Managing your MP3 library can be both confusing and frustrating. Letting your music accumulate in a pile without any arrangement can spell disaster in the future. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools available to help you handle your MP3 management.
MediaMonkey
MediaMonkey works as both a music player and MP3-organizer software. It’s a great tool to have on your desktop, especially if you’ve found a lot of music while searching for audio files on your Windows computer. Before you pick up MediaMonkey, it’s worth noting that this is no lightweight app. It’s a very comprehensive way to keep your music collection under control. This means that beginners may struggle with the various tools available.
However, if MediaMonkey interests you, you have a whole new world of MP3 management open to you. First of all, you can organize your music by genre, year, artist name, or album title. This means that finding files will be much easier. Not only that, but you can edit the tags for every single music file. The software includes several tools that can do this job automatically for you as well.
Whether your MP3 collection is made up of podcasts, audiobooks, or plain old music, MediaMonkey offers consistency across the board. MediaMonkey will also let you fully control and edit your playlists. Plus, whenever you add music to the library folder on your hard drive, MediaMonkey will update it on the next launch.
One last feature we’d like to highlight is the ability to share your music across devices. So, if you have your computer set as your media server, you can connect your smartphone to it wirelessly and play files remotely. This means you don’t even need to physically store the music on your smartphone, which makes organizing MP3s even easier! There’s also a Pro version available that adds several more features to the free version of the app.
MusicBrainz Picard
MusicBrainz Picard is a cross-platform, open-source MP3 organizing software. It’s available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Haiku, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The best part is that it’s completely free. This means you can organize your music collection without having to shell out for an expensive package. Plus, it supports a wide range of formats. So, whether you have MP3, WAV or FLAC files, MusicBrainz Picard is always ready to organize it.
However, one of the best features is the AcoustID song identifier. Even the most organized MP3 collections will have tracks with little or no metadata. Perhaps even the tracks are mistitled. The AcoustID feature works by checking the “audio fingerprint” of a track against a database of songs. If it finds a match, it will fill in the tag data for you, saving you work.
Of course, you can still edit all the metadata yourself. Clicking on an MP3 file found by MusicBrainz Picard will open the editing pane. This will display the current data along with any missing entries. You can add these yourself using text entries. The more the metadata matches other tracks in an album, the more organized your MP3 collection will be. You won’t have random MP3 files on your hard drive.
Mp3tag
Mp3tag is great if you have a lot of duplicate MP3 files. That’s because it has a great batch converter. This means you can take a whole bunch of your MP3s and let Mp3tag sort them out.
You can also edit the metadata yourself. Apart from the batch converter, it’s very similar to MusicBrainz Picard. It can use the MusicBrainz database to get file information.
Despite the name, Mp3tag supports many popular (and some less popular) media formats. The app also supports cover art for albums, EPs, and singles. It will save the cover art right into the file. So, not only will your music stay organized, but it will also look nice when you scroll through your MP3s.
The app is also attractive because it allows you to export your library data. With HTML, RTF, and CSV exports all available, you’ll be able to see what’s in your collection – all in a nice table format. This will help you keep track of what’s out there and organize the data in any way that suits you. You can download Mp3tag for Windows and macOS.