Some people were surprised when I converted my 2,000 CDs to MP3 files. Reader Dave Camp of Oak Grove did the same thing — except he had more than 15,000 CDs, which took him “well over a year” to rip himself, he says. Because Dave has a few years’ experience managing such a huge MP3 collection, he kindly shared these tips for others who are in the same situation or considering making the MP3 leap:

“First of all, having the Id3 tags messed up on my MP3s drives me nuts. I guess that was one good thing about ripping my own: I was in complete control of the naming process. A great program that will help you is called Tag & Rename (well worth the price whatever it is now [Editor’s note: It’s $30.]) It lets you edit the Id3 tags, rename files or folders, check the album against an online database or against Amazon.com. A few clicks in Tag & Rename will have your collection much more manageable. A properly tagged mp3 in my collection will include band name, album name, year, genre, track number, track name & comments from the All Music Guide.

“My MP3 file and folder names are just as crucial to me. The word ‘the’ is removed from the name of the group (ie: Rolling Stones, not The Rolling Stones). Each band or artist has their own folder on the root of a 2-terabyte drive on a server. Under group name will be album year and date, so it would look something like this expanded:

Root
Rolling Stones Â
       1968 – Beggars Banquet
                01 - Sympathy for the Devil.mp3
                02 – No Expectations.mp3
                Etc.

       1969 – Let it Bleed
                01 – Gimme Shelter.mp3
                02 – Love in Vain.mp3
                Etc.

Rush
       1976 – 2112
                01 – 2112 Overture.mp3
                02 – A Passage to Bangkok.mp3              Â
                Etc.

“I also downloaded all the album art and insets, liner notes, etc. and copy it into the folder with the music. Most MP3 players will display the album art and the Id3 tags.

“My collection has risen to over 25,000 albums. With everything organized under strict guidelines, I am never caught searching for an album. I have seven stereos in my home, each with a direct connection to the MP3 server via the Squeezebox Duet, a very sweet piece of hardware.

“Smart move encoding to 320kbps; drive space is super cheap now days. A couple of other cool programs I use are MAC (MPEG Audio Collection) – a great freeware utility designed to organize your audio file collection. It is fast and easy to use, scans selected drives for supported audio files and lists them in an Explorer-style tree-view interface. You can retrieve all information about your audio collection, and you can play files as well. It also scans your MP3 library and allows you to export a report in Excel. This is a handy way of double checking your tags, as well as a nice reference to keep track of albums you already own. Audio Catalyst is a nice MP3 editor/encoder, and Tunebite is a universal converter (including iTunes!).”

Dave concludes with tremendous understatement: “I am very passionate about my music collection.” 

I’m happy to report that I’ve already glommed onto the first two points Dave made, based on research I did before I converted my collection. The freeware PC program I use, TagScanner, does exactly what he suggested with Tag & Rename, but it also tracks and organizes, too, like MAC. I also am in the process of cleaning up the folder names and organization, as he noted.

Thanks for the great advice, Dave.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.