In less than five minutes, I had not only renamed all of my iTunes music files exactly as I wanted them, but also organized nicely into folders sorted by artist.  Want to know how to rename iTunes files yourself?  Read on!

Organize and Rename iTunes Files and Folders

Before starting, I’d like to note that The Godfather 0.71 is still in beta; however, you can download the stable version 7.0 from the same site instead, if you prefer.  When you open the program, you’ll see, at first glance, what appears to be a somewhat complicated interface.  Don’t worry!  It’s not as complex as it seems.

You want to begin by selecting the main folder in the left-hand explorer pane that all of your music is stored in.  It can be the entire C:\ drive, or a specific folder where all of your music is stored.  In my case, I had imported everything into an “iPod Music” folder within the My Music directory, so that’s what I selected.

After selecting the folder you want, click Scan (the magnifying glass button), and every music file within that folder and its subfolders will be populated in the results.  You will see an “If Renamed“ column.  The program defaults to an “Artist Name ““ Song Title“ format, and shows you how the file names would appear here.

If you wish to rename your files differently, you have a plethora of options.  Above the Scan button, under Format Options > Use Variables, you will see a “%A – %T” field.  These are your variables.  If you click the down arrow to the right of that field, you will see a menu including all of the variables available to you.  Input the variables you like (mine were %T – %A for Song Title – Artist Name), and click the “Apply“ button to see the “If Renamed“ results.

If you’re not sure what the different row colors mean, you can view them by going to File > Options and clicking the “Colors“ tab (or by referring to the screenshot below).  There, you can also change the default colors if you like.

When you’re ready to rename your iTunes files, click the “Rename“ button, and The Godfather will quickly take care of the rest!  It will also report any problems it might have encountered or files that it skipped.  You can see those results in the lower left corner of the screen, as well as in the far right column in your music list.

The Godfather has many other features in addition to renaming and reorganizing your music files and folders, such as creating playlists, finding duplicates, encoding and decoding with LAME/Ogg Vorbis/MPCEnc, and editing ID3 tags.  You can refer to the program’s “Help” menu for an HTML help index that will explain more about the program’s additional features.

We have written a lot in the past on naming and organising your music library.   Here are some of those posts :

4 Easy Ways Fix Music Tags & Organize Music Library
Organize Your Music Collection Effectively With Media JukeBox
Organize and Manage Your Music  Collection with MediaMonkey
Organize and Tag Your Music Library with MP3Tag
6 Ways to Sync Music to Your iPhone Without iTunes

Do you know of any other great music management programs?  Tell us about it in the comments!

TuneUp Companion

TuneUp Companion has one major advantage over all the other solutions: it uses Gracenote CDDB database ““ which is considered to be one of the largest and most comprehensive out there.

TuneUp uses a technology similar to MusicBrainz, “˜FileID’ to fingerprint the song even without the proper filename ““ retrieving accurate metadata. Depending on the server-load, an album doesn’t take more than 15-30 seconds to fix. My experience with TuneUp was extremely positive ““ it only failed on an old classical compilation out of 253 albums.

In addition to fixing your music tags and songs, TuneUp also downloads high-resolution album art and integrates with YouTube to provide related videos to the song you’re listening; eBay and Amazon for merchandise and Ticketmaster/StubHub for concert tickets.

The “˜Never miss another show’ tab provides concert dates and prices for artists in your library, a very useful feature for any music fan.

It’s definitely the most comprehensive solution ““ and easy to use. TuneUp is available for Mac and Windows and works by interfacing with your iTunes Music Library. Even if you don’t use iTunes to manage your music day-to-day, you can download it, fix your music then import it in your preferred application.

MusicBrainz Picard

MusicBrainz, a non-profit corporation, picks up where Gracenote left off, as an open-source, freely available database of CD information or metadata. Picard takes advantage of this database with an intuitive barebones interface and a similar fingerprinting technology that aims to match the tracks as best as possible from the acoustic scan rather than on file sizes or names. The Scan takes a little more time than TuneUp but not significantly.

Picard supports plugins ““ although I had a hard time finding any notable ones ““ and does automatically download and save album art if it’s in the database. However, don’t expect album art on anything other than popular titles.

At heart I am an open source fan ““ and I always try to use it when I have a choice. That being said, I encountered a bug that undermined the functionality of the program for some albums. For example a ‘Jet’ album, properly tagged, had tracks indentified from two separate albums with the same correct name. Saving the information would split the tracks into different folders appearing twice in iTunes. This happened multiple times for quite popular recordings from Coldplay and The Killers.

MusicBrainz is a very exciting project and definitely deserves a second chance from users after this weird bug is corrected. If you’re willing to spend some time manually assigning names for misbehaving albums, it’s a good application. You can get MusicBrainz for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Mp3Tag

Mp3Tag is free, although it’s not open source. It uses the FreeDB database as its primary solution which is noticeably lower quality than MusicBrainz, but it also integrates with the Amazon catalog, which is quite large and boasts largely high quality album art. It’s a bit of work to get everything right but it’s worth it considering the price ““ free.

A nice feature I found in Mp3Tag allows you to automatically rename the filenames according to tags, useful when browsing the library directly from the file system.

Unfortunately, Mp3Tag is only available for Windows.

iTunes Store File Validator

Skip past the messy interface and you’ve got a marvelous little tool with features like Reverse Scrobble to update the play count within iTunes from Last.fm, embed album art in songs, automatically clean empty folders, set EQ automatically based on genre, and more nifty actions.

Additionally it scans your library and assesses whether your songs are iTunes Store quality ““ checks for all the important indicators and then creates and easy to use report. Download it from here.

I also approached FixTunes, an application similar to TuneUp, that instead of using Gracenote, piggy backs on multiple free databases like freeDB, Amazon and MusicBrainz to create its own database and then charge for its software. The worst part is that it doesn’t seem to have a fingerprinting technology and instead relies on the tags you already have ““ which is inherently prone to mistakes. I dropped FixTunes from this article because numerous comments were unfavorable and I personally had  my share of weird Chinese song titles, frequent crashes and fairly popular albums poorly recognized.

Conclusion

Using features from all the software above, you can manage to have a true collector quality music library: complete with correct metadata, album art and normalized filenames.

If you’ve got any suggestions for other great software that I missed ““ let me know in the comments; I’ll take a look at it and include it for the readers.

For those of you who don’t know, the ID3 tags are meta data that you insert into the file including the song name, the artist that sings the song, the name of the album, album art, etc.

Now I wasn’t inclined to sit there and start writing the ID3 tags from scratch so I jumped onto Google and took a quick look to see if there was a small program that would instantly remove the ID3 tags in one go (yeah I know, I can be really lazy sometimes).

After searching for a couple of minutes, it seems there is such a program – ID3 Kill (sounds like a James Bond gadget!). It is a portable USB app so it requires no installation. Even better Moneypenny!

So, first I went to the MP3 folder in question on my computer. Note how the MP3′s currently have all their ID3 tags intact.

Then I fired up ID3 Kill and this is what I found :

It’s extremely simple to use. Using the top yellow button, just navigate to the music folder where you want to remove the ID3 tags. Then tick the boxes for what you want killed. When everything looks peachy, click “GO” and let the app get on with its work.

It moves at lightning speed and when it’s finished, you’ll get a notification like this :

If you then go to the folder in question, you’ll see all the ID3 tags stripped and zapped, bagged and…well…untagged.

Weighing in at 175KB, this is a nice portable app to keep around if you need to nuke those ID3 music tags in a flash. It certainly beats having to delete and edit your tags one by one if you have an error with one of your music albums which is tedious!

Do you know of any other ID3 removal / clean up apps?

It works along the same principles as the HTML “alt” tag. After installing InfoTags, just move your mouse over the desired file and it will tell you the first few lines of what is inside :

It is also useful if you have say a mis-named MP3 file on your computer and you want to see what the file really is without playing it. If the ID3 tags are inserted, then InfoTags can read them for you :

It would be nice if the program extended support to other file formats such as PDF but in its present form, I am finding InfoTags extremely useful for navigating through the hundreds of Notepad files in my hard-drive.

(By) Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer, proofreader and blogger. Visit his blog at BetterThanTherapy

So if you listen to your albums on your MP3 player, you’ll end up with mis-named songs which makes it virtually impossible to find what you’re looking for. The key is to be able to edit the “ID3 tags” of the file which will change the name of the MP3 file to whatever you want it to be. If you use iTunes and an iPod, changing the ID3 tags is very easy. But there isn’t an easy way to change the tags inside Windows Explorer – until today when I found the freeware ID3 tag editor program Audioshell.

Audioshell is a shell program which integrates into Windows Explorer and allows you to edit your ID3 tags quickly and easily (you can edit tags by track or by groups). You can even upload cover art to each MP3 file.

First of all, download and install Audioshell. Then select the MP3 file to be edited and right-click with the mouse. Select “Properties”. You’ll now see two new tabs in the properties section. The one you need is the Audioshell Tag Editor :

Change the required fields to what you want it to be, upload your cover art (if you want to) then press OK. When you play the song, it will now show the song title properly :

The Tag Editor also has a comments section so you can theoretically tag each song to find it again quickly.

Does anyone know of any Audioshell alternatives? I really like Audioshell and its simplicity but if anyone else has any other suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Download Audioshell.