Sunday, April 19, 2009

Adventures into album covers

I've spent several hours trying to complete my music library with the correct album covers, including various tracks I really don't remember where I got. I'm sure some of them are illegally copied from somewhere, but the majority are ripped from physical CDs that I own. (I have a whole bunch of old vinyl albums which I haven't digitalized yet, though.)

Mp3Tag has been an invaluable help; it can search freedb given a set of tracks, and it can also search Amazon.com. There is also a menu option for searching discogs.com, but that never seems to work. I'm not sure why.

Several hundred tracks did not have any tag info at all. I had to go purely by file and directory names. Very weird, I'm sure that when I ripped them, they looked good. My programmer brain wanted to start disecting the files to figure out if the files contained any clues to which program I used to rip them, but the rational part of my brain said that that was a waste of time. Which it surely was. I'm still curious about how it really happened. After getting the album and song names correct, Mp3Tag could fix the rest.

I still have problems with a couple of albums. I borrowed a CD from my sister (which I still think I haven't returned -- I'm sure she's forgotten): "Pops by Gershwin" with John Williams and the Boston Pops Orchestra. I can't find any information about the album at all. Even Google lets me down.

The OCD part of my brain tells me that I have to keep going until there are no more unknown album covers, while the other not-so-OCD part protests and would rather play another level of GTA:IV. We'll see which part wins.

2 comments:

Richard Carlsson said...

Have you tried MusicBrainz tagger ("Picard")? It can usually identify the songs based on the sound profile alone, regardless of the file name. Works really, really well.

Unknown said...

Yes, but that was a while ago. Maybe I should give it another try.