Organizing audio

When we first started getting a serious collection of digital music, we weren't too fussy about organization. Then we started digitizing our CD collection and downloading music from the Internet in earnest.

One of our favorite sources of music was eMusic.com. EMusic was, and still is, the place to find the independent labels, and when it first started, it allowed unlimited downloads! This was fantastic but alas, such audio riches could not last.

Some subscribers took "unlimited" literally and got kicked off and eventually the company changed the subscription terms: from unlimited downloads for $9.99 per month to just 30 downloads per month for the same price. Even so, it is still worth subscribing because eMusic has content that's hard to find.

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When we first started getting a serious collection of digital music, we weren't too fussy about organization. Then we started digitizing our CD collection and downloading music from the Internet in earnest.

One of our favorite sources of music was eMusic.com. EMusic was, and still is, the place to find the independent labels, and when it first started, it allowed unlimited downloads! This was fantastic but alas, such audio riches could not last.

Some subscribers took "unlimited" literally and got kicked off and eventually the company changed the subscription terms: from unlimited downloads for $9.99 per month to just 30 downloads per month for the same price. Even so, it is still worth subscribing because eMusic has content that's hard to find.

The result of being a subscriber to eMusic was that our collection increased with wild abandon. It was at that time we discovered a program we found invaluable for organizing our music: MP3/Tag Studio published by Magnus Brading. We reviewed this outstanding $19 tool in 2003, and it has only gotten better. MP3/Tag Studio is the best tool we've found for batch reorganizing, retagging and reporting on MP3-encoded files. The latest version boasts macros and command line operation, along with performance improvements.

But by '02 our music collection surpassed 50GB, and we fooled around with devices such as the Turtle Beach AudioTron (reviewed in this column back in 2002) to make operations easier and test certain features. As an aside, we have to say Turtle Beach did the user community a huge disservice when it decided to discontinue the AudioTron in 2004. Any company with a piece of hardware they want to disown should turn its code over to open source so enthusiasts can keep it alive.

Since then, the organized part of our collection has grown to more than 100GB: 1,933 albums with a total of 14,215 songs by 1,075 artists. There's another 25GB of music waiting for MP3 tags. This lump consists of CDs that weren't recognized by CDDB when they were ripped, or never had proper tags in the first place, something that happens a lot for some reason with very long DJ mixes.

A big problem is that, over the years, about 10% of the albums have become duplicated, so we have several hundred files with names like song.mp3, song1.mp3, song2.mp3, song3.mp3, and so on. Apart from the names, they are identical in size, duration and tags.

We tried to find the duplicates by listing the files and sorting them under Excel, but that didn't work. Trying to identify the duplicate files by finding the ones with a numeral before the file type didn't help, because many of the files that weren't duplicated have names that end in digits.

We finally figured out that we could use MP3/Tag Studio to generate a list of the contents of the file tags. We then sorted the list by name and size under Excel, and (using a column with a simple formula that compared the attributes of the previous line with the current line) we could figure out which files were duplicates.