Find out how a few utilities can help organise even the most extensive digital music collection

The larger the music collection on your hard disk, the more difficult it becomes to manage.

It may even get to the point where you no longer recognise the titles of the albums you’ve stored on an individual CD or DVD. If your audio collection includes hundreds of records, keeping it organised can start to look like a hopeless task.

But help is at hand – we’ve put together a collection of utilities to take care of the work. With our selection of tools, you can manage large numbers of music files with just the press of a button.

Use metadata
Utilities such as The Godfather can bring order to a chaotic collection of audio files. Using these tools enables you to not only find albums on your hard disk, but also – more importantly – label tracks with matching metadata (or tags).

Tags are labels stored in the music file and contain information, for example, about the track’s source album, genre and date. A tag can also contain an album cover image or lyrics – items that can be displayed when a track is played back with audio players such as Winamp or Foobar2000.

The most important requirement for keeping your music archive in order is to make it quick and easy to administer. So, it’s helpful if you have all of your favourite music in one place. Archiving your CD collection on the PC – also known as ripping – offers many advantages; thousands of pieces of music can fit onto DVDs or hard disks, be annotated with tags and have value added with cover artwork images and lyrics. Gradually, you can build up a virtual CD shelf on your PC screen.

For most people, mp3 is synonymous with music downloaded from the internet or copied to a mobile player. Mp3 isn’t the only format though; codecs such as Vorbis (Ogg) or Musepack (Mpc) have learned from the technology and improved on it, offering sound quality that is just as good for the same or smaller file sizes.

To keep your music files sounding as close as possible to the original, the Ape, Flac or Shn codecs are also worth a look. There’s an overview of different compression formats and their space requirements in the section ‘Choosing the right audio format’ below.

From CD to hard drive
Converting audio files is particularly easy using the freeware DBPoweramp. All you have to do is select the music file to be converted, access DBPoweramp from the context menu, choose the target format and the conversion will start.

The Lame mp3 encoder is already integrated and more than 40 others, both well known and lesser known, can be downloaded free as plug-ins. The codecs come as a .exe file; double-clicking installs the codec in the program, and it can then be selected from the context menu.

Another useful tool for copying whole CDs is EAC (Exact Audio Copy). The big advantage over other programs is its Secure mode, which spots and warns of errors in the copying process.

To get started, specify which codec you prefer to use for ripping via the EAC/Compression settings menu, then select the destination and naming method for the music files from the EAC/EAC Settings menu and use EAC/Drive settings to calibrate your CD/DVD drive – there must be an audio CD in the drive during calibration.

Start the copying process by selecting the tracks to be copied in the main window and then choose Actions, Copy selected tracks and Compressed. Among EAC’s useful functions is a normalisation function, which can be used to equalise the volume of selected audio tracks.

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.

Playing tag
There are different formats for music file metatags, of which the best known is ID3. Version 1 only has seven data fields: title, performer, track number, album, year, genre and comment. Its successor, ID3v2, can have dozens of fields, although there are few players that can display them all.

However, for managing the collection on your PC, information about the language, label and subtitles can be useful. If you wish to complete fields that are not yet saved in the file, you can use the Add New Field command from Foobar’s Properties context menu dialogue box. See the section ‘Other tag formats’ for information about other types of tagging.

Instead of entering all the metadata by hand, you can use the folder and filenames as a template. To do this, highlight all of the tracks in the main window and right-click to open the Properties dialogue box.

Using the Metatags context menu tab, select Fill Values from File Names. In the Patterns field, enter the actual directory structure and file-naming convention in the form of placeholders. For example, if the path is Artist/Album/CD number/Track number/Filename, then the pattern would be %artist%\%album%\%discnumber %\%tracknumber.%.%title%, which extracts all of the data from the path and saves it in the corresponding data fields.

It works the other way round too, so you can create filenames from Tags. To do this, select File Operations, Move, Rename or Copy Files from Foobar’s playlist context menu. All the necessary settings are made from this dialogue box.

Using the same method as before, enter a pattern for the renamed files into the Output file name format field. This time, the Tags serve as sources for the filenames and their data fields are referred to with placeholders such as %album%, %artist% or %tracknumber%. This means you can create a complete directory structure by placing a backslash between the placeholders. You can also find similar functions in programs such as Prograce’s MP3 Sorter, provided your tracks have been tagged.

Enhance your archive
Once you have filled the most important tags with accurate details and named the files as you want, only the finishing touches remain. Many music fans like to save the album cover artwork and lyrics as well as the basic details. You can use the Album Cover Art utility to trawl the internet for the relevant images for whole albums or individual songs (see image). The main source for album cover images is Amazon, but you can also make the program use the Yahoo, Buy.com and Walmart websites.

Click on the Folders icon in the toolbar to browse for the folder where the audio files are stored. The program will automatically list all the sub-folders and the music they contain in a tree structure. Clicking on an entry will copy the Artist and Album Tags as search terms to the right of the program window. Click on Download Covers to start the search for the corresponding covers.

If it is successful, then Foobar displays all the matching images under the heading of Album Cover Art. Select the album or track to which you wish to allocate a cover, select a picture by clicking on it and then on the ‘Set as cover’ button. If an entire album is selected as the target then the image is not only written to the relevant tag for each track, but will also be saved in Jpeg and Png format in the corresponding folder.

Saving lyrics
Lyrics can also be saved in an mp3 file. The Foobar Mini Lyrics plug-in is handy for this. If it is installed, the plug-in starts automatically at the same time as Foobar 2000. As soon as a track is played, Mini Lyrics searches for the corresponding lyrics. If it finds more than one set, you can choose which one to use, before they’re displayed.

Foobar highlights the line being sung, just like a karaoke machine; if you want to save the lyrics with the mp3 file, click on the Menu button – this only appears when you move the mouse over the Mini Lyrics window. Select File, then Save Lyrics to mp3 files. Alternatively, you can save the lyrics as a Txt or Lrc file, which can be recognised and displayed by some mp3 players when the song is played.

The Godfather
One of the most powerful programs for music management is The Godfather. It is particularly suitable for music that does not originate on an audio CD but has found its way on to your hard disk as an encoded file.

The Godfather offers numerous music management features, but in spite of this only plays back mp3s. For tagging and renaming files though, it supports all of the important and well-known music file formats from mp3 to Ape. The program’s main disadvantage is that beginners are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of functions.

On the left of the program’s window is an Explorer-like tree, which you can use to browse through the drives and directories on your computer. What is displayed on the right depends on which button is pressed in the toolbar. Using Rename you can create filenames from the details in the Tags, in a similar way to Foobar 2000.

To do this, use File Options, then Rename to make a template consisting of placeholders in the Use Variables field. The Tags section is normally used to change the metadata of multiple files.

For example, if you put a tick in front of Artist, enter a description of your choice and confirm it by clicking on Update, then the Artist tag for all the selected tracks will be overwritten with the new data. If you prefer to work track by track and fill in the Tags individually then select Edit by Hand.

If all that is too much, you can use The Godfather in automatic mode: the program will try to find album information from the FreeDB database. Click on the Online button to connect to the database, then activate FreeDB and click the button with the magic wand symbol. To start the search, click on the Search Freedb button.

The program displays the entries found under the heading of Result. If the right one is there, go to Transfer Album and then to Rename and Update. If the album you are looking for is not in the results list, then you can search FreeDB manually, clicking on the relevant symbol to activate a text search. You can then specify the artists and albums to look for.

Creating playlists
The Godfather can also generate M3u and Pls format playlists, which can be imported to player software such as Winamp or Foobar 2000. All that the lists contain is information to say which tracks should be played and in what order.

Click the Organize button to access this function; to generate a playlist, select the folder containing the tracks from the file tree on the left. The individual tracks will then be shown in the lower-right window and you can use Add selected to add songs to the list in the main window.

You can use tracks from different folders in a playlist – it doesn’t matter where the tracks are stored. After putting the list together, click on the Playlists button and then on Save. Give the list a name and select the format in which you want it saved.

Backup copies
Like digital photos, your collection of audio files can soon add up to several gigabytes. If a lightning strike brings your computer to a halt, your digital music collection could be toast too – unless you have a backup.

The larger the archive, the more effort and more tiresome making a backup becomes. However, you should resist the temptation to do without a backup. If, for example, all your music files are stored on a single hard disk then your entire collection will be lost if the disk fails – and if you’ve spent hours tagging files and adding lyrics or artwork, that’s a lot of work to lose.

And remember that it doesn’t have to be something dramatic like a lightning strike; it’s more likely to be a mechanical failure caused by wear and tear. So, keeping backup copies of all your audio files is a sensible precaution.

A small music collection of, say, a few hundred megabytes to a couple of gigabytes, can be backed up cheaply: it will fit easily on a few CDs or DVDs. However, the more your collection grows, the more unmanageable this process can become. Working out which tracks are stored on which disk often requires a printed list, and a lot of head-scratching.

If you’re using CDs or DVDs as your backup media then remember to handle and store them carefully. Ageing and scratches on the surface can cause data loss. Thankfully, utilities such as DVDisaster (see section called 'Software round-up') can be used to create error correcting data, stored in a file roughly 15 per cent of the size of the original data.

This information can be used to read bad sectors on the disc. It’s important to note that the error-correction file has to be generated while the disc is still working normally – ideally, right after making the backup.

As with much else in computers, when it comes to storage, you get a lot for your money these days, and easy-to-use portable USB hard drives can be bought quite cheaply. Particularly easy to use are portable USB2 hard disks – you can buy a 160GB drive for about £60; cheaper still are Pata or Sata hard disks in removable caddies.

The main advantage of hard drives over optical media is the higher data transfer rate, and the additional capacity removes the need to constantly swap media (see section called 'Software round-up).

If the hard disk is used simply as a backup device then the time consumed by read/write cycles is reduced too. If you decide to save your music archive on a second hard disk, using a synchronisation tool such as Synchronize It makes the job even easier.

This utility compares source and target folders and keeps them both in the same state, which means that you don’t have to make copies by hand and can be sure that you won’t forget any files.

Another reliable backup solution is a Raid 1 (mirroring) disk configuration, which means that Windows saves all files simultaneously on two internal hard disks. Every action on drive 1 is simultaneously carried out on drive 2, creating a backup automatically.

Whichever backup solution you choose, be prepared for a lengthy process the first time you make a complete copy of your library; it’ll be quicker in future, if you just copy the files that have changed. And while you’re waiting, why not listen to some music?

Bit rates explained
The bit rate of a recording isn’t necessarily a mark of the quality of an audio file. It shows, instead, how much space it requires, expressed in kilobits per second (Kbits/sec).

In a constant bit rate recording (CBR), the data is encoded at a constant rate over the whole length of the track, while for a variable bit rate recording (VBR) the storage space is dynamically adjusted for the different parts of the music.

The more complicated sections can be encoded at a higher bit rate than those where there is only a single note to be heard, so the overall compression can make more efficient use of storage space.

Choosing the right audio format
Whether you want lossless copies of CDs or space-saving music files, there’s a suitable audio format and conversion tool for every purpose. Despite the wide range of audio formats, the best known remains mp3. From a technical standpoint, it’s outdated, but because it is so well known and widely supported by both software and hardware players, it’s still very popular.

The best-known mp3 codec is Lame, which is particularly suited for files to be used on mobile music players. Musepack (Mpc) and Ogg Vorbis (Ogg) files, compared with mp3, are smaller and have better quality for a given bit rate.

However, hardware manufacturers have hardly taken any notice of the Musepack codec yet, although some do support Ogg. Windows Media Audio (Wma), on the other hand, is widely supported by hardware players, although not usually in its lossless form.

Its lossy codec gives acceptable quality at bit rates as low as 64Kbits/sec but cannot match the performance of Vorbis and Musepack in other areas; it’s best considered an alternative to mp3/Lame as a solution for users who require very small files.

Lossless codecs: Ape, Flac and Shn
The codecs we’ve mentioned so far are all lossy, which means that the copy is not as good as the original – to save space during the encoding, information that the codec thinks doesn’t matter is thrown away, making it impossible to recreate the original audio exactly.

If you value sound quality rather than compact storage size, then we recommend that you use another codec, such as Free Lossless Audio Codec (Flac), Monkey’s Audio (Ape), Shorten (Shn) or Wma 9 Lossless (Wma) instead.

Using one of these codecs, files are about two-thirds of their original size and quality is much better than their lossy counterparts. Ape, Flace and Shn files are all bit-precise copies that do not lose any data; some audio hardware such as the Neodigits Helios X5000 already supports Flac. Wma Lossless is less widely supported in hardware but can provide small file sizes with its 2:1 maximum compression.

Audio codecs compared
For our tests, we compressed a track ripped from an audio CD using various codecs at their respective default settings.

The original track was four minutes long, with a bit rate of 1,411Kbits/sec, taking up about 41MB on the hard disk. If you have enough hard drive space and are not prepared to compromise on sound quality or tolerate loss of information, you should choose one of the lossless formats. In terms of compatibility with players though, the mp3 output from the Lame codec is still streets ahead.

See the attached table of results above

Other tag formats
As well as ID3, there are several other tag formats used on music files. Apev2 – developed for the Mpc and Ape audio formats – allows you to add and fill as many data fields as you like, and include duplicates.

Unlike ID3v2, in which the details are encoded, ape saves them in plain text in the audio file header. The Vorbis Comment Format can be used with Ogg Vorbis and Flac, and is not very different from Apev2. Both Foobar2000 and Mp3tag work out which format to use, based on the audio codec that encoded a particular file.

Software round-up – top mp3 tools
DBPoweramp
Music files that are already stored on your hard disk can be converted to other formats very easily using DBpoweramp. There are more than 40 codecs available for download from the DBPoweramp website, and files can be converted from the right-click menu.

Mp3tag
If you’re looking for a simple but powerful tag editor, then Mp3tag fits the bill. It supports 13 audio formats and, like Foobar2000, is capable of adding user-defined tags, and can be linked to the FreeDB CD database. It will also generate playlists for you.

iTunes
Apple’s program isn’t just for managing your iPod. It also has a very capable music manager: you can use iTunes to organise songs as you wish, annotate them, specify genres and create playlists. The program’s repertoire also includes a burning function and a CD ripper, which can store CDs in Apple’s own lossless format.

Media Monkey
If your music is scattered all over your hard disk, then Media Monkey can put it in order. It scans all your drives for audio files and then sorts them, using the tags, into categories such as title, artist, album or genre. You can rate your tracks and make a playlist or audio CD with your favourite tunes, based on these ratings. The built-in audio player recognises the mp3, Ogg, Mpc, Wma, Ape and Flac formats; external player programs can also be integrated.

Amok Playlist CopyMusic can be copied to many mobile audio players easily using Windows Explorer or with bundled software. However, it’s worth taking a look at Amok Playlist Copy. This utility loads up an mp3 player based on a playlist. It reads the playlist and then copies all the songs that it contains to the player or to a directory on your hard disk – even if the source mp3s are distributed among various folders.

Md5 Summer
This program uses checksums to test how successful a backup was. Md5 Summer generates Md5 unique hashes – a sort of electronic fingerprint – from the original file and the copy. This tool’s big advantage is that it creates checksums for whole directories at once and saves them as an Md5 file. You can then compare the two files using CSDiff, which shows you any differences between the Md5 files, so that you know which – if any – audio files were not backed up correctly.

DVDisaster
This useful piece of freeware generates error correction information for CD and DVD data. If read errors occur, for example, because the media has aged or been physically damaged, you still have a good chance of rescuing all your music using this utility. DVDisaster tries to read as much data as possible from a damaged disk, and then reconstructs unreadable portions of data from the previously generated error correction information.

Synchronize It
This is a practical tool that compares the contents of two drives and synchronises them. This is ideal, for example, if one hard disk is being used as the backup medium for your music files that are stored on another drive.

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