Renumbering FLAC files - help!

[Mutley]

I posted this on the SlimDevices forum, and I'm posting here too in case anyone can help!

I've just started sorting out numbering in my music collection. All my filenames and track numbers don't have leading zeros, which is no big deal, but some apps outside of Slim get the ordering wrong, and if I use Moose to control SlimServer play lists, it also gets the ordering wrong.

Anyhoo. I've realised part of the way through that for a whole bunch of albums I've completely screwed up the track ordering. I had been grabbing several albums at a time, and dropping them in to Mp3tag, and doing auto-renumber, not realising that the order the tracks were in was WRONG!

So, anybody got any bright ideas for applications or methods for correcting track number automagically? I've tried using MediaMonkey but it only talks to Amazon and can't find half my albums. I've tried using Mp3tag, and although you can search using freedb ids (which is great), it wants to update all the tags, not just the track number (which overwrites my carefully crafted tags).

I need something which recognises the tracks and will reorder and renumber them for me. Otherwise, its back to the CDs and re-ordering tracks by hand. Please, no.....

TIA!

Mut.

[Mutley]

I'll answer my own question, as it might help others....

MusicBrainz Picard - brilliant piece of software. Its beta and still being developed, but is very useful for properly tagging and ordering your music collection. Using Picard I was able to take my scrambled music and have it ID'd by MusicBrainz and correctly ordered. Had the bonus of fixing and improving a bunch of tags as well.

[autopilot]

In future use EAC. I have ripped hundreds of CD's to flac and it's never failed me once with tagging and naming, just use a good formating string (although the default ones work just fine).

It's also the best ripper in terms of quality and functionality. It's would be a crime to use anything else.

However, if all your music is now ripped, and you dont want to re-rip it, you could write your own batch script to add leading zeros, although there are programs that can do it (im sure Foobar200's mass tagger can do this). Head over to the www.hydrogenaudio.org and all your questions will be solved on thier god like knowledge base that is the hydrogen audio forums and WiKi (look for a guy called Synthetic Soul, he will probably write a custom script for you. Top bloke).

[Mutley]

I use dbPowerAmp - I played with EAC but its not for me. I believe dbPowerAmp is just as a capable as EAC, but a little friendlier to use, and its faster (if you use the powerpack option). I would agree that its not as configurable as EAC, but for me it does the job.

My mistake was using Mp3tag to add leading zeros in a sledgehammer fashion, and then compounding that mistake by copying the update misordered numbers to the filenames, thus losing any useful information about track ordering. Re-ripping those would have been over kill to be honest. However, picard has done the job, and now MusicBrainz information has been embedded, if I screw things up again, it will be straight forward to correct.

And in future if I need to change track number formats, I won't do it by reordering the tracks! I think, like you say, a simple script to prepend leading zeros would suffice...something that tag&rename does for you out of the box.

[TooNice]

Well, this doesn't really matter anymore since you solved your problem.

The Foobar masstagger is also pretty handy when you need to tag a large number of songs.

[Mutley]

It certainly is. I've found FB2000 masstagger to be invaluable in removing or adjusting tags.