I feel like a teacher correcting schoolwork lately. In my ongoing quest to wrangle my extensive music collection — having recently converted 2,000 CDs to MP3s – I’ve been spending most of my time fixing other people’s mistakes.

I’m talking about the tags attached to each music file, which iTunes uses to display information such as title, artist and album on an iPod. When you rip a CD, this information is frequently culled from an online database such as freedb. But that information is only as good as the users who took the time to enter it, and frequently, to put it bluntly, it’s just plain wrong. The biggest problems occur off the beaten maintream-music path. For example, a few Jerry Goldsmith orchestral film scores were tagged as being New Age. Composer information is often missing on classical works, even though there’s a field for it, or included in the track title. Often, a conductor is listed as the “artist” for a classical recording while the composer — more important when hunting a track on an iPod — goes unlisted. And then there were several discs whose information was all in Japanese. After some rooting around at translated pages of Amazon Japan and pasting track titles into the Babel Fish translator, I was able to sort them out.

Now, this isn’t a big problem with tracks downloaded from online stores such as the iTunes Store and Amazon, but it’s a huge deal when dealing with ripped discs, especially when 30,000+ files are involved.

So I’ve been going through the tracks and albums to fix all of the errors. The goals: consistency, accurate displays, easy searching. The free PC program TagScanner has been invaluable in this regard. It’s a powerful editor that simplifies the process of renaming and fixing tags. I couldn’t imagine doing this using iTunes’ limited renaming features and see no better option for purchase.

The only downside is that I’ve been spending so much time tidying up tags — which has been fun in that it has helped reacquaint me with forgotten recordings — that I haven’t taken the time to enjoy all of my more-easily-accessible music. I finally did something about that this morning by grabbing a few thousand rock/pop tracks, fixed tags or not, and transferring them to the iPod to listen to in the car on the way to work. It was a good ride.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 9:44 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.