Heartland

I thought to switch my digital music and iPod to Spotify the other day. I would like to use Spotify more to find new stuff rather than relying on, errr, evaluation copies. I know Spotify's royalty schemes are far from fair but it's better than nothing I guess. Plus I can guarantee all scared musicians that I will still regularly (manically?) visit record stores wherever I can find them!

However, here is my problem: It seems Spotify doesn't handle the original ID3 tags too well. Artists are split up over several spellings (e.g. with and without the), album titles are dismissed so tracks are split over albums in different spellings, compilations, ... At 15,000ish tracks this sort of mess does turn finding stuff into a bit of a nightmare. Oh and all my lovely cover art has disappeared too. That turns browsing my iPod into a bit of a bore.

Anyone who's got an idea how to set things straight again?

I use spotify premium regularly to find and listen to (streamed) music but I've never imported my mp3 library into spotify for that exact reason.

It's a great music discovery tool but it's not the best media library. Better to have a standalone dedicated audio player app for that (iTunes for example... Stop sniggering at the back!)

Spotify tries to compare your mp3 this with its own library to find matches. In theory then you can take that library to any device with a spotify app on it because it's "in the cloud". However as you've noticed it tagging isn't as precise as your own (sheer amount of files, them being supplied by record labels, bands having different names in different territories - think the m*****n uk for example). Its a nightmare for spotify to manage all those variations

I know that doesn't answer your problem but hopefully it help shed light on why...

Well, that's more or less what I thought to be the issue too. So, I guess there's no way of getting both your 'regular' stuff and Spotify discoveries onto the same device properly then... If there'd been a possibility to transfer my Spotify playlists to iTunes that'd been nice too but I guess that's not possible either.

I have a folder for each artist, then within that a folder for each album, and then within that tracks have filenames that are track number + song name. for example, ~/music/Sisters Of Mercy, The/Floodland/01 Dominion - Mother Russia.mp3

If your music files are properly organised in the file system like that then you can probably retag them based on their file paths. There's a linux retagging utility called Kid3-qt which will do this, and I'm sure there are similar for other operating systems.

I think that's what iTunes does automatically, it was also something Spotify advised to switch off to be safe. But I think they take their tags from GraceNote, which probably leads to the issue I have...

Oh yes I forgot, iTunes organises the music filesystem based on the ID3 tags, so if the ID3 tags get f**ked up by Spotify, you can always regenerate the ID3 tags from the filesystem, is what I was getting at. If that's any help?

Hmm, I'll have a look, thanks!