How I Managed to Tag 70GB of MP3s in a Few Months.

First, let me start by saying that I never bothered tagging any of my MP3s until about a half a year ago when I bought a Zune (in another post, I’ll explain why I picked the Zune over an iPod).  I used to listen to my MP3s straight from the folders themselves independent of any player, so I had no reason to tag my MP3 files.  In fact, I always thought that tagging more than 80GB of MP3s (more than 10,000 songs) would be a very daunting task that will take years.  However, when I realized that in order to get the most out of my Zune player and Zune desktop software, I would had to tag all my music.  At that point, I had to bite the bullet and tag all my music, otherwise I won’t be able to have a pleasant experience using the Zune player or the Zune Software.

This is how I managed to tag almost 90% of my collection in a few months.

The first thing I did was to create three folders,  “unorganized”, “organizedUntagged”, and “tagged”.  All my music was initially placed into the “unorganized” folder.  All new music that I will get from this point on would always go into the “unorganized” folder.  Even if the MP3s came from legitimate sources, such as Amazon or eMusic, they would still go into the “unorganized” folder.  Even though files from legitimate sources would be properly tagged,  they were not necessarily be tagged in my own personal standard.  For example, I don’t always agree with the ‘genre’ tag given to some songs.  Basically, the main goal was for me to move all my music from the “unorganized” folder into the “organizedTagged” folder where the files will be grouped by genre.  Finally, I would move the files from the “organizedTagged” folder into “tagged” folder where the music would be properly tagged and organized by genre.

unorganized to organziedUntagged

The “unorganized” folder does not have any sub-folders.  The “organizedUntagged” folder has a sub-folder for each genre.  The first task is to move each file into the appropriate genre in the “organizedUntagged” folder.  Many times, this can be done without listening to the songs – just simply cut-n-paste.  Sometimes, when I don’t recognize the song, I must listen to a few seconds of the song.  I don’t spend a lot of time determining the exact genre – I just quickly pick the best genre.  The key to quickly sort all music by genre is to just pick the best possible genre and don’t overthink the proper genre – this decision is not final, you can always change the genre if you feel you’ve assigned the wrong genre to a song.

organizedUntagged to tagged

When I get songs of the same genre in one folder, then I can use Mp3 Tag Tools to fix the tags in each folder.  With Mp3 Tag Tools I get a spreadsheet-like view of each folder, where I can edit each tag in every file in the folder quickly and easily.

Example of a folder before any tagging is done (click to enlarge):

Notice that most of the songs in this view have an incorrect value for Title, Artist, and Genre.  At this point, I don’t think about genre at all because I am looking into all the files in one folder, hence they belong to the same genre.  Therefore, at this step, I simply add proper Title and Artist tags – so the process goes rather quick.

Example of a folder after all tagging is completed (click to enlarge):

a few notes regarding these screenshots:

• I do not fix any album data, I figured that the time spent looking up album information is not worth the benefit of having it.  If I were to supply album information per song, then I would be taking a lot more tagging my files.
• I am also ignoring any album art, track number, comments for the same reasons for ignoring album name.
• Basically, the only tags I fix are: Title, Artist, and Genre.
• Since all files reside in same folder, this means that the genre is the same for every track.  Therefore, when I am finished with a folder, I can quickly copy-and-paste all the files into the folder with the same name in the “tagged” folder.
• I am using the ID3 v2 as the tagging mechanism.  ID3 v2 has a couple of advantages over ID3 v1 such as: not limited to a finite set of genres and tag fields are not limited by number of characters.

Pretty much that is all.  I have my Zune desktop software point to my “tagged” directory and the software automatically imports every song that exists within that folder.  Basically, every time I cut and paste files into my “tagged” directory, they automatically appear in my Zune software and, subsequently, my Zune portable player.

As you can see, tagging my MP3 files was not a daunting task as I initially thought.  The time spent tagging these files is well worth the benefit.  Having every single track properly tagged greatly improves the way I interact with my music collection.