Music ID3 Tagging and Music Organizers

ID3 Tagging for International Music

If you are a music lover with large music collection on your hard drive, I’m sure organizing huge music is a tough task. There are so many music players and organizers but honestly speaking after trying many of them I could not find any one that really works. Every music organizer had some or other limitation or something that did not clicked my need. I have Creative Zen Vision M 30GB player and I wanted something that will manage my music player too.

Features I want in player:

1. It should update ID3tags including international languages. Somehow ID3tags are all English centric. If you want to only listen to Hindi songs of Rock Gener there should be way to tackle that cause when you are listening to Hindi songs you don’t want suddenly English song to be played. Same goes for other languages like German, French and so on…
2. Tagging of music is not accurate. I have tried tagging music from MusicBrainz, Amazon but they are accurate for 60% cases on English music but not on Hindi, Marathi songs. Also I found in lot of cases they destroyed the music that I had tagged.
3. Some players do not give full flexibility of organizing music in folder – file structure and naming the files as per the users wish.
4. I wanted to maintain and create auto play lists using the tags – Ex: Hindi songs – Can contain songs by Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle mainly songs from 70’s & 80’s while I need playlist of New Hindi with songs from Udit Narayan, Shreya Ghosal, mainly songs from year 90’s and 2000.
5. I also have “Natya sageet”, “Classical vocal”, “Classical instrumental”, “Dramas" by V.P.Kale, P.L.Deshpande its hard to tag such music for existing music organizers and players.
6. I also wanted album art to be properly placed
7. Finally I wanted to manage my Creative Zen with the same program that can place music in correct folder, transfer music, create folder structure, put the album art, maintain my music rating and also report music that I’m playing on player and on my PC to last.fm

I have seen these all requirements on so many forums and it seems nobody has found a accurate player. All they get in answer is how other users are maintaining music using multiple programs and having own way of tagging. People with 5000+ music its a nightmare to manage the music.

I tried following players:

On Windows I tried: iTunes, WinAmp, MediaMonkey Freeware, JetAudio, CreativeMedia Source, Window Media Player, Songbird and non of them give accurate data.

On Linux I tried: Amarok, Banshee they lack many of the basic features I want.

1. Songbird 1.2.0:
Dis-adv: MTP Sync issues with Creative Zen, In many cases I received blank auto playlist with only numbers in playlist and with some XML errors ( Bug no: 15324 http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=15324 )
Adv: Organizes the Files and Folder as per your wish. Ex: I sorted my folders as Genre/Album/Artist-Title.extension, inbuilt last.fm song scrobbling, means you don't need to run any external last.fm external scrobbling.

2. Windows Media Player 11:
Dis-adv: File-Folder organization has limitations. Cannot organize as per your wish. Auto tagging feature destroyed many of my correct ID3 tags
Adv: Sync well to MTP device, Fetches Album art, By default available with Windows OS

3. Winamp 5.56:
Dis-adv: Do not offer media organizer, you cannot ask winamp to restructure your files on drive.
Adv: One of the best ID3 tagger that comes closer to 70% accurate in identifying songs. Also quite accurate in tagging Marathi and Hindi language songs.

4. iTunes 8:
Dis-adv: Do not offer sync option for Creative Zen only limited to apple devices, Do not offer File naming option
Adv: Offers good Folder organizer however do not offer File naming option. Fetches album art.

5. MediaMonkey Freeware:
Dis-adv: Last.fm scrobbling seems buggy. Do not offer auto File-Folder organization in Freeware version

Adv: The features required for good media organizer seems to be present but only in Paid version

Correction Feb 2010: MediaMonkey last.fm scrobbling is working fine. Also I figured out how to use auto music arrange feature in MediaMonkey. Seems MediaMonkey is the best media player on Windows Platform.

6. Amarok:
Amarok 2 is still under development and new interface is quite confusing. Also you need to be on Linux to use this program.

7. Banshee:
Banshee is developed using Mono on Linux and for Macs. Offers good File-Folder management but do not offer auto ID3 tagger also is not available on Windows OS.

8. Creative Media Source:
Dis-adv: Do not offer File-Folder Organizer. Do not offer auto id3 tagger. Do not find duplicate Files. Has a very very confusing interface. Dont have last.fm scrobbling option or plugin.