Manage Your Music

YOU’LL NEED THIS

THERE ARE SO MANY PLACES TO GET MUSIC— you can rip it from CDs, download it directly from the artist, buy it in an online store…. It’s brilliant to have so much choice, but it’s easy to end up with a huge collection of music that’s impossible to organize and manage. Incorrectly labeled songs, duplicated files, and missing artwork all make it difficult to find and enjoy the library that you have spent years assembling.

That’s why you need MusicBee. This amazing free music software can handle just about every audio file format there is (including FLAC and WMP), and it works with some high-end audio cards.

Crucially, MusicBee can also help organize even the biggest and messiest of music archives. It can tag your songs automatically, remove duplicates, fix split albums, find cover art, and even track down song lyrics. To top it all off, MusicBee is also a brilliant music player. Once you try it, you’ll never want to use anything else. 1 GET MUSICBEE Go to www.getmusicbee.com and click the “Download now” button to fetch the MusicBee app. Once its ZIP archive has been saved to your PC, extract the contents, and double-click the EXE file to run the installer. Accept the default options, then leave “Run MusicBee 3.0” checked, and click “Finish.” Select your preferred language, and the program opens for the first time [ Image A].

2 IMPORT YOUR MUSIC Now you need to tell MusicBee where to find your music. The software can automatically import songs and album artwork from Windows Media Player or iTunes, or scan your PC for songs. By default, it looks in the public Music library on your PC, and in your own library. If you keep your music in other locations (on a connected external drive, for example), click “Choose folders,” and select them.

3 CHECK YOUR FILES Click “Scan now,” and MusicBee finds all the audio files in those folders, and organizes them by artist. If a file has no metadata, it appears at the top under “[Empty].” It might be an incorrectly labeled song, or other audio file. Click to find out. If it isn’t a song, right-click it, and select “Delete > Delete from library only” [ Image B]. 4 UPDATE ARTIST IMAGES MusicBee automatically searches for an image of all the artists in your music library. If one of the

artists doesn’t have a photo (or the photo is wrong), find a suitable image online, and copy it to your clipboard, then right-click the artist in MusicBee, and select “Paste artwork”[ Image C]. Now it’s time to take a look at your albums. Click the “Music explorer” tab in the gray bar at the top.

5 GET ALBUM ART AUTOMATICALLY Select an artist to see the albums you own. Some of these may also be missing artwork. If that is the case, you can either paste it in like before, or right-click the empty square, and select “Search Internet for picture.” Leave “Embed this picture in music file” selected [ Image D], so it isn’t lost if you decide to change to a different music player at a later date.

6 FIX INCORRECT TAGS Sometimes you might come across an album that MusicBee doesn’t recognize. Unless it’s a very rare or esoteric work, and very few people are likely to own it, it has probably just been tagged incorrectly. Right-click it, select “Auto tag by album,” and several options should appear. You need to select the one that matches the music you own, but be careful—it isn’t necessarily the first one on the list [ Image E].

7 GET THE RIGHT INFO At the bottom of the track details window, you’ll see two sets of information—one in black, and one grayed out. The information in gray is the original metadata attached to the album, and the information in black is what will replace it. You want to select the option from the auto-tagger list that’s the most accurate. When you’re satisfied, click “Apply tags.”

8 JOIN SPLIT ALBUMS Occasionally you’ll come across an album that’s split [ Image F]— iTunes is notorious for causing this. Click one album, hold Ctrl, click the other, and select “Auto tag by album.” There should be an option to combine them. If the change doesn’t happen immediately, select a different artist, then go back to refresh the library.

9 GET SONG LYRICS Double-click an album to start playing it, then click the “Now playing” tab. MusicBee finds highresolution pictures of the artist, and uses them to create a slideshow that you can watch. It also tries to find lyrics for the current song. If you can see that the lyrics aren’t correct, right-click them, and choose “Search next provider” or “Edit displayed lyrics” [ Image G].

10 MANAGE SLIDESHOW IMAGES If a picture you particularly like appears in the slideshow, right-click it, and select “Save artist picture” [ Image H]. Similarly, if a picture appears that isn’t of the artist, or you don’t like it, you can select “Ban picture.” Congratulations—your music library is now much more organized, with correctly tagged albums, artwork, lyrics, and photos. Happy listening!