Will WinAmp populate the tags if they start out blank?
Yes. That's what's so cool about it. You can have a file called 1.mp3 and no tag, and WinAmp will fill the tag in.
Is it producing track labels that you're satisfied with? I generally have to make manual edits to all data sources because so many people use different conventions. Even when a convention has been standardized, such as at RateYourMusic.com, it's not necessarily something I agree with.
Generally, I'm satisfied with what WinAmp produces. I only actually need Title/Artist/Album/Year. The Genre will be filled in by me, but that won't be hard since I've categorised my files by genre, so a batch file process in Tag&Rename or MP3TagStudio will do the trick.
I have noticed though that WinAmp sometimes also fills in comment fields and other stuff I'm not happy with. (like 'encoded by') That's why I will, after the files have been tagged by Winamp, run the files through MP3TagStudio and delete everything from the tags, except for the Title/Artist/Album/Year fields which I require.
After this is all done, I will also rename all the file names with my preferred <artist> - <title>.mp3 file name mask. In the case of these specific files, I don't need tracks numbers (and maybe I don't even need album names), since these are all separate music files, not connected to an album. (nor do I want them to be)
But granted, being the perfectionist that I am, I will probably manually check all the files as well. Something I'm not looking forward to with 20.000+ files.
For instance, braces () only appear in my song titles if they're part of the title. All Remix attributes and credits always go in square braces [] at the end of the title. Such as "This is the Song Name [Groovy Remix]"
This is also the way I prefer it. My guess is this will be one of those things I will have to edit manually sometimes.
Guest artists or duets always get listed with the artist and not as part of the title. I then use the BAND (aka Album Artist) tag to store the name of the artist for the album (for non compilation albums). So I'll have a song by "David Bowie and Mick Jagger" or maybe "David Bowie feat. Placebo" for example.
Hmmm...that's not a bad idea. In your own specific example, you mean you would put David Bowie in the Album Artist field and "feat. Mick Jagger" in the artist field? Or the other way around? If you were to put "feat. Mick Jagger" in the Artist field, wouldn't that give you problems when browsing by artist? (unless you wanted to play all the "feat. Mick Jagger" files in one queue?)
I've already noticed that Tag&Rename doesn't really like this. I had tagged one of my Mp3 files like that: Quincy Jones & Michael Jackson - Liberian Girl. I've put Quincy Jones in the Album Artist field, and Michael Jackson in the Artist field. When I then ran my usual <artist> - <title>.mp3 file name mask, I noticed that Tag&Rename always made a file named Quincy Jones - Liberian Girl.mp3. (even though Tag&Rename also has a Album artist file name mask, but seems to ignore it). Hmmm... Maybe that MP3 file tagger program you've suggested before does a better job of this...
For artwork I would first start out with iTunes. Let it download art for whatever it can. It will store this in files on your drive, not within the tunes. Then use a third-party program to imbed the images into the tunes. When you're done, then use whatever other solutions you want for the tracks that still lack art.
I'll have a look at it, even though I absolutely hate iTunes. But I can imagine them having the largest album art library. Which third party program would you suggest to embed the images into the tunes? Because I can do this with WinAmp again, but in this case, it would be a file-by-file method, and I'm really not looking forward to this...
Thanks for all the help!
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