Recommended tagging utilities

[DavidHB]

(30-09-2016 09:46)Glandwr Wrote:  I use MP3tag and am very pleased with it's capabilities especially now I'm refining my metadata as the filtering function is excellent. The easiest way is to list all my tracks by starting at the upper 'FLAC' directory and filter out those I'm interested in, but as my music is on a NAS and accessed via WiFi, it can take a while to load (and I've only got 5000 tracks so far). I'm interested in Qoobar as a comparison...

I haven't tried Qoobar (nor feel the need as MP3Tag is so good), but the speed of access will be a function of your network rather than the software, and will (as you have surmised) inevitably get slower as your collection grows. My answer to this problem is twofold.

Firstly, I organise the folder structure within the music directory on the basis of Genre > Composer > Album (for classical music) or Genre > Artist > Album (for all other genres). This allows me, more often than not, to select a subset of the library to work on, so that the MP3Tag grid populates quickly. I still use filtering on the subset. One oddity of MP3Tag is that its own file selection dialog does not allow the selection of multiple folders at the top level, but if you select multiple folders in File Explorer and open them in MP3Tag via the context menu, this works perfectly well.

My other (in fact my main) method is to keep two copies of the music library - the master copy on the desktop and the production copy on the NAS. All ripping, downloading and tagging is done in the master library. I also run MinimServer on the desktop, so that I can rescan there and identify any issues in the master library from the log. Then, using SyncToy, I synchronize the master copy with the production copy, and rescan the latter. This process automatically generates a backup and is much less dependant on network speed.

I hope these thoughts are of interest.

David