The Smorgasbord

I’m going to show you “How to Fix MP3’s” today because we all have digital music for our ipods, cell phones, computers, and laptops. Most people I know have thousands of songs, some have tens of thousands. Today I decided to sit down and cleanup my collection to make it more manageable, searchable, and listenable.

There are 3 basic problems with MP3 files:

1. The MP3 filenames are all screwed up and unreadable with crazy characters
2. The MP3 volume levels are all over the place, some are low and some are really loud
3. The MP3 “tags” are screwed up and the names come up wrong or weird in an iPod or MP3 player

I’m going to show you how to fix all 3 problems, using FREE software with no NAGS, no hidden things to install, no garbage, and no trials! 100% freeware utilities that just plain work!

How to fix MP3 filenames

First download 1-4a Batch File Renamer. It’s a freeware windows utility for renaming files. I have used dozens of file renamers, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this! There seems to be nothing it can’t do.

When you first fire it up it looks like this:

you have simple options to find and replace things. The left pane are your filenames before you make changes, and it shows what they’ll look like once you make the changes in the right preview pane. This works for a lot of instances – but there is an absolutely INSANE expert mode!

Here’s the expert mode screen:

You can use almost unlimited conditions. I removed all extra spaces, replaced underscores with dashes, and capitalized the first letter of every word on 1,000 mp3 files in about 5 seconds! I also remove the first 5 characters from 875 other mp3 files, and I had a bunch of files from one artist with song name but no artist. So I pre-pended those 50 files with the artist name in seconds!

You can clean up your MP3 filenames with this batch renamer utility more quickly than anything I’ve ever seen. The beauty of this little utility is that it works for any kind of file, so you can use it on your digital pics, movie downloads, or anything else you have!

How to “Normalize” and fix MP3 Volume Levels

The next most common thing wrong with MP3 files is that they volume levels are all different. Some are really low, so you turn it way up, and then a really loud once comes on and about blows you out of the room! There are many mp3 file editors that will normalize your mp3’s for you – but again, most of us have thousands of songs or more. I don’t have time to open my MP3’s one by one and fix them in a damn editor. That’s why I was so exited to find a batch file renamer – a utility that would rename all my MP3 files at once. I was just as excited to find this next one. Now, Download Mp3Gain and install it. It’s a windows freeware utility that does exactly ONE thing and it does it well – it normalizes the volume levels on MP3 files in batches!

That’s right – it can rename 1-10,000+ mp3 files in batch mode! Personally, I recommend doing them about 1,000 at a time if you’re in a time crunch or using your computer all day. Else, you could load say 10,000 in a batch and do them overnight while you sleep. See, unlike the file renaming, this utility has to actually analyze and change the volume level on your each MP3 file, and then save it back again. For me to do about 1,000 mp3’s on my laptop with 2GB ram as I worked took about 30 minutes. Oh – and don’t worry, it doesn’t change the sound quality of your MP3 files at all (just the volume level). It’s a completely lossless process.

Here’s a screenshot of Mp3gain in action on my laptop – you can see that the volume levels for my files was all over the map, some higher, some lower. I made them all a good default of 89db (decibels).

How to Fix MP3 Tags

The last problem we all seem to have is the tags on MP3 files are usually all over the place too. Some are great, some have artist but no song, others have song but no artist. You get all kinds of weird characters, mis-spellings, and more. Now download Mp3 Tag Editor, and install it.

When you start the program first you will need to open a folder that contains MP3 files, and it will read and analyze the current tag information like this:

Once your files are imported you click to look them up on freedb or Amazon. I chose freedb, and then you get a dialogue box like this one:

A lot of times you can just lookup your missing (or bad) song information from what’s already in the tags (or filename). I my particular case – that didn’t help me because my mp3’s (in this case) were karaoke files and the file information within them didn’t really help look them up in freedb at all. I chose to “determine via web search”, and guess what – JACKPOT!

You can see in the image above that my lookup found exactly what my mp3’s were down to the very last detail! Check out what happens when I click “ok” and the changes are saved:

My MP3 files are completely updated with accurate information – so they will (now) display properly in any CD or MP3 player! I’ve used a lot of Mp3 tag editors in the last so many years, and this one is free, fast, and very accurate!

Conclusion

If you use the 3 freeware MP3 utilities I told you about today to clean up your MP3 collection you will be much happier with your music collection! Maybe then your friends will want you to fix theirs too – or you could be a DJ!

I was asked the other day by a colleague “how do I print directory file lists for all my external drives”? I would imagine that this is a pretty common task, considering those of us with gaggles of external drives just chock full of digital images, mp3’s, documents, videos, and more! Most people I know are really big digital packrats!

Back in the days of dial-up modems, when broadband was still kind of dreamy – we had these things called “utilities”. Windows was just an operating system, and there were all kinds of things that it “didn’t do” yet…like unzip files, manage themes, burn cd’s, and countless other things. There were lots of software repositories online where you could download freeware “utilities” that did cool things. Those days were kind of lost with the wild west days of the web.

I’m happy to announce there are still a few programmers out there writing and maintaining cool and free downloadable software utilities, and Karen’s Powertools is one of them. Her utility solves the problem of trying to figure out what exactly is stored in a bazillion directories by allowing you to print them a detailed listing, that includes options for date, name, system files, subdirectories and more. If you don’t download it – bookmark it today, when someone asks you how you do this – you’ll remember reading this post and want to forward it on to them!

You can download Karen’s Directory Printer here!

Ever lost a password? I did today, and I found a “free password reveal tool”. Actually, what happenned was that I had a password saved in my browser, but I didn’t know what it was anymore and I wanted to change it. When I tried to change the password, it wanted the old one before I could enter a new one…and well, that was the start of a way to figure my password out.

Back in the day (like 10 years ago) I remember when we used to download all kinds of Windows utilities to do handy things, and there was this thing called a “password revealer” that I used to have. When you ran a small executable file it would open a “loupe” (fancy word for jewelers maginifying glass). When you moved the “loupe” over a password field it would turn the dots or asteriks into their real letters, numbers, and characters revealing the real password. w00t!

Now today I wanted to find this utility or a very good reason – I wanted to figure my own password out. Unfortuantely there are people out there who would want to use this tool for ill gotten gains, like hacking your myspace password, breaking into your hotmail account, or for an easy way to steal your yahoo password. What I’m saying is, I’m going to give you a tool you can use to reveal most saved password, but it would be in your best interest to uninstall when you were done to keep prying eyes from getting into your business! Like I said – there’s a reason that less than 100 people per month search for “password revealer”, but more than 2,000 each search for “hacking myspace password”, and “hotmail password stealer”?!?

When your dealing something like looking for a “password revealer” tool – a lot of the search results are spammy or trying to get you to buy some piece of software to solve your problem. I was lucky enough that Lifehacker saved the day (again) with their post Recover Lost Passwords. They linked to a site and post I forgot about – Snadboy’s Revelation 2.0, which is course is a freeware password revealer. It worked for me! If it doesn’t work for you, try some of the other tools on the Lifehacker page, and report back here what works and what doesn’t!