Damn, customizing my music is long! Anyone else using too much time as well?

I’m in the process of classifying and editting my music. The final step is to place the files in Window Media Player and pasting album covers. Finding certain art is almost impossible (like art for DinaGiga or Parapara Tokusatsu Max), but I’m pleased to say I’m almost done. I think I’ve probably spent not hours, but weeks doing this, and I’m just about done, yet there will still be things to tweak. That’s 21.3 Gbs of work. To some it’s insane, to others it’s hardly anything.

Anyone else try to take on such a product and how much time have you spent on it?

It definitely takes long to customize… especially when using Windows Media Player. I completely understand.

Heh.. i know what you are talking about, and i join you.

Having a "nice" abslolutly perfectly tagged collection is just a pain in the ass.

I can’t do that. this would take toooo much time.
I guess if i would have a little collection, i certainly would class and tag nicely all of my albums one by one (and i did it in the beginning..)

I renamed/retagged/tested/classed my first ~ 700 albums (around 80 Gb).. (before i started to burn on dvd), then i gave up.
When you download like 10 or 20 gigs of music / week (and more) that’s just insane.

I still class all of my albums, i rename every directory myself, and always search for covers.. but that’s all. Then I burn the music like i find them.. i can’t be arsed to rename every track anymore. I know it’s a shame.. but oh god, that would take me days and days to do it.

Just for the curious, my collection (only VGM) is about:
~ 5,000 albums
~ 140,000 tracks
~ 22,000 covers

I’d say 50% of my collection need to be completely checked (missing tracklist, untranslated tracklist, bad idtags, japanese idtags to be translated..)

So no.. i already spend a few hours/day to "find" some soundtracks.. i’d certainly class everything in another life 🙁

@Sliat:
I am not an anime or film expert at all, but if you are looking for covers, i can help you (or at least i can try), i probably have one of the biggest vgm covers archive around (since i collect them like soundtracks.. -sounds a bit insane no?-).
At least if the covers you are searching comes from "real" soundtracks that were released, i can help you. Just make a list (you can also do in via PM)

See, I can’t say I really care for "official" covers. Ok, true that for vgm, I do care, and I have succeeded in finding everything. Doujin game music which I personally rip I have to use any picture I can find to use as an album cover. But for anime music, 90% of the time, since all I have are op/ed themes, usually the cover single may be the artist themsleves, and I would rather have a picture of the series and not the single. Anyways, after I first posted, I found Toku, so things are still going very smoothly. There are still about 5% of my covers I’d rather have in a higher quality, mostly pre-2000 Transformers, but I’m pleased with what I’ve done so far.

For the record, I have 7721 music files (not including 613 wrestling themes). The hardest part is usually trying to find out either the name of the music composer or even the game distributor for doujin PC games, and a translation of japanese titles. I’m still stuck on 1 album for track names (Touhou Tetris, a post already exists for asking for translation help).

Still, it’s nice to know if I ever need a hand for covers, guys like you are willing to help. Thanks. (I’ll give you one challenge, for fun: Chou Kidou Densetsu DinaGiga. I have just a title logo for a cover)

I’ll give you one challenge, for fun: Chou Kidou Densetsu DinaGiga. I have just a title logo for a cover

Ok, once again, i don’t know anything about anime music (and very little about anime anyway).
I found 2 albums (on 4 existing for Dinagiga..)

The OVA Soundtrack (45 tracks):
(http://img98.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ost1he0.jpg) – (http://img297.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ost2de5.jpg)

Drama cd vol. 1 ?? (7 tracks) – & – drama cd vol. 3 ??
(http://img81.imageshack.us/my.php?image=drama1kc8.jpg) – (http://img503.imageshack.us/my.php?image=drama3wu4.jpg)

The OST is pretty easy to find, it took me 30 seconds..
Just a note, if you (or anyone else) want me to find a cover for an existing soundtrack.. if you could also tell me how many tracks are in the cd, it could help me to choose the good one. (at least for anime soundtracks)

😉

Damn! What’d you google differently than me? Oh well, it’s too bad the image of the drama cd isn’t flush, but I do like soundtrack image. It’s much better than my screenshot.

Last night I finished my customization. If there are images I really end up getting tired of, I’ll let you know. Thank you.

I know what you mean everything i download goes into a seperate download folder and doesnt get added to my main music folder until its been properly tagged i still have 12gb of music to be tagged

Isn’t it easier to tag albums with either Winamp or iTunes?

I currently have 80gigs of correctly tagged files (17,693 files), which I mostly ripped from CDs (now THAT took countless weekends to do!). The only thing left to do with these is to add album art, which can be a complete and utter pain, especially if the albums are rare or out of the ordinary titles.

My main problem is the 29 gigs of downloaded music I’ve yet to attack! And I’m VERY particular when it comes to how my files are named AND tagged. I’m imagining it’s something I’ll still be perfecting when I retire 😛 And yet I’m eager to listen to and enjoy the music NOW, so…….maybe next time I have a week off work I’ll focus on that and nothing else. See if I can make a dent in it.

As to what I use, I find MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com) to be the best music player (especially when you have LARGE music libraries) and easiest way to edit multiple tags at once.

I use mediamonkey too but when you have to enter track titles manually or remove artist names or numbers from the track title that slows you down big time

I find it a pain just trying to remove the track number. It’s no something you can do just through properties.

The process I use is mostly through Winamp. After everything is done, I’ll send it to Windows Media Player. That way I can see what errorrs I’ve made (genre, album name, track numbers, year), remove them from WMP, fix them with Winamp, and do the process all over again.

To tag mp3s (i still do it sometimes – when i know they need proper tagging)

I use an old version of "Mp3-Tag Studio 3"
This soft have some nice features i think:

First you can choose to work on ID3v1 or ID3v2 only (or both) for every tool:
I am using in general those 3 to get nice tagging:

– Cleaning you can delete all tags or choose whatever you want (only artist for exemple)
– Auto tag from filename (this one is nice, let’s say you name your tracks "01 blabla" you can set options to "TrackNr" "Title" and it will tags fine both of these.
– Mass set tags, finally i enter the rest (artist, album, and comment – for catalogs numbers -)

1 press and it do it automatically for the directory(ies) i choose.

You can also rename files from tags.. direct tag manipulation.. direct rename files.. and browsing tags.

All of this is an easy and small interface. (http://img183.imageshack.us/my.php?image=52433333wk9.jpg)

Someone knows something better and/or faster ?

Exact Copy (Exact Audio Copy), connects to freedb with the music files on so it tags em automatically if your CD is in the database, just check em before hand, since the database is filled by users, so their might be some mistakes.

EDIT: Thats only from CD, dunno about mp3 files on your hard drive….don’t think it does..

Exact Copy (Exact Audio Copy), connects to freedb with the music files on so it tags em automatically if your CD is in the database, just check em before hand, since the database is filled by users, so their might be some mistakes.

Auto-tagging from the web is a good idea, that could be an awesome feature if it was complete enough.. but freedb is certainly not interesting for VGM.. as 80% of soundtracks are missing.

Auto-tagging from the web is a good idea, that could be an awesome feature if it was complete enough.. but freedb is certainly not interesting for VGM.. as 80% of soundtracks are missing.

Auto tagging can also be bad too. Easy CD-DA Extractor (my cd ripping tool) will try to connect to a central database, but sometimes there’s more than one match for an album. But as with VGM soundtracks, the problem with japanese albums is that you could also likely get ????? as a track title, or sometime kanji (which is no better for some people).

Now I reach another dilemna. I’ve just finished listing my albums as a text file. If I post it, I’m obligated to keep track of requests that come my way, aren’t I? But I suppose as with anyone else, I’ll just fill them when I have the time. I’m just debating whether I want to post my list or not, because there’s a lot in it, and I tend to work a full schedule (leaving only a couple of hours per night to fulfill requests).

The other problem is that for my vgm, I’d say over 80% of the music has been eddited (extra loops, changed track order, omitted tracks like endings) and I’d be posting work other people have already posted, but modified. I know it works in the shmup thread. I just don’t want to make it look like I’ve pissed on anyone’s work and claimed credit for myself, especially when I can’t remember the original source. I know which are my own works, but that’s probably less than 50% of my vgm.

I’ll just think it over and I’ll wait and see.