Mastering your music

Organising your music collection
From writing on cassette labels to metatags and folders, organising music has changed dramatically, but it’s still the key to being able to find your way around the collection months or years later.

To make sure that you’ll be able to navigate around your collection properly, it is not only important to name the files correctly but also to append the right metadata.

These bits of data – tags – contain additional information such as the track title, artist, album name or genre and are stored in the audio file. Both hardware and software players can read and display these tags. This means that you will always know which song is being played without having to pack all of the information into the file and folder names. In addition, you can include the album cover and song lyrics in the tags.

Filename comes first
In Windows Explorer, filenames are the main way of seeing what’s what. How you name your music files is up to you; many people create a folder for each artist and then put each album in a separate sub-folder. The sub-folders then hold the tracks, playlists and CD covers.

You can set up the right directory structure and file-naming convention when ripping a CD using EAC. To do this, select the Filename tab from the EAC/EAC Settings menu. In the Naming conventions field use placeholders to create a rule that lays down how EAC should name the files. EAC gets information about which audio CD is in the drive from the FreeDB online database. By clicking on Database, and ‘Get information about CD from internet’, FreeDB fetches the relevant descriptions from the internet.

The freeware Foobar2000 Tag Editor adds metadata to audio files that are not already tagged. It’s more than just a good tag editor; it is also an excellent audio player, which supports the Aac (Adaptive Audio Codec), Flac, mp3, Mpc and Ogg formats. Further formats can be added as plug-ins.

To import audio files, either select them individually after choosing File, Add Files or use Add Directory to add all the files in a directory at once. The selected files are then listed in the program window. Right-click on a file in this list and choose Properties from the context menu.

If you downloaded the tracks from the internet – say from iTunes or Napster – or if they have been ripped by EAC with access to FreeDB, the files will already have their own metadata, which you can view on the Metatags tab. The way in which the tags are allocated depends on the files’ source. You can alter them to fit your own preferences by clicking on a field and entering new details.