Anyone know a good (preferably free or cheap) program for Mac to organize my music collection?

Why not iTunes? It has all the things you need.

@Pixel itunes only finds some artworks, doesnt find lyrics or album year or any other info.

i ran the album artwork finder and it found maybe about half of artworks.

You could try Corripio. But after they have been converted to MP3 or AAC or FLAC it gets hard to find good information on songs. With this stuff 50% is probably better than average.

Actually it does. (Click Get Info) The Lyrics you have to put in yourself. The reason it only found half of your musics artwork is because your titles have to be exactly like the original. It cant be for example “stronger_kaynewest” in the title section.

iTunes works well for me.

I use CoverScout but it is not free. It does work very well however and is quite reliable to even find rare tracks, album art and all those nice things.

Maybe they have a trial you could use?

The best thing is to use iTunes and organize it yourself. No automated service is really good.

yeah but i need a program that will do all that stuff for me automatically. itunes involves too much work of going thru and making sure i have the right titles and everything. i need a program that will go in there and fix it all for me.

mad props to anyone who wants to go thru 2500 albums and manually organize them but i don’t have the time or energy to do it myself.

i checked out coverscout but that seems like too much work and its 40 dollars lol. corrpio had the whole free thing going for it but it couldn’t find a single album artwork or lyric.

thanks for the help any other suggestions??

and I have already done probably about 20 hours of basic reorganizing and whatnot before this. I just am looking for a new solution because I’m getting tired lol

You are kinda screwed. Without proper ID3 tags you won’t reliably get artwork or lyrics.

How did you get 2500 albums? Normally the stuff on bittorrent is tagged pretty well. If you rip a bunch of CD’s without getting the ID3 info first you end up with a bunch of tracks called “untitled 1” and that it damn near impossible to fix.

pay a friend. haha.

Actually I believe I remember downloading an Application that would listen to a part of the song then identify it. Then fixing my iTunes mess. I’ll see if I can try and find it

There’s the MusicBrainz project that seeks to enable easy identification of audio files. It does it by creating a unique digital ‘fingeprint’ for each song that can be identified even across different formats and ripping methods. The system also accounts for any metadata that’s already there and pulls it into a community-database that gets more accurate as people use it and refine the database by making corrections.

Using the client programs they’ll sift through a bunch of music and automatically give it appropriate ID3 tags and/or rename them. I used the original ClassicTagger program a few years ago and it worked great – you just throw a bunch of songs into it and it magically knows what they are, even if they were lacking tags or had wrong tag info. Any that it’s not sure of are put into another list that you can just fill-in the blanks for, but it was able to identify more than 80% of my songs and tag them.

The current PicardTagger program is the one to use – it’s supposed to be technically superior and also runs on Linux and Mac (as well as Windows).

This only does the standard ID3 tags so you’ll get year, artist,etc. But once you get all your songs fully tagged you can find other solutions that can go through and add lyrics/artwork based on the tag info.

Thanks everyone!

the app that would listen to part of a song and then identify it I think is “album art thingy”.
that has actually worked really well for lyrics and artwork but you do have to play a few seconds of the song for it to work. Plus it only uses amazon for images so they are kinda small but thats okay. I’d def. recommend that for missing stuff.

@artificialard
i had actually had already had “ieatbrainz” which was the old musicbrainz app but that kinda sucked. I just tried out PicardTagger which is kind of confusing to find because on the homepage it says it is only for windows and linux but then there is a mac download and that program has been great so far.

Thanks everyone for their help. So far the PicardTagger has gotten like 90% of the stuff i’ve searched for so I would highly recommend that! (plus it’s free) A combo of the album art thingy and picardtagger should do the trick!

I’ve been checking out Album Art Thingy and it looks like it can cover the album covers and even lyrics now. This program only adds them as the song is being played – I’d prefer a program that will just sift through a bunch of files but it’s better than nothing!

For those that haven’t tried Picard, I know it’s a little difficult to get into but it works!

Just my two sense, but I did all this manualy arcoarenna.

Yea i recommend iTunes you can download it off Apple.com for free it holds anything you can think of. Music, Movies, Music Videos I use it myself for my iPhone and i think its a great program.

All automated services suck. they have the wrong ID3 tags, wrong album art and lack a lot of tags. Seriously, it’s the best to do it yourself.

yeah i kind of realize that now. although this is gonna take me like 6 months to do manually. I used music brainz to organize and it fucked up so many of my id3 tags that were from local bands and stuf that it didn’t know it just assumed so it kind of messed up a good bit of my collection.

I would definitely be wary when trying to use that. itunes has never really helped me in the process though just been there while i did all the work myself haha.

I wish last.fm launched a service like this…

Gabe Adiv here, CEO of TuneUp. I’ll admit that I am subjective, but definitely suggest you check us out at tuneupmedia.com We built an application that we, as major music fans were craving. Super easy to use and there’s a free version that allows you to clean up 500 tracks. Also cleans up your cover and has a built-in concert alert system. Let me know what you think…