Dear readers, I come to you today with a peace offering, relevant to nearly everyone (and especially so to those of you who might be particularly anal). I’ve rounded up a few tried and tested apps for Leopard (tested on my current version of 10.5.5) that go a long way towards helping you expediate (or even just start) organizing your music libraries.
Assuming you hate getting blank metadata fields or ugly looking file names or randomly loud or soft gain on your songs and you’re on Mac OS X, I’ve got a few treats for you:
- TriTag – could be used to batch fix your tag information of all songs by an artist or in an album or something, but it truly shines in its allowing you to easily rename a whole bunch of files according to their ID3 tag data. Oh, and it’s free.
- Switch – lets you convert your music from one format to, for example, my favourite 128 CBR (constant bitrate) LAME MP3 setting, to standardize your music. This lets you chop off unnecessary “quality” that the average listener probaby can’t notice anyway to save space. I personally keep most normal songs at 128 CBR, symphonies and electronic at 320 KBS, and I don’t convert songs I receive from Amy. This one is free as well.
- MacMP3Gain – lets you analyze and equalize your music’s playback gain (i.e. “how much loudy it makes”) so that you won’t have to readjust your volume everytime you get to that one song that’s very quiet or that album that’s much too loud for the neighbours’ tastes. This one is useful but a little slower than its Windows counterpart (just MP3Gain) which I had also used. This one, miraculously, is also free. See a pattern?
And that about sums it up. Granted, I still rely mostly on iTunes and its relatively weak interface for editing tag info, but these three are definitely very useful for everything iTunes can’t do. Give em a try and I’m almost sure you’ll love the new MP3 library smell.