Best way to organize/tag music?

[z4ckattack]

Hey everybody, just got a new 15GB ipod and so I need to organize my music collection (finally). I have a lot of songs and most of them are a tag nightmare, how do I quickly fix these? (Quickly meaning NOT 3 days of re-tagging). Is there some program that will look up the filenames on CDDB and correct it for me? The filenames are fine but the tags are all screwed up.

Thanks!

[Mikebuzzsaw]

YEa.. im wondering too.

[baggss]

I know of no easy way. CDDB is poor at best when based on filenames. When I first started using iTunes it took me a week to sort out the tunes on 2000 or so file collection. When my wife switched to a Mac it took her a few weeks on her 5000 or so collection. I don't think there is an easy answer.
There are some automated tools out there that can do bulk tagging for you, every song in a specific folder can have the Genre changed to rock, every song on an album can have the same artist and album name, but sometimes you have to go through multiple songs 1 at a time to get the tags just how you want them. For me, this is a lot of the fun of having a big music collection. Keeping it arranged just the way I like it can be pretty challenging sometimes.

Also recommend you look through this forum for a thread called "Just tagged 5700 mp3s". There's some good info in there as well.

[ashawley]

If you're in windows, you should check out the Windows Software section. There's a Compendium of tools for you.

If your files are truly named well, then any good tag editor (i.e. id3-tagit) will let you populate the tags based on your file/folder names. As long as you've followed a standard you should be fine.

Adam