kellyfelkins.org: lessons learned in electronic media

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lessons learned in electronic media

Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.

Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

It seemed simple at first. Mp3 rippers were everywhere. Just slide the CD into the computer and, voila, mp3s!

oh, there are bitrates?

oh, some rippers rip better than others?

oh, I need to deal with these tags?

Cool, here’s a ripper that will get the tag information from someplace …out there.

oh, these tags that came from out there are wrong?

So I’ve done a lot of learning on this. These are just some of the issues. I’m not going to go into building and configuring the home network or how to effectively back up an ever changing 30GB plus collection. And, yes, I did loose it once before it was backed up.

My current process goes like this:

Rip the CD with a quality ripper and compressor. I use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and LAME. EAC is an audio grabber that copies the bits from the CD onto your disk somewhere. It will optionally run the compressor of your choice on those bits creating the mp3 files. LAME is a quaility open source compressor. EAC will grab the music information from freedb.org which is used to name the mp3s and populate the id3 tags. Unfortunately, freedb only gets you close to where you need to go with naming and tagging.
Retag and rename the mp3s using the MusicBrainz tagger. MusicBrainz keeps their own database of music information which is much more carefully managed than freedb. Plus, MusicBrainz records signatures of music tracks, so it is possible to identify music by this signature rather than just by the (possibly wrong) mp3 file names or id3 tags.

Here are some other details to help you get it right the first time:

Due to reasons I don’t fully understand, the LAME project does not offer precompiled versions of LAME. However, others do. I get my copies here.
EAC needs settings for LAME. I use the “recommended” settings, which work great.
You can define how EAC will name your files. I use %D[backslash]%C[backslash]%N-%T. In english this means “create an artist sub folder, in that create an album sub folder, in that name each track with the track number, a dash, and the track title.” It’s actually more important to do this in MusicBrainz—see below.
I use 2 folders for my mp3s—a main folder (say, “My Music”) and another folder called something like “musicbrainzed”. My musicbrainzed folder is in My Music. This allows me to point an mp3 player at My Music and load up all of my music. It allows me to keep separate my first try tagged files from my properly tagged files.

Using MusicBrainz

The current MusicBrainz application is a little tricky to use but I understand there is a new version in development which will address the issues I discuss here.

MusicBrainz attempts to recognize each of the tunes in the directory you give it individually. I recommend you give MusicBrainz a single CD to tag. It will look them up in its database and tell you that some were recognized and some were not. I recommend that you check both. In fact, I’ve gotten in the habit of overriding its list of recognized tracks. Here’s how I do it:

Click on the Identified tab and view the information associated with identified tracks. Often there will be one or a few artists associated with various identified tracks. Memorize the one you think is correct. Pay attention to artist and album details.
Select all of the tracks in the Identified tab and click the Misidentified button. In other words, tell it you don’t trust any of its identifications.
Click on the Unidentified tab. Select a track and click “Lookup”. This will bring up a list of artists and tracks on albums.
Click on the artists name.
Click on the album name. Now you have a list of the tracks for that album. Now it is easy to assign the track names to the track files. You simply look at the highlighted track, and click the little tag icon next to the appropriate track below. Do this for each track.
Now you click the save icon on the toolbar (looks like a floppy disk with an arrow). My MusicBrainz is configured to move the files to the “My Music/musicbrainzed” folder.
Close MusicBrainz. You are done.

To configure MusicBrainz to move files to the proper directories with the proper names, view “options” and click on the “naming” tab. Check the “Rename files when writing metadata tags” box. I use this as my naming specification:

%artist[backslash]%album[backslash]%0num-%track.

I use this for my Various Artist naming specification:

Various Artists[backslash]%album[backslash]%0num-%artist-%track

Have fun.

-Kelly

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