Great iTunes Extensions
I've had iTunes for about a year now and my iPod mini since August and have had two frustrations:
- If I import a mix CD, CDDB only matches entire Cd's and not specific tracks. Additionally, music from the weird Napster age was tagged by imbeciles and tracks I have from then are labeled horribly wrong. The final relabeling issue is that several evolutions of CD to MP3 ripping software I have used to consolidate my CD collection have inconsistently constructed filenames and not used ID3 tagging.
- iTunes has a Beats Per Minute (BPM) column (right click any column header while viewing your library or play lists to see it). Problem is, not one of my songs has the BPM data stored there.
But this was supposed to be a post about great extensions so here are the solutions to my problems. Jeff, the sagely CSS guru and MacHead from work, showed me a fun tool today for his Mac called iEatBrainz which scans your MP3 and AAC files, compares some key fingerprint element of the files against a central repository and then finds the closest match for your songs. Once you review the matches you can write the results back to your MP3/AAC files.
Great... Well, it only runs on Macs so I was SOL. However, scanning the site I noticed it runs off MusicBrainz.org and listed on their site is a windows product called MusicBrainz Tagger which does the same thing. I've just scanned my 1600 songs in less than half an hour and it successfully categorized 1000 without assistance. It then provides an interface to the MusicBrainz site to allow you to manually tag any it can't identify outright, based on extra clues like artist name, album or title stored in the filename (I'm butchering the actual detail of what it does I'm sure!). So this product has fixed 66% of my music collection unassisted.
Jeff also directed me the answer to my second problem. I hadn't found a good beats per minute batch analysis tool. I want this to help me sort my collection into slow, medium and fast songs to match different running paces on the treadmill but while iTunes was obviously able to assist with the mix part, it gave no answer to the BPM. Enter MixMeister BPM Analyzer. It has been running over an hour and a half now but is nearly finished with my 1600 songs. Some of them look a little goofy like Sting's "If I ever loose my faith in you" which is reported as 195.98 BPM, but overall, it looks pretty good with many of my bangin house tunes up at the top. You simply point it at your music collection and hit submit and then listen to the joys of your processor fan whirring on and off for nearly two hours while it updates all your ID3 tags.
The last step to joy is that iTunes doesn't automatically rescan all your ID3 tags after they have changed. To do this, you must highlight all your collection in the Library view and right click on a song to select "Convert ID3 tags". Select version 1.0 and it sets to work reading the ID3 tags and updating itself. That took less than 10 minutes for the whole collection.