. Close JJ’s
30. Open up Album Art Downloader
31. Go to File->New->File Browser (or hit control-B)
32. Type your work directory in the box (or click the … to select it), and click Search — it will go through your albums and have a list for you to choose from. You can choose to grab artwork for all albums by clicking the checkbox at the top of the list.
33. Click “Get Artwork for Selection” to begin searching for artwork
34. This will bring up a window (or multiple if you’ve selected multiple) with covers (among other things) for the album you’ve selected. I click on Sort by to change to size sorting, so that the biggest images will be on top. Click on the image to blow it up to make sure it looks good. When you’ve chosen the one you want, click the disc icon to save a file called “Folder.jpg” in the album directory. Finish doing this for all of the albums you’ve selected.
35. Drag the folders back into iTunes to import them again.
36. In order to embed the cover art into the ID3 tag, there’s a very simple method (thanks to Chris for this tidbit!) — Simply select all of the songs from the album, right click and click Get Info again, and drag the folder.jpg file to the square for artwork, which will embed it into the files. Click OK.
37. Change the view to Cover Flow — make sure that the graphic is the same height as the others and that there’s no undesirable stuff on the edges. You might need to edit it using an image editor to fix it up and re-add it.
38. Now that the cover art has been embedded and everything looks good, you’re done! Delete from iTunes and move the folders to the Good directory and move onto another artist. You can leave the Folder.jpg file in the directories (some programs will use it, so might not be a bad idea to leave it there)

Whew! I didn’t realize that there were that many steps! It’s really not as bad as it looks — I can usually organize things pretty quickly, even when doing this many things.

Also, when you’re dealing with an artist that has many albums (with various recordings of the same song), it can be annoying to look in a list and see that it’s spelled/capitalized 3 different ways — one way to fix that is to sort by song title — inconsistencies will jump out very quickly.

Hopefully you’ve been able to follow this and now have a cool way to get your MP3 collection more organized. Please leave me feedback if you have comments / suggestions.

Note: This blog has been brought over from my old site, originally posted on Jan 28, 2008.