So last month I decided to finally clean up my music library.  What exactly am I talking about?  Well, when you have a massive music library like I do, the metadata inside of the songs usually is different between songs, albums, and artists.  Windows Media Player will automatically build your library based off of Artist, Album, or Genre (see picture below). 

 

Lets start on how you have your files organized.  Most people organize their songs by artist with all the albums under that, then all songs for that album under that folder.  Like this (I am using R.E.M. as the example for this tutorial):

 

As you can see, this is a CD is corrected already.  Metadata in a song is all the fields above past the “Name” field.  The data for Track #, Contributing Artists, Album, and Genre are all stored WITHIN the actual mp4 file.  You have many ways you can edit this data.  You can either go through each song and edit them by right clicking on each file and going to the details tab:

                                        

OR you could do it the easy way with one of my favorite programs ever created, Media Monkey!

Media Monkey gives you an easy way to manage your entire music library.  It has the ability to auto-tag albums from the internet, change filenames with scripts, and tons of other really cool features that helped me fix over 45,000 songs in just under a month.  Lets look at an ugly music library.

A lot of times, songs will either not have an artist or they are all different so when Windows Media Player automatically builds the artists, they will be under 2 different categories but they are really the same artist.  This is why I am using R.E.M. as the example, I had 3 different REM bands when I started on my music library.  Like this (notice the highlighted ones):

This is where Media Monkey comes in.  With the program, you can scan your entire music library into it, see all the metadata you want, adjust it easily, and add album art to the songs!  First you have to come up with a naming convention.  For example, do you want to have the band name as “Doobie Brothers” or “The Doobie Brothers”?  My personal preference is, whatever is on the album cover, that is what I put as the band name.

Lets fix the metadata on the R.E.M. album.  First off, scan your folder into Media Monkey (Go to File –> Add/Rescan Tracks to the Library).  Just select the base of the folder where you keep all of your music, then find the music folders you would like to fix.  As you can see from my setup, this CD’s metadata is in bad shape (3 different band names for the same band, 2 different album names for the same CD):

To correct this, Media Monkey makes it really easy.  Just select all of the files, right click, and hit “Auto-Tag from Web”.  Media Monkey bases it’s search off of the very first track’s Artist and Album data so make sure you have at least that one filled in with the CD you are searching for (if it is blank, it will not be able to find the CD).  As you can see, Media Monkey found the album with no issues.  Everything that it will be changing is highlighted with yellow.

Once you hit Auto-Tag, it will replace the song names, album title, and artist title with what is in yellow and when your media player plays the music, it will look perfect!  Now on to the actual file names.

If you are like me, you like to have a naming convention for even the actual filenames in your music library (yes i know it is anal, don’t judge me).  Luckily, Media Monkey also has a built in script to change your actual filenames based off of the metadata inside of the file!  To do this, select all of the songs you want to replace the names on in Media Monkey, right click, and select “Auto-Organize Files”.  With the destination bar, you can configure your naming convention however you like.  I personally do <Artist>-  <Song Name>.mp4.  It is very uniform and easy to tell song names based off of that.

Just hit “OK” and it will run the script to rename all of your files.  I hope this article has helped at least a few of you to clean up your music library.  If anyone has any questions about Media Monkey, feel free to ask it in the comments and I’ll answer it the best that I can.

–Zac McKinney