TECH SPECIAL ................Take Control of Your Multimedia

Take Control of Your Multimedia  Over time, your media collection has probably accumulated problems like missing artwork and wrong filenames. The good news is that even with thousands of files, it doesn’t take too long to get things back in shape. Show you how MEDIAMONKEY www.mediamonkey.com MediaMonkey is a powerful, Windows only music player and organiser. Once you import all your songs into the software, it automatically searches and updates metadata including album art, lyrics and other CD information from various databases. It also has a built-in metadata tag editor that lets you manually edit details in case there is a mismatch. Moreover, MediaMonkey can also rename your music and video files for improved identification. A paid Gold version for Rs 3,400 adds other useful features including auto volume leveling, auto playlist, cd ripping and an auto file organizer that moves your audio/video files into specific folders — extremely useful if your files are spread across various partitions and folders on your computer. MUSICBRAINZ PICARD http://musicbrainz.org If you have a large number of audio files with missing metadata, try Musicbrainz Picard. It uses a song’s acoustic ID (actual music) for identification so it can identify the song and find matching metadata information even if there is no older metadata available. It works with common audio formats and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Like other audio tag editors, this one also has a manual edit mode to add additional information plus it can also use existing metadata to search for additional details from its database. Once it scans through your music library, it displays matching information level using colours: green, yellow, orange and red to indicate the match (green being the best and red being the worst match). You can then choose which songs should be updated automatically. MP3TAG www.mp3tag.de/en If you do not want software bloated with features and prefer something simple, Mp3tag fits the bill perfectly. It has a basic pane type interface with a list of songs on one side and metadata on the other side. You can choose to manually update each entry or let Mp3tag search from online databases (such as Amazon, freedb and discogs) for metadata information and album art. If you have multiple files from a single artist/ album, Mp3tag will offer the option to batch edit them together. It supports a large number of audio formats including aac, flac, ogg, wma and mp3. Another useful feature is that it can automatically rename your audio files using the metadata information as per your choice, making it easier to identify and search them on the hard drive. Mac users can check out a free program called Tagr which functions in a similar way. XBMC www.xbmc.org Originally designed for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console, XBMC has grown into a multi-platform entertainment hub that works great for people who want to play all sorts of multimedia content on a large screen with a 10-foot interface: an interface that you can easily see and control even when sitting 10 feet away from the screen. It’s completely free and open-source, but the best part about XBMC is that it’s hugely customisable with hundreds of add-ons (to enhance functionality) and skins (to change appearance). XBMC neatly organises all your multimedia content, whether stored on a local or network drive. It has built in ‘scrapers’, which check the audio/video files and automatically add missing information like artwork/album covers, tags, descriptions and so on. In fact, the functionality offered by XBMC rivals that of many commercial offerings designed for expensive media server applications. As a bonus, you can control XBMC on a computer using the official, free XBMC apps on iOS or Android. PLEX www.plex.tv In many ways, Plex is very similar to XBMC and some earlier versions were even based on XBMC. Now, Plex is closed source and has two parts; Plex Media Server and Plex Media Center. When you download the Media Server, it scans through your media library to start the process of making it ‘beautiful’. In other words, using metadata from the internet, it automatically adds wallpaper, fan art, posters, movie information, ratings and so on. You can then enjoy your media with a better interface or stream your media from one place to various other devices in the house (including mobile devices). Plex also works with Chromecast, Google TV, Roku and with many newer Smart TVs. Additionally, since Plex is DLNA certified, it can stream content to other DLNA devices like Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and various other media players like the WDTV series without the need for additional software or apps. RENAME TV SHOWS & MOVIES The Renamer (www.therenamer.com) fixes media file names to remove all the extra ‘junk’ in the filename. For instance, “tVshow_ nameSeason1ep03-Proper720pencoded” will be renamed to “TV show name S01E03”. This is handy when you want to use something like XBMC to playback your shows on a PC. It links up with thetvdb.com, tv.com and epguides.com to automatically get the correct information for each episode of each show (including the name of each episode). The software is smart enough to recognise variations in filenames. For example, it can tell when Season is abbreviated as S or is just a number or if Episode is written in full, as E, Ep and so on. All you have to do is drag and drop the files into TheRenamer’s window and it does the rest. Before it actually changes the file names, it shows you a preview so that you can check them first. Although originally built for TV shows, TheRenamer also supports movies: in the same way that it corrects TV show names, it links up with IMDB.com to get movie info. Also Try JAIKOZ (http://jthink.net/jaikoz) $ 30 Compatible with Windows, MAC & Linux, Jaikoz can quickly correct thousands of ID3 tags. It only works with audio formats though. TUNEUP FOR ITUNES (www.tuneupmedia.com) $ 34.97 For iTunes users with scattered libraries, TuneUp offers artwork, lyrics, removal of duplicates and correction of mislabelled tracks. LIBRA (www.getlibra.com) FREE Library software that sorts books, audio, movies and games Other free programs that you can try include Moovida (www.moovida.com), a multi-format video player and MusicBee (www.getmusicbee.com), which offers audio tools in addition to a player and tag editor. Karan Bajaj & Hitesh Raj Bhagat ET140319