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Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Organize & Clean Your Music & Your Voice Recordings in Batches



Correct the album, artist, album art ( the album cover ) easily. Make it Louder. Make it Cleaner.

Tools:

  1. MP3 Tag - works with all common music file types (MP3, WMA, WAV, FLAC, etc.)
  2. Audacity - download and install also the optional plug-ins (LAME encoder & LADSPA plugins), and install them after you install Audacity.

Correcting Music Information with MP3 Tag:

The trick: this program allows you to batch-edit many files at the same time. So, changing the album artist, album name, and album art for your music becomes a piece of cake.
  1. Select all the tracks in the folder you're working on. 
  2. Drag and drop the files in the album folder into MP3 Tag window.
  3. On the left side you will see the album/track information. Leave the song name and the track number alone, and edit the rest as needed.
  4. The album art is the empty box bottom left. Click it to select an album art.
  5. Push Control+S. Done!
  6. Rinse & repeat! Push delete to remove the current list of songs in MP3 tag ( this will not delete them from your library), repeat for a new batch of music.

Tips: 

  1. Get the album art from amazon.com or from Google.
  2. If you have an album that is multiple CD's, consider naming each CD distinctively. Example: "Shisha Lounge Disc 1" & "Shisha Lounge Disc 2". This means you will do it in 2 batches, but this is easier to process for most music players on phones.
  3. If you value listening to your music in the same order of the CD, review the "track number" field. Of course this will need to be done song-by-song.

Making It Louder:

  1. Select the files you want to clean. 
  2. Drag and drop the files you want to work with into Audacity window.
  3. Press Control + A. All the open files should be marked now.
  4. In the menu bar ( to the right of "File" ), Click "Effects".
  5. Select "Amplify". Enter a value a small value. Let's go with 1.2.
  6. Make sure "Allow Clipping" is unchecked.
  7. Click preview to hear what the result will be like. Change the amplification value if needed and retest till you find a sweet result.
  8. Click OK.
  9. When done, click "File" > "Export Multiple". 
  10. Select "Export Format" ( typicall MP3). 
  11. Click options, set quality to 320 kbps if you're working with music and to 128 kbps if you're working with voice. 
  12. Click OK.
  13. DONE!

Making It Cleaner:

  1. Select the files you want to clean. 
  2. Drag and drop the files you want to work with into Audacity window.
  3. Press Control + A. All the open files should be marked now.
  4. In the menu bar ( to the right of "File" ), Click "Effects".
  5. Select "Noise Removal". Do the 2 steps on the screen.
  6. When done, click "File" > "Export Multiple". 
  7. Select "Export Format" ( typicall MP3). 
  8. Click options, set quality to 128 kbps if you're working with voice.
  9. Click OK.
  10. DONE!

2 comments:

  1. Nice! I like people who pay attention to those small details! :D

    For me, I use Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) .. It supports both batch-editing for the music information AND batch-rename of files using regular expressions!

    You should give it a try if you haven't (Y)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the feedback. You can try Audacity for normalization of volume and/ or amplification. Open source FTW.

      Delete