Welcome to my first blog post!
This is about organizing mp3 files, by folder, filename, metadata tags, and embedded album arts. Fortunately there are nice free tools that complement each other in this task.
I will not cover: volume leveling, CD ripping, CD burning, playlists.
Quod Libet
I didn’t particularly like Quod Libet for playing music.
For organizing your files, it rocks. Quod Libet has by principle that “you know how to organize your music better than they do”. That’s great! How I wish every free software had a clue on that.
It does take some time to get used to its configuration, and the way you can personalize tag editing and folder/file organizing. But after a while you realize that this nice little tool allows you to easily do whatever you want to your files, in a very flexible, precise, and automated way.
Quod Libet also has two nice plugins: it can download album arts to the same folder as your mp3, and it can fetch CDDB info.
Banshee and Listen
These are the best and cutest for playing.
They can as well download album art and save it inside ~/.cache, which also helps retrieving the covers. Listen is even better in this matter, as it can simultaneously download the missing covers for all your collection at once.
Easytag
It is great as it automatically fixes all the ID3 tags, and can easily embed pictures inside the mp3 files.
Rhythmbox
It is well-integrated with Gnome and the latest version can even sync your iPhone.
Workflow
Initial setup
Move your music to some other folder rather than ~/Music.
Get Quod Libet and EasyTag finely configured, and set the other players to automatically refresh the collection from the ~/Music folder.
Getting your music organized
Move some folders to ~/Music.
Open EasyTag, select these folders, then select something else. It may prompt if you want to save the files, you say yes. EasyTag will be fixing your tags and character encoding to the latest ID3 standard.
If you already have a jpg with the album art you can insert it into the mp3 files now (see below).
Open Quod Libet, refresh or rebuild your collection, right-click on the new albums and fix their tags, track numbering etc. If some songs inside a whole album are badly tagged, use the CDDB lookup to fix it. Quod Libet can also organize the file and folder names once you learn how to set it to your tastes.
Fetching the album art
You can ask Quod Libet to download it and choose which one you want, it will appear in the same folder as the song.
You can also ask Listen and Banshee, it will appear in ~/.cache.
If they all fail to get a nice picture, you can try Album Cover Art Downloader.
Yet you can search in albumart.org and finally in google images. 200×200 or 300×300 files with 90% jpg compression give reasonably sized files, about 1% of the mp3 size.
Saving the album art
“Standards are very good. Everyone has their own.” The only de facto standard that will robustly and gracefully survive copying your folders around, copying between different operating systems etc, is embedding the images inside the mp3 files.
Fortunately EasyTag is very good at it:
Inside EasyTag, select the folder whose files you want to port the image. Select all the files and open the tab “Pictures”. Drag your picture from Nautilus and drop it in this area, click on the little checkbox on the right, so that it applies for all selected songs. Click on “Save All”. Le voilà.
An advise
Start moving your library slowly until you get familiar with Quod Libet and EasyTag.
Sources
http://www.williambrownstreet.net/wordpress/?p=50&page=2 http://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/ http://easytag.sourceforge.net/ http://www.listen-project.org/ http://banshee-project.org/ http://lifehacker.com/397258/find-and-embed-album-art-in-your-mp3-collection http://lifehacker.com/software/mp3/alpha-geek-whip-your-mp3-library-into-shape-part-i–level-the-volume-230105.php http://www.unrealvoodoo.org/hiteck/projects/albumart/
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