The Marv Digital Music Library

1. Acquiring the MP3s

a. Rip CD audio to WAV with iTunes then encode to MP3 with LAME using the --alt-preset standard setting.

b. Obtain already encoded MP3s at VBR/CBR192 quality from various sources.

2. Tag MP3s as accurately as possible through official sites, freedb.org, or Amazon.com through Tag&Rename.

Note: After trying out tons of different freeware and shareware tagging utilities, I have found that Tag&Rename is the best for all of my needs.

3. Grab album art from Amazon.com through Tag&Rename, or wait until later to drag and drop artwork to iTunes; use high quality images no less than 200x200 found through Amazon.com/music, Google Image Search, Buy.com's BuyMusic, or other random sites.

4. Rename files into the following format:

%My Music% / %Album Name% / %Artist% - %Album Name% - %Track #% - %Song Title%.mp3

using Tag&Rename's mass renaming feature after the files have been properly tagged.
Alternatively, I could have iTunes organize my music which is what I used to do. It renames your files into the following format, which you are unable to change: %My Music% / %Artist% / %Album% / %Track #% - %Song Title%.mp3
The main problem with this appears when you have compilations: albums with many different artists on one album. For this, if you have told it to, it puts those albums into a different folder called "Compilations". If you forget to set an album as a "compilation" it can be quite a hassle to find your files outside of iTunes, and if you do use the compilation feature, it leaves your file hierarchy inconsistant with some albums in this special folder.

5. Add music to iTunes' Library, making sure iTunes accepts the files into this exclusive area on your computer. (I had a problem with some files suddenly no longer being recognized by iTunes. Here is my fix.)


1 Dec 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)