3 Ways to Organize Windows Music Library

Written by Alan Monday, 14 June 2010 08:00

With everyone now keeping their music collection on their PC a whole new problem has cropped up – our music libraries are a mess.  We’ve all got missing information.  Sometimes it’s the cover art.  Sometimes it’s artist or track information.  If you have ripped a lot of CD’s and bought a lot of online music there’s a good chance your library is a jungle.  Let’s take a look at three ways you can tame this jungle.

Windows Media Player

This is the simplest because there’s nothing to install.  If you have Windows then you have Media Player.  Just right-click the artist name, album title, year genre or song title and choose edit or right-click the cover and choose Find album info.

You can also paste in album art if you have CD cover to scan, or go to somewhere like Amazon and copy the cover from there.

MP3Tag

MP3Tag can be found here.  This is my favorite of the three tools listed here, and best of all, it’s free.  The interface and is clean and simple.  It allows you to edit (among other things):

• Title
• Artists
• Album
• Year
• Track
• Genre

The one drawback I have found is the time the program takes to open.  Each time you open MP3Tag it rescans your entire library and if that’s large (like my 40+ GB library) it can take up to ten minutes.

TuneUp Media

TuneUp Media is a pay program, but very reasonably priced at $19.95.  There is a free trial available which allows you to clean up 100 songs and 50 covers.  It automatically scans your music library and gives you a list of songs and covers it finds “errors” with.  While it was great on most of what it found, it had misinformation on some and failed to find others at all.

The program has been around for the Mac/iTunes platform for quite a while, but has only very recently been ported over to Windows.  I’ve heard great things about the Mac version, but I think the Windows version still needs some work.

Conclusion

I have been using a combination of manual editing in WMP and MP3Tag and my music library is getting into shape quite nicely.  If you have Windows, your WMP and MP3Tag is a free download (that comes with no baggage like toolbars, etc).  TuneUp  Media, while a decent program, does cost money and just didn’t seem ready for prime time.

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

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