Okay, long story short: ages ago I ripped my 4,000 cd collection (this is pre-sonos era). I bought an automated ripper and since I had it I ripped my friends collections for them as well. So now my collection is roughly 8,000 albums (mostly aif).
Here’s the problem - I have a lot of stuff in there that’s pretty terrible (I’d tell you it was all my friends but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate).
As a result I don’t really browse my collection anymore and there are albums that pre you-can-play-anything-you-want-on-a-streaming-service - it seemed like a cool idea to have a bunch of stuff you might only listen to once.
Now, not so much.
So I’m looking to thin the herd.
Ideally, I’d be able to drag and drop albums looking at album art into 3 different collections. Then possibly only import 2 into Roon.
I recognize I can’t do that in Roon, right?
My hunch is I would need to append to metadata and then sort into folders by that data.
Anyone have a program that let’s you drag and drop and then append metadata based on that sorting?
I’d prefer MacOS but can do PC too.
Thanks for any help and if I’m thinking of this in the wrong way, let me know.
I am not sure I am understanding this correctly and how you want to sort or separate your albums, but on Mac I use a program called Yate. It lets you change metadata however you want and move albums into different or new folders Once you learn the program you can even make your own actions to automate the process. It is also set up to be compatible with Roon in terms of how it organizes and writes tags and musician credits. You can find it here https://2manyrobots.com .
If you are looking for something simpler, I would recommend MP3tag for Mac. Not as powerful as Yate, but easier to learn and use.
In the left column is the folder hierarchy which I move through to find the album I want to edit. Once I do, I load it and all of the stuff in the middle column is metadata about the tracks in a spreadsheet layout. All of that is editable and you can change what columns are there. On the right is the album artwork but you have to add that after you load the files you are working on. You can’t just load album artwork and then drag and drop tracks somewhere. Also on the right side, you can change to different panels that have different information on them. like in the following screenshot
In this screenshot I changed the panel on the right to get rid of the cover art and there are a bunch of fields you can fill in with metadata such as recording dates, release dates, and a whole bunch of other fields. You can customize which fields are visible on this panel or if you want them on a different panel. Here is another panel and this is where I have the fields for the song title, album title, artist, the year, and genres. I have each of those buttons to fill in a genre in the list so I dont have to type them all the time.
So you might have to change how to go about organizing your music, but it can be done in Yate. I am going to mess wit hit now to see what else I can come up with that more matches how you want it.
So in unearthing my audio files again, looks like there is some pre-work to do.
Basically, I’m not sure I have a de-duped/highest quality master of all my files on my NAS. Originally, I encoded everything AIFF - then re-encoded ALAC, and also have some random stuff that’s AAC, etc.
I’m thinking of trying to get a solid set of de-duped files on my NAS as a starting point.
Here’s the workflow I’m thinking of so far (welcome any thoughts, criticisms, omissions, etc):
Start with files that are on NAS
Have YATE or other move these files into folders by Stream/Artist/Album
Then begin with AIFF files
Add additional sources/drives, etc to NAS, YATE, Stream/Artist/Album
Add AIFF files to master location and de-dupe with Gemini
some fuzzy plan for handling other stream types, de-dupe, etc (a little foggy on best practices here but I’ll cross the bridge when I come to it).
Once I work the magic of 6 - add that folder to iTunes as a new library
COLLECTIONS steps:
Drag and drop albums into ‘playlists’ representing the different collections I want tagged in Roon.
Append comments with a tag with Doug’s Applescript - something like *essentials, *AJBCollection -whatever.
SUPER FUZZY HERE - then in Yate move that Comment into ROONALBUMTRACK - WOULD WELCOME ANY GUIDANCE OR LINKS ON DOING THIS IN YATE!
Do a bunch of other magic in Yate - again, not sure what this is but welcome guidance.
Import collections I want in roon and enter audio nirvana - at least that’s the plan.
Again, welcome any thought/ideas/etc. on this. I’m both new to YATE and ROON so if there’s stuff I should be doing as I pass through YATE to ROON that you wish you had done with your collection - I’m all ears!
Sounds like a good starting point. Yate can do pretty much everything you have listed. It even has built in functions to move text from one field to another, like in step 10.
My questions is why do steps 7 and 8? Is this because you want these files in iTunes, or are you simply using iTunes to organize them by playlists? The data about playlists in iTunes is not contained in the files, but is contained in the iTunes XML file, which is what you import into Roon to get your playlists in Roon.
Although there are a lot of tags that Roon does not read from your files, I still use them and make sure they are correct so that I can use the files in another program if I need to. I just use Yate to do all the tagging and then different programs can use the same files and you aren’t re-tagging everything separately for each application.
The things I wish I did from the beginning are decide on exactly how I want to tag my files, set some rules (like no more than 5 genres) and figure out how I am going to name the songs, files and their folders and stick with that all the time. Then make some naming templates for different situations, like albums with more than 1 disc and stuff like that. Once you do that, you don’t need to worry about it. It will take some time to learn Yate and make your actions, but once you do it then everything becomes automatic and saves you so much time in the long run
If all of these albums are already in your Roon library, then, use Roon to tag all the albums you want to keep. Pick the format and version that you need/want. When you are 100% happy that you have chosen what you want then EXPORT those to a new folder using Roon export feature.
Hi, I am not totally clear on what you are trying to do, but you could try out SongKong
Points of interest:
Can work on any size collection, fully automated
Can automatically tag your music
Can rename/reorgnize files based on existing metadata
Delete Duplicates can find duplicates and automatically remove the lower quality duplicates (based on bit rate/audio format etc)
Roon friendly, helps Roon identify more albums
You can run Fix Songs task and test out matching of songs and renaming/reorganization of songs in preview mode without any license purchase necessary, and it will show you exactly what has been matched, metadata added, folder structure ectera.
