iTunes Library Management

written on Tuesday, 20th October, 2009

iTunes does a great job in playing music. Once your library is set up iTunes works like charm, at least on a mac. But when you want to keep a custom folder structure or manage unsorted or badly tagged mp3 files iTunes really sucks.

There is a whole bunch of mp3 files with really bad ID3 tags in my music folder (which by the way is from a time when Winamp was almost the only way to playback mp3 files). Then some CDs were ripped without connection to the CDDB, thus have only the artist and album field tagged. Furthermore the aforementioned Winamp does a great job displaying files which do not contain any ID3 data. Which of course results in files without any data in iTunes – especially if you simply drop them into iTunes without switching off library management! Bad idea.

Since quite a while now I am working on cleaning up my iTunes library. I am following a strategy of small steps. Every time I stumble upon a badly or incompletely tagged file I take my time to correct and complete all the data.

On my way to the pedanticly uncluttered library I came across some helpers which saved me a lot of time – perhaps you already know them, they were new to me!

TriTag

TriTag converts filenames to ID-Tags and vice versa. You can define a pattern which then will be translated into ID3 tags. Before you apply your pattern you will get a preview, even a Pattern builder is included (though you won't need it)! This tool is so damn helpful, I can hardly imagine how I managed managing my music all these years without having a tool like this at hand.

Get the tool at the developers site:
http://www.feedface.com/software/tritag.html

MP3 Scan+Repair

Some of my mp3 files were rejected by iTunes, no matter wether I tried importing them via file menu or just dropped them into my library. Re-encoding of mp3 files is no solution, since you're loosing sound quality. Finder and VLC played the affected files just fine, but my Console caught an error thrown by VLC during playback of the bad files: org.videolan.vlc: [mp3 @ 0x8b7a10]Header missing
The fact that obviously my files were missing some important information, suggested to alter my search pattern from blaming iTunes for rejecting my files to how to repair mp3 files.
This finally led me to MP3 Scan+Repair (previously named MP3 Validator) which solved the problem faster than I could imagine.

Get MP3 Scan+Repair at the developer's site:
http://triq.net/mac/mp3-validator-mac-os-x

Get Lyrical

Okay, this last one is not really needed, but it does a great job completing your meta information! Get Lyrical automatically fetches lyrics from http://lyrics.wikia.com/ and saves them in the lyrics field of iTunes. This is especially nice if you own an iPhone which displays the lyrics on your standby screen during playback!

Get Lyrical is available at:
http://shullian.com/get_lyrical.php

You can download the three tools for free. Please consider to make a donation to the developers. In particular as these tools might save you quite a lot of time!