Getting music onto your PC is relatively easy, but once it's there, how do you find missing track information and get it organized into an easy to navigate collection?

Steps

  1. 1
    Install MediaMonkey. The free version will do.
  2. 2
    Run MediaMonkey and let it scan your drive/network for music files.
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  3. 3
    Since MediaMonkey will find all the sound files on your computer, you will want to remove any irrelevant files from your library. This can be done by selecting the files and pressing 'Delete'. (Hint: it is easier to first sort the items by Path).
  4. 4
    Remove duplicate files from library. Go to the sidebar on the left, and navigate to - Library->Files to edit->Duplicate Titles. It can be easier if you sort the items by path.
  5. 5
    Go to the 'Files to Edit' node to locate all tracks that are missing information. Click the 'Album' heading to sort by Album.
  6. 6
    Lookup missing information and album art by selecting all the tracks from an album and right-click 'Auto-tag from Amazon'.
  7. 7
    If the information can't be located in Amazon's database, look up the information manually via www.allmusic.com and update the tracks manually by selecting them and right-clicking 'Properties'.
  8. 8
    Once track tags are updated, you'll want to organize the files on your drive in a consistent format. Select all the tracks in the MediaMonkey library by clicking <Ctrl><a> and click Tools | Auto-Organize
  9. 9
    Choose a format for organizing your collection. A pretty standard one is ../My Music/<Artist>/<Album>/<Track#> <Title>
  10. 10
    Your entire collection will now be tagged and organized in a manner that allows you to navigate it from music organizers such as MediaMonkey or directly from your Windows Explorer.
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Community Q&A

  • Question
    How do I backup my Mediamonkey?
    Community Answer
    Community Answer
    Use duplicate external hard drives by using the file copy command in win7. This takes over one day for large collections.
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Warnings

  • This method will not update imported playlists. They will no longer work if they contain tracks that are moved.
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  • MediaMonkey also rips CDs, however, MP3 encoding is limited to 30 days. After that, you'll want to copy a standard version of the lame.dll to the MediaMonkey directory to get around this limitation.
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About This Article

wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 14 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has been viewed 232,786 times.
33 votes - 68%
Co-authors: 14
Updated: November 30, 2022
Views: 232,786
Categories: Music
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