What's the best way to organize a digital music collection that has duplicates and some bad tags?

Question

Because of several hard drive failures, and consolidation efforts across multiple computers, I now have a very messy digital music collection. Does anyone know a solution that can effectively identfiy duplicates, and help clean up metadata in the files?

Answer 1

iTunes is probably your best bet, as it has a "find duplicates" feature which you can then use to clean up your collection.



It also does a great job of cleaning up the metadata in your files as well.

Answer 2

There are a number of ways, but I think the best way for you would be to use a music library manager. It allows you to go through albums and tag them based on online databases like freedb.org etc... It then stores all of your titles in a databasee and can even rename and organize the actual file structure. Helium Music Manager is probably exactly what you are looking for. Amarok is for linux and has a few less features.

Answer 3

I was in a similar situation. I had a great deal of luck with MusicBrainz - http://musicbrainz.org/ It looks for a digital fingerprint of each file and tries to tag it automatically. It was quite accurate with my huge mp3 collection.