Music Library Manager

[Lil Frier]

For a while now, I've used MusicBee to handle my music library. It tags things really well, and did a good job of making replacing info that it couldn't auto-tag easy. However, I just went through ripping about 40-50 CDs in .flac format, and either it or Windows 10 has failed me. Several albums didn't put in the art right, and have left tracks in an unmanageable state--they have no tagging info, and if I try to manually edit it in the File Explorer, I get "COM surrogate has stopped working," an issue the Internet didn't offer a good solution to.

So, I'm curious as to whether anyone has a suggestion (preferably free) for replacing MusicBee, to see if something else can do the job without messing up files while playing nicely with .flac and W10. I'd like something that makes editing tags easy (ideally with a good means of auto-tagging albums). Groove Music messes up a chunk of my library, so I'm not going to bother. WMP never seems to do a good job of tagging either, and it can be more troublesome. I used Zune until W8 stopped letting me, plus its tagging was crap as well (and manual editing was slow).

Any suggestions?

 

[Carson Dyle]

Mp3tag is a great tagging program for Windows (and works on FLAC and most other audio file formats).

But I'd review your ripping procedure, maybe even rerip those 50 CDs. Mp3tag has means of tagging untagged files from online databases, but you should get the procedure down for future CD ripping. You don't want to go through that again and find that the next 50 CDs is just as screwed up.

My recommendation is to take one CD and rip it and rerip it until you're certain that you've produced the desired file format that you want, and that the tagging is exactly the way you want. Get the process down to a perfectly repeatable number of known steps, so you can rip CDS and barely need to think about it.

 

[Larryrup]

For a while now, I've used MusicBee to handle my music library. It tags things really well, and did a good job of making replacing info that it couldn't auto-tag easy. However, I just went through ripping about 40-50 CDs in .flac format, and either it or Windows 10 has failed me. Several albums didn't put in the art right, and have left tracks in an unmanageable state--they have no tagging info, and if I try to manually edit it in the File Explorer, I get "COM surrogate has stopped working," an issue the Internet didn't offer a good solution to.

So, I'm curious as to whether anyone has a suggestion (preferably free) for replacing MusicBee, to see if something else can do the job without messing up files while playing nicely with .flac and W10. I'd like something that makes editing tags easy (ideally with a good means of auto-tagging albums). Groove Music messes up a chunk of my library, so I'm not going to bother. WMP never seems to do a good job of tagging either, and it can be more troublesome. I used Zune until W8 stopped letting me, plus its tagging was crap as well (and manual editing was slow).

Any suggestions?

I use picard Music Brainz. It's free, album coverage is quite extensive, and saves just about all the information and art you would need. It's free.

I have had problems running it on one machine (another works fine). They have a forum that is helpful, though I found it a bit cumbersome. Worth a look...the price is right! I use it all the time.

Larry