Hi everyone,
I’m looking for some advice: I need a macOS application to help me organize my audio files once and for all. Specifically, I’m looking for something that not only manages and fixes missing tags but also organizes my folders according to my own specific criteria.
I’ve already tried Yate, TagScanner, AudioRanger, and MusicBrainz, but either they don’t work as expected, or they don’t fully meet my needs.
Do you know of any app that could help me?
Thanks a lot!
Check out Songkong
Steve,
In what way ‘organize’?
If you can be more specific, please, we may be able to come up with suggestions.
When you say:
Have you looked at Hazel and Alfred?
For tagging Yate is your best bet, or - as @Stampie says - SongKong, which has fewer features and isn’t able to automate and allow infinitely precise scripting, as Yate is.
Does a page like this help?
Thanks for the tips! As an example, my criteria are something like: “Artist/Album Name - Year - Bitrate/”. I’d also like to create separate folders for live performances and others for singles.
My issue is that a lot of the music I’ve purchased doesn’t have complete tags, or they’re missing lyrics (which I’d really love to have), or, with my CD rips, I don’t have cover art, etc.
I’m getting close to madness trying to organize all this (I have 2.5 TB of music), and I just want to bring some order to it all.
So far, I’ve only managed to create broad categories based on my personal preferences: Classical Music, Metal, Oldies (Blues, Jazz, R&B), OST, Pop Rock and Alternative Indie, and Various Artists. I’m going crazy! 
Thank you so much! This might actually be the tool I was looking for, although at first glance it seems a bit complicated. (It also bothers me that I can’t just buy it but have to subscribe to it.)
Steve,
My apologies: I, for one, am still not clear whether you are hoping to:
The more information you can give, the more we can try and help.
For organization by Folders in macOS at the filesystem level, ways like those described by @SandsOfArrakis are surely as good as any.
Except when it comes to devising a system of top-level categories - because ‘Classical’ music is usually best organized by Composer; and most other genres by performer.
Other than that, I really do suspect you could write your own ticket if that’s what you want to do. Especially if you use Smart Folders.
I’ve always sorted my folders like this
Artist (A-Z)
Various Artists
Then each artist has it’s albums alpabetically sorted underneath. Keeps everything sorted nicely. Various Artists contains compilation albums and collections.
I’ve ripped my own music CD’s with dbPoweramp and completed the tagging, if needed, with its accompanying app. For the rest I have tagged everything with Jriver Media Center. I have a master license for it, so I can use it on my MacBook Pro and on both Windows and Linux on my dualboot NUC.
Not sure how well Jriver holds up when it comes to your search criteria. But for general tagging I find it to be a very useful tool. I believe you can trial it before deciding if you wish to buy it. https://jriver.com/
Hi, thanks for your interest. Just to be clear there is no subscription, a single purchase buys the product and that never expires and gives free updates to any new versions released during the year. After that time additional new versions are not free but a payment of $15 gives you another year of new versions, and this can be done at any time there is no subscription.
For most customers SonKong is actually very simple, just point it at your files , select a profile and go, but we add options for those customers that need more flexibiblity.
For automated tagging SongKong has far more features than Yate, Yate can only tag one album at a time, comparison here. Yate does have a scripting facility that SongKong does not have yet, but scripting is coming in the next version
Don’t worry, Steve… Paul (whom I fully respect) and I (and others) often have this friendly debate .
In case you do turn out to be interested in tagging software - and you really should (if I may be so bold): essential in getting the most from Roon - Paul’s comparison is in some places inaccurate and misleading in ways which have been discussed here often.
But do look at both packages (again) and make up your own mind. Yate is on version 7 now and is updated often. SongKong also works well, to be sure, and may do the job. Good luck!
Mark, Im not aware of any inaccuracies in that comparison now. There were a couple of mimor inadvertent inaccuracies pointed out to me by the Yate author and I corrected those some time ago. If there is anything incorrect in that comparison let me know and i will correct it.
Of course like any review it is subjective. And of course i have a vested interest on presenting SongKong in a favourable light but i havent come across a more objective comparison anywhere else
Think of it this way, on my website I list the features that SongKong has, not features it doesn’t have. Likewise websites of other taggers such as Yate list the features they have, not the features they don’t have. It would be weird for me to list all the features SongKong doesn’t have wouldnt it, even more so if they were features I would not want to add anyway.
Picard is probably the go to if you need a GUI and aren’t doing an insane volume of material. What needs isn’t it meeting? You may just not be configuring the folder output paths to your liking or something.
No GUI, beets is good but you’ll end up going down a rabbit hole and running the musicbrainz db locally lmao. I tried beets, it’s alright but I had to move away from it.
Some use multiple tools
There is also Jaikoz for MacOS
I agree. Roon uses MusicBrainz, so get a match, and you’re 90%+ sorted. I export MB-matched releases to a staging folder with label and catalogue number. I then apply some routine metadata changes / additions using a script (Metaflac-based), including Discogs references, and occasionally use a tag editor to add works or parts, correct typos, formatting etc.
Once I’m satisfied, the release(s) are moved to my music library and synchronized with Roon.
In my experience, it’s best to load individual releases, or an artist’s catalogue into MB. Any more and it’s difficult to keep track of the changes made.
I’ve used both Yate and Song Kong, but this is the workflow I ended up using.
What I meant by volume of material is like, if you’re dealing with a significantly large library, the only option short of building your own thing is beets. Doing albums one at a time or in groups in Picard doesn’t really scale, just from a time perspective lol.
Or SongKong, I have one user who used it successfully on 4 millions tracks. And unlike beets it has a GUI, it makes use of multiple cpus to process multiple albums at once and doesn’t require the user to confirm matches. For the rare occasions that SongKong makes a match you don’t like there is an undo feature that can be applied at later date, it does not have to be done immediately after the match.
These were issues I ran into with beets. Was initially using it with a plugin I wrote to handle my own database + emitting events but I ended up splitting so many things out into ‘workers’ anyways that I scrapped using beets entirely but Idk who the hell else would write their own thing for this.
When I retired, my first project was to begin ripping my CD collection. (1,000 CD’s 8 yrs ago) I have learned a lot along the way.
I use XLD to rip anything I purchase to my NAS. I use a combo of MetaDatics & Musicbrainz for my metadata. Once I think I have my metadata the way I want, I use MinimServer on my NAS to sort by various profiles to see if I missed any key tags and edit as required. It’s a hobby so find something and give it a try, you can always tweak. Just my 2 cents…
I forgot to mention I have my CD rips cataloged in Discogs.
Great source for buying used stuff and in case of a disaster, I can prove to insurance company what I had because it gives you low, med & hi prices for entire collection.
I also use it to find musician credits to enhance my Roon playlist data. Sometimes Roon lacks credit info and discogs has what I’m looking for. Rate my Music works well too.
