Organize your music collection in 3 steps with 3 freewares

Everyone loves to listen to music and collect music from all sources. And over the years this collection becomes very messy with some files having name as Track 01, some having no metadata, some files sound loud and some are very difficult to hear. Fortunately most of these problems are very easy to correct and the best part is this can be done with free software. No need to buy anything.

So here are 3 steps and 3 softwares to a better looking and sounding music collection.

P.S. - Why the hell do you need 3 different softwares ? I have found the below softwares to be the best when it comes to doing what they are doing.

1. Fix the metadata - Filling up album, artist and title information for all tracks

For someone with 1000+ tracks in library this will sound a bit hard and cumbersome. Worry not… It’s simple.

• Download Winamp 5.5 from here.
• Why Winamp ? - I found Winamp to be the best for auto-tagging any kind of music you have. Winamp uses Gracenote service to tag your music files by sending the waveform info of your files to the Gracenote Database.
• Add your music files to Winamp’s playlist.
• Then select all files in the playlist (Ctrl + A).
• Right Click and select Send To —> Auto - Tag
• Have a coffee while Winamp does the job.
• After the querying is over for all files, click on “Apply Changes” for the information to be added to the music files.

2. Rename your music files to something sane

Now that your music files have got proper tags, it is time to rename your music files for easy identification. I use the format to rename my <Track> . <Album> - <Title> - <Artist>.mp3 music files. To do this :

• Download MP3 Rename from here.
• Extract the package and open the executable “MP3 Rename”.
• Add all your music files.
• In the “Rename Files” tab, check the box “Change the ID3 to filename rules”.
• Enter the renaming format.
• Click OK.
• Hit “Preview” to see how your songs will look after renaming.
• If all is fine, click “Rename”

3. Normalize the volume of your music files

Here comes the third step. Do you need to adjust the volume everytime the song changes in your audio player ? Then this step is just for you. You need to normalize the volume of your songs so that they sound the same. You can achieve this using MP3Gain.

What MP3Gain does is that it scans your music and adds a ReplayGain metadata to your songs. Almost all audio players today support ReplayGain. The best thing is that your song’s quality is not affected at all.

• Download MP3Gain from here and install it.
• Open MP3Gain and add all your music.
• Now click on Track Analysis.
• After the analysis is over, click Track Again.
• Now check your songs, the volume of all songs will be consistent.

Thats it.. The three steps..

May be I will write a second part to this soon.