External tagger question

Since we have members with large collections there must be a lot of experience in what to do and not to do or what to use and not what to use when it comes to tagging our valuable files.

My collection is moderate with roughly 55+K tracks and about 15+K not properly tagged yet.

I am happily using mp3tag, but the advent of roon made me rethink my tagging. Roon simply does more and shows more of your tags and I never bothered to complete my tags since the apps and players I used until now where not handling these tags anyway (composer, discID, label, etc…)

Now I want to gradually complete these tags.

What I noticed is that when using discogs through mp3tag you get a lot of “mess” like artist names with (2) added, release number duplicated, just looks horrible and would take considerable effort to clean up.

When using musicbrainz through mp3tag the data is a lot cleaner, but is missing some items and is not as complete.

Is there a tool that can combine multiple sources in order to complete your tags? So use the clean artist from source A, the release ID from source B, etc…

How did you guys tackle your large collections?

Almost forgot, but I prefer loacal metadata as opposed to make all changes in roon.

I left the Topic uncategorized.

1 Like

I use MediaMonkey as my “audio (file) collection management tool”, but specifically with the DiscOgs plug-in and AccurateRip enabled.

This gives you a lot of flexible management options, plus a lossless / checked disc-ripper, plus very comprehensive metadata.

I’m very happy with it : so far it’s given me everything I need except Blu-ray / DVD (ripping) options, which can be addressed either with other plug-ins or external programmes - but I (personally) only require this rarely.

Rob
I have not solved your problem because I have repeatedly groomed my library over many years: weeding out small cover art, checking the spelling of foreign artists etc. That is something different than the bulk clean up you describe. I also use MP3Tag and TagScanner. You might want to look at PerfectTunes (https://www.dbpoweramp.com/perfecttunes.htm) from the dbPowerAmp family. I have not used it for the reasons above, but it seems to me that it is designed to do what you need and I have a great deal of confidence in Spoon’s work.

@allineedis

Puddletag (Linux and Mac) can do what you want using its masstagging feature. It can make use of several metadata sources in a single masstagging operation and you can specify which fields/tags you want from which metadata source. When is done masstagging the results are presented to you for editing/ accepting/ rejecting wholesale or down to individual file and field level.

Thanks for sharing.

@rolski

Mediamonkey is OK and installed the Discogs plugin, but for bulk tagging it offers nothing additional compared to Mp3tag, but need to play a bit more with it.

@audiomuze

I am using Windows, so probably would have to use some middleware for Puddletag, but will check it out.

@PNCD

I have the full suite of Illustrate and agree, spoon has serious skillls. But for now the PerfectTunes tagging part is not really usable and a work in progress. The albumart part is almost perfect.

Since posting I also started experimenting.

Currently I am test driving a combination of Musicbrainz Picard and Mp3tag. Where I do a first pass in Picard, populating all tags and a second pass in Mp3tag to groom all tags according to a Action Group I have defined. Sounds more time consuming as it is. For now this looks promissing.

Interesting - I will take a look at Captain Picard. I can understand the two-pass process: populate then groom the details.

My two cents : if you have a large classical connection, I have found nothing better than Musichi. I found it thanks to this site : http://thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Players/MusiCHI.htm

I still have mediamonkey and Mp3tag on the computer but use them less and less. Musichi is great in validating entries. The leaning curve was pretty steep for me, but once you have a feeling for it …

I do all tagging and disc management in jriver - it really shines there. When it comes to missing, incomplete or wrong tags you may want to look at SongKong. It does sonic fingerprinting of the audio and then queries musicbrainz and discogs for matches. I understand roon taps into musicbrainz, too.

Can highly recommend Beets -> http://beets.io/

Fetch or calculate all the metadata you could possibly need: album art,
lyrics, genres, tempos, ReplayGain levels, or acoustic
fingerprints.Get metadata from MusicBrainz, Discogs, or Beatport. Or guess
metadata using songs’ filenames or their acoustic fingerprints.Transcode audio to any format you like.Check your library for duplicate tracks and albums or for
albums that are missing tracks.Browse your music library graphically through a Web browser and play it in
any browser that supports HTML5 Audio.…and lots more.