I haven't mentioned it until now, but for the last month or more, I've changed how I put information in the mp3 tags of songs. Previously, I had the album title and the source info in the album title tag. This always worked fine for me, though I got a few complaints in the comments. Then in August I went on a big vacation where I had to use an iPhone to listen to music for an extended period of time. I found the iPhone sorts the music by the album title, and it gets confused by my style, thinking each different source is a different album. Obviously, there are tons of people who use iPhones or other music programs that operate in a similar way, so I realized I need to make a change.
Thus, since getting back from that trip, I've been putting just the album name in the album title tag, and putting the source info in the comments tag. I'd previously put an X in the comments tag to indicate which songs were done live. That now is moved to the otherwise unused genre tag. I think this system works better. However, I've posted about 1,500 albums here. It's going to take me a long time to covert all the old albums to the new system. At the same time, I also have gotten better at balancing volume levels between songs, so I need to make improvements with that for the vast majority of albums I've posted.
Making these two fixes is such a big task that I'm dealing with it bit by bit. For instance, whenever a link dies and I get a request for a new link, I change the mp3 tags to the new system and I make improvements on the song to song volume balance, if necessary.
Which brings me to Bob Dylan. As I mentioned a day or two ago, I'm in the middle of a Dylan listening kick right now. So I just updated all the Dylan albums I'd previously posted with the new mp3 tag system and the better volume balancing. Also, I added a song to the "Introducing Bob Dylan" album, and added and removed some songs to the "I Ain't Got No Home" and "Abandoned Love" albums. So if you're a big Dylan fan, and especially one who uses iPhones, you might want to download all those albums again.
Paul,
ReplyDeleteIt is not clear which if the Dylan albums you have/will update. I assume at some point it will be everything as you mention the '1,500 albums'. I have an extensive collection of music going back nearly 50 years which I have (and am still) been standardizing all of the tags to allow for easy searching etc. A mere '1500 albums' would have been a nightmare to deal with were I not to have 'MP3 Tag' which has been my go to for dealing with the task you are faced with. The link is below but before you leap in and go 'Yippee!' I heartily recommend a thorough reading of the manual and perform a few test runs on some test mp3's. I was a bit gungho a few years ago while performing some capitalization of file names and comments along with a few 'minor' changes (so I thought) to several terrabytes. Imagine my horror when I looked through the files to find my mistakes e.g. "It'S My Party And I'LL Cry If I Want To" being but one and perhaps the most painful one where I wanted to flip files like "The Faces" (relevant to your most recent excellent posts - side story ... I was in a pub 'The White Hart' in the UK in Virginia Water using the urinal. Two people walked in and were standing to my right. I look up to see Rod Stewart AND Elton John next to me! Rod turned to me and said "Careful mate! You're splashing your boots." or should that be "You'Re" boots?) to be "Faces, The" and so on. When you begin to think of this particular horror you will understand why I recommend the classic RTFM maxim... The program, at my directions, went through EVERY band / artist name looking for the string 'the' or 'The', cutting it out and suffixing the first name with a comma-space while also capitalizing the "the" if needed and writing the name back as (theoretically) "Faces, The". The true extent of my lack of thinking and not really reading the help files ended up with things like "Wear Report, The". When you look at the many (MANY!!!) names with that particular string in there you will understand my grief. I was missing a track I KNEW I have and eventually found it under "Derek & Dominoes, The". YOu get the idea. Very powerful and wonderful piece of software...
https://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html
I also use MediaMonkey as my go to player as it is the only program capable of coping with the sheer number of files I (and I assume you) have. Unless you no of a better alternative than that.
Keep up the good work. I thoroughly enjoy the surprises you post of music I thought I knew existed. Just recently stumbled upon "Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen" in my collection which I had totally forgotten about and "The Penguin Cafe Orchestra" as well.
Thanks for the comments. When I said 1,500 albums, that's a rough estimate of all the albums I've posted at this blog so far. My actual music collection, of course, is much bigger than that.
DeleteIn terms of mp3 tags, I already have my full music collection well sorted out (after many years of wrestling with it). For instance, I don't have a problem with songs named differently on different albums (like "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" vs. "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star") since I fixed that kind of thing gradually over many years. I use the mp3 program you mentioned as well as another one, TagScanner, because they have different strengths.
My current problem is simply one of moving the source info from the album name tag to the comments tag - for all my songs on all my albums! I have to do it manually, because the info in the album name tag has to be split in two. For instance, for a given song, it might look like this:
Live and Rare - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 2-22-1970
I need to move all the "Fillmore West" stuff after the dash to the comments tag, get rid of the dash, and keep the "Live and Rare" part in the album tag. I often have to fix that song by song, when there's lots of different sources.
But there's another problem. The program I used to edit sound files is Audacity. It seems to have some quirks. One is that anytime I edit an mp3 tag, it doubles the info in the comments tag. So, in the above case, it'll look like this:
Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 2-22-1970 // Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 2-22-1970
That's dumb, and clearly some kind of program bug. I don't want it to do that. I also have the huge task of going through my music and adjusting the volume balance from song to song. For the first year or two of this blog, I didn't do that well, so now I have to fix that sloppy work. But I want to make those volume changes FIRST, because the album name tag doesn't get doubled whenever an mp3 file is edited, only the comments tag. So this doubling isn't a problem if I do things in a certain order.
Make sense?
If anyone wants to help with this, I sure would appreciate it. Maybe there's a way to avoid or fix the doubling problem? (It also happens with the essential year mp3 tag field, by the way.) Maybe someone wants to help with the volume balance fixing, and/or the splitting of info from the album name tag?
Otherwise, I figure this is the kind of thing I will gradually fix over many months, or even years. But at least all my new album posts here use the new system.
One more thing. Maybe the biggest pain in the ass for me right now is fixing the volume levels of songs. For a long time, I relied on a program called "Mp3Gain" to help with that. But I've learned over time that program just isn't very good. When it automatically fixes the volume of a given album, it usually makes mistakes. I don't know how it works, but maybe it samples the volume in a couple points in the song, and they just happen to be unusually low or high, so it misjudges the whole song. This happens so much that I've stopped using the program and have resigned myself to fixing songs one by one, in Audacity. That takes a long time.
DeleteYou'd think there'd be an easy way to automate this task, but I've searched the Internet and haven't found one. Heck, it's hard to even look at the sound profiles of songs, except by opening them in Audacity. When I've seen people discuss this on the Internet, they basically say do it the tedious way I'm doing, using Audacity. It's very frustrating there isn't a "killer ap" for this.
If I could get these problems solved, I could spend a lot more time posting new albums here instead of fixing things.
One more comment about that "killer ap" idea. I'd think that EVERYONE who has a serious music collection would want a way to have the volume levels of their songs normalized, so you don't get one album or song that's really loud (or even brickwalled), and another that's quiet. Some music players do this on the fly when songs are playing, but what about permanently changing the actual files, so they're volume balanced no matter what? There simply doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this right now. Or am I missing something?
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