Okay... here's the problem that I am having with tagging... and it's becoming a HUGE project and a huge thorn in my side. Any advice would help. Here's the situation:

I have about 40,000 MP3's on about 40 DVD's and CD-roms. They came from various sources. Some I downloaded over time from WinMX, some I ripped my own albums, and some I bought mail order from Europe.

What I want to do is to tag all of them with album art and move them over to my music server.

I initially only had the ones that I had downloaded myself, and many of the tags were incorrect (and still are.) I tried to attach the album art as best as I could using various programs, but none of them work very well... and some of the albums covers are incorrect.

So what I did was to put all of these in one directory (called MUSIC - with 4,000 files in it.) And then I ADDED to that MUSIC directory all of the MP3's that I purchased on DVD from Europe. These are mostly in the folder tree of Artist/Album/title. Many are tagged, many are not. Some have album art, some do not. A BUNCH of them have the correct Artist name/Album name, but the titles are "track01" etc.

I then ran a tagging program called "FixTunes" - it appeared to have the best reviews. It correctly tagged about 30% of these files, and moved them into a new directory called "fixtunes" with a tree of artist/album/title. That's about as far as the program got.

So now I have an incomplete 'fixtunes' directory of 'fixed' songs, and a BUNCH in another master directory that still need help.

What I WANT is all tunes in one directory with the tree of artist/album/title. All files tagged with title, artist, genre, and album art.

Now I am worried that if I use ANOTHER tagging program, it may attribute songs in the fixed directory to other albums, or not keep some of the albums together... etc.

Really a mess. And starting to be a problem, since our music server has been out of service for 45 days while I am trying to figure this thing out.

Any ideas on how best to proceed?

Help!

I also have about 40,000 mp3's and they are all tagged right using Tag&Rename, but that was an hard work for me too (with a lot of handmade...) especially when songs are not grouped by complete albums, because only complete albums with the tracks in the right order (like on the original CD) can be automatically tagged by T&R or any other tagging program...

Otherwise you can try to let eJukebox build partials albums with your mixed tracks... Normally it's one of its "great" features!

Good luck!

I agree with Pirk, you just have to stick it out. If you can group them by artist, you could mass tag a bit but, yeah, it is a pain in the ___. Once you have the tags right, make a backup copy (I use a USB drive) and then you won't have to worry about it, again. I use http://www.allmusic.com as a resource when I need album or song information.

Thanks, guys.

I think what I will do is re-transfer the songs from the original DVD's one at a time, and tag them as I go along.

Thanks!

Paul

Have a look at Mp3 Tag http://www.maniactools.com/soft/mp3tag/index.shtml
It will search it's database and amazon in several countries to get the info for you. I have tagged 20,000 songs with it so far without much trouble, but it will take a while if you have incomplete albums.

One off fee and free upgrades for life.