Since I’m a beta tester on a new device, I thought it would be a good time to clean up my collection of MP3 files…
What. A. Nightmare.
OK… here’s the core problem: no media player reads/writes ID3 tags the same way. There’s a standard. It should just work. But it doesn’t. All players/libraries/rippers are guilty of something or another. Consider the list of things I use:
iTunes 7: easiest way to manage my iPod and nano.
Windows Media Player 10: on all my boxes, mostly for watching streaming video
Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2: on the notebook and work machine b/c I like the new UI
WinAMP 5: on my work machine for “Shuffle by Album” since iTunes 5 and 6 sucked at it and WMP doesn’t offer it
Windows Media Center Edition: on my home machine for grins, but my 360 uses it as an extender
And now the problems:
iTunes 7: Sure, this will pull down artwork for you, but it doesn’t embed it into the file. There’s not even an option for it. So if you stay in iTunes and iPod, everything is fine. Given the list above, it’s not an option. Besides, I hate being trapped by one media player.
WMP10: I’ll be honest… I’ve never liked the UI and since there’s no Shuffle by Album option, I haven’t spent much time with it… I do know that at one time it iffy about ID3 tags and it required the album art be in the file system… meaning that embedded images never got picked up. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore – might have been an earlier build of it.
WMP11: Same as WMP10 but now you can’t add specific files. It does this monitoring directory bit and for the life of me, I’m just irked by that, especially when you move files around the monitored directories. Ah well – it’s beta. At least it seems to see all of the tags and images. It also does some funky sort of thing with Genre and won’t group albums if certain tag fields don’t match, in spite of Album and Artist.
WinAMP: Out of the box it doesn’t see images in the MP3 files and looks for folder.jpg. It also seems to be more aware of file and path than the others. Shuffle by Album was added via a plug in, but I liked it better when it was just a player.
MCE: This is the most weird. It will show the embedded artwork one some screens but not in others. For those “other” screens it looks in the directory for AlbumArtSmall.jpg. It also has this notion that Artist and Album Artist aren’t the same: it will not group tracks together if they have different Album Artist values.
So what do you do if you want these MP3 files to behave against that list of players, knowing these problems? First thing: grab a media tag tool that works. I was using FixTunes – hell I even bought it – and it does some stuff well… it takes an MP3 file, reads in the ID3 tags and then does a search for art work. It lets you review it, make tweaks, and that’s all good. The problem is when it writes out the tag information: it sometimes misses. Either the ID3v1 or ID3v2 or PIC information… one of the three sometimes gets lost. And of course, that means even more “checking” with another tagging tool. Sucks, but it’s the best I could find for that crap.
Oh and at some point I had a ripper or a player that flipped Artist and Album around, which really messed with all of the library sorting attempts
Yeah. I spent the greater part of the weekend working on this stuff.
One tool looked up the images, another tool let me edit the MP3 files. Between the two I ended up with a clean collection of files: embedded images, up to date tags, all that rot. Even reformatted my iPod and nano and cleared out the iTunes library.
That covered iTunes, WMP, and it should cover WinAMP now that I turned on the “use the artwork in the MP3” flag, but what about the MCX box in the form of the 360? This was a tough one. It does the WMP11 “monitor the directories” stuff but it doesn’t sync the media list… if you delete an MP3 file, it doesn’t update the catalog. On the MCE box, you can get at this catalog via WMP. On the MCX box, you can’t… the only thing I could find was a blog post that tells you where the catalog is stored on the PC: you can delete those files and the next time you go to the MCX session, the catalog will be clear.
This is where being a coder comes in handy :) A quick check via Windows Live Search [yeah, I use it!] and I found UltraID3Lib which is a .NET Assembly for editing ID3 tags. After a couple of hours I had a utility that ran through every MP3 file it could find, grabbed the embedded album art and saved it out as folder.jpg. It then resized the image to 75 x 75 and saved another copy as AlbumArtSmall.jpg. Of course, it helps that I started storing my music as \PlayListName\Artist\Album but I did that a long, long while ago. I may take a look and see if I could get it to sync Artist and Album Artist, but I dunno about… something about batch editing this crap makes me worried.
Done. At least it is now. I mean. I’m not doing anything more.
Whoo!
what is this shuffle album thing? wmp has really good shuffle support so I don’t quite get what is missing…
Ah, Shuffle by Album: It would select the first track of a random album. Then play that entire album in order. Then skip to another album.
In the past, when iTunes offered this it would take Play Count into consideration and keep coming back to songs you’ve played a lot before… that would drive me nuts because if I heard something a lot, I don’t want to hear it for a while. iTunes 7 (or maybe 6) includes a seeding option for it… could be totally random or it could stack up songs you like. Was nice to see that added.
Ah. You can do that in wmp, but, you would have to make each album one track by ‘stiching’ them together with 3rd party software. I do this with some of my classical albums where the entire set of 6 cds is one song :)
But then how do they shuffle between the album? I got stuff grouping now as an album – they just don’t shuffle by it.
You forgot about Musicmatch. No jukebox does better at tagging and actually embedding all the content. Too bad it such little support with other MP3 players, but I just use it for organization and playing.
Hey, I know this is an old post, but you think you could put out a version of that ID3 utility that would do the opposite? i.e. For each mp3 check for folder.jpg and if it exists put that in the file?
Not really – the ID3 Library doesn’t work altogether well with image-inserting… there should be a few different tagging tools out there that do something like this, I think – take a look at Tucows or DownloadSquad… they might have something already.