Some might call me perverse, but the vast majority of my music collection has been ripped from CD by me, using EAC, and I’ve typed in the track data myself, and scanned, cleaned and resized the artwork, and created a Unix scripting system to rename ripped tracks from this, and tidy up the riplogs, rename files and artwork, and create ‘folder.jpg’ and ‘back_cover.jpg’ artwork files. This scripting system means that I can type in the titles whilst the CD is ripping, and do a ripping session of a number of CDs, scan & clean the artwork and drop it into the album folders, and then just type ‘ripprocess’, and I end up with nice, tidy renamed music files. Since this scripting system was written to run under Cygwin, I can SSH into the MyCloud and run it there, as it takes an age to run many of the analysis scripts via a 100Mb ethernet link… Having the disk connected directly to the processor means it’s even faster that when using a USB disk on the PC (it’s an I/O bound process, not processor bound).
I always rip to a directory ‘NewlyRipped’, so that when I load them into my MediaMonkey library, it’s easy to select them to infer metadata from the filename, do volume analysis, and compress them to MP3 in a parallel directory for mobile media players. Once this is all done, I either manually drag & drop, or use MM’s ‘Auto-Organise’ function to move them into my main library.
Yes; this is somewhat obsessive, but it works for me…
It’s only recently that I’ve got connected to the internet, and can now use the ‘get metadata’ facility in EAC. But I often find that the metadata is either plain wrong, or not conforming the the convention I’ve adopted over 20 years or so. So it takes about as long to check the metadata as it would to type in…
MediaMonkey will get metadata and album artwork when you rip. But, as I said, I prefer to use EAC for the rip status information it gives, and the improved error correction. MM also allows you to search for metadata and artwork on Amazon.
Once you have music in MM, there are a number of ways it can help you with metadata. Select an album or track, and right-click to the menu, and then look at the ‘Auto-tag’ options; from filename, from Web. There are also some very useful add-on scripts, such as AlbumArtTagger, that offer very sophisticated processing of artwork, to make album art consistent (e.g. to make all albums include artwork in the file, or all use a folder.jpg file in the folder). It’s well worth having a look around the MM add-ons pages, to see what useful stuff is there. I also use ‘MonkeyFlow’, a facsimile of CoverFlow.
I’ve assumed you’re new to MM; if not, apologies for egg-sucking advice…
