For the last decade I’ve been half-heartedly trying to clean up and organize my collection of music.  This collection has duplicate, triplicate, quadricate? copies of songs.  Some songs are tagged with no name or artist while others have the completely wrong information associated with them.  In addition to this hole of chaos I could never figure out a good way to get updates made on my phone over to my computer without a huge hassle.  All that changed after I decided to pick up a new Micro SDHC for my phone that can more than handle my entire collection.

My saving grace turned out to be MusicBrainz Picard.  Not only is it free but it took my piece of chaos and fixed it.  The software has a great way to fix all of the ID3 tags in my MP3 and M4A files.  The application will tag songs based on the names of the files as well as lookup the fingerprint of the song.  Since the software is lets developers create their own plugins you can extend the application to incorporate information from Last.fm or try your own hand at writing a customing plugin.

After playing around with Picard over the weekend I was able to cleanup over 90% of the music on my machine.  In looking at the music that wasn’t fixed I’m seeing a trend of duplicate songs and some that appear to have been corrupted.  Most likely I’ll be deleting the untagged files once I’ve verified they aren’t worth saving.  As always, if you find this software useful consider donating some money towards its development at MetaBrainz.