How to add details in folders containing music?

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I have folders containing music, I would like them to include the year in the details, but its all blank, can I manually add the year?

Also, what does ”unspecified 18” mean above the list of albums?
40765-Screenshot-30

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I’m not sure if that is possible with Windows Explorer as the extra information is stored in MP3 Tags which are part of an individual track.

Afaik folders do not have the capability to store such extra information.

Be glad to be proved wrong though!

ETA is 18 not the number of albums listed?

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I don’t use MP3’s , just WAV or flac. 18 is indeed the number of albums , I think, but none of my other folders show this.

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You can modify the year with an MP3 Tag editor. One example is: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

Jerry

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You can modify the year with an MP3 Tag editor. One example is: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725671.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

Jerry

You sure about that link?

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I use MediaMonkey to manage my music as it handles FLAC, MP3, WAV etc. The free version has all you need.

cheers, Paul

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Oops. Provided wrong link in message #4. Fixed now.

Jerry

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You can edit or add track info to FLAC files with one of the editing programs mentioned by other posters, no problem. However, you will find .WAV files are not amenable in the same way. At home we use dbPowerAmp for ripping CDs because it double-checks for digital errors when ripping and because it does a great job of including a lot of dat about albums and tracks. Go here and scroll down to the section called “PerfectMeta” to get an idea of what it can do. The only drawback is that, at least on my older version of dbPowerAmp, i can’t add more track info (such as the Year) later on after it’s been ripped. Not sure if the newest version allows this so read up on it: https://www.dbpoweramp.com/cd-ripper.htm

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I use a paid program called Tag&Rename that will allow the editing of metadata for .wav files. You can find it here: http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm

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If you want just the year of the album on the folder, you can rename the folder to include it. Right click the folder, and select ‘Rename’. Then add the year to the name.

If you add the year before the name of the album, it will sort in year order. if you want to keep it sorting in alphabetical order, put the year after the name of the album.

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Hi, the number (18) appears when you look at the “LibrariesMusic” root folder. When you go to a subfolder you don’t see the number (well I don’t anyway). Also if you navigate directly to the “Music” folder location without going through the libraries (which isn’t a real folder anyway) you won’t see the number either.

If you want dates on your folders, you can edit the folder name to put it there. I use the international format YYYY-MM-DD in front of the folder name so it sorts sensibly. Can’t edit the dates in the metadata here, sorry. However if you go to the folder with the MP3 files in it, you can right-click each music file and bring up “properties”, then click on the “Details” tab, then you can update the metadata (aka “properties”) for each track right in Windows. Track by track, I’m afraid, but no additional software needed.

HTH
Paul

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I have folders containing music, I would like them to include the year in the details, but its all blank, can I manually add the year?

Also, what does ”unspecified 18” mean above the list of albums?
40765-Screenshot-30

I know you are here to have a specific question answered, and I will answer it, but inevitably you will want to customize more. This whole reply should prepare you for that.

Don’t get me wrong with the way I describe this stuff. It might sound like I’m a snob or something, but what I’m trying to do is let you know how I approach the subject. I have done a bunch of work on this stuff because I was really frustrated with the way various music players and services handled my music. I quickly read what the other posters wrote and it’s all good. That said, I’m probably going to repeat some of the things they wrote just because it’s easier to re-write than it is to keep checking to see if I’m repeating someone’s good info. Hey, if we repeat each other it’s confirmation.

A very important concept to understand how MP3 players and Windows Explorer work is they extract information from individual files (songs, podcasts, etc) and use that to display details about the music on the device (in this case, columns.) Programs like WinAmp actually create a database out of the tags. That’s why they can be slow to open up if you have a lot of music.

Continuing along that approach is the fact that your file structure doesn’t mean much to the music player. That said, I keep my music in folders just like you. The only time it consistently makes a difference is if you have a burned CD with folders of music arranged as album-folders. But even then, all that I’m about to write holds true. As another respondent says, every MP3 has “headers” with a variety of text fields called “tags.” For instance, one of the fields/tags is the song’s title. That title does not need to be same as the file. Seriously, you might re-name the file-name of the song “Money” in Windows Explorer to something like “New-Car-Caviar” and then edit the tag labeled ‘title’ to be “4-Star-Daydream.” When you open WinAmp (or whatever) and choose “4-star…” it will sure sound like Money.

Now, to address your questions directly.

First of all, I venture to guess “unspecified 18” is a genre, and since there are 18 albums, a quantity. We can get into specifying a genre in a minute.

As for viewing ‘year’ in the details (perhaps so you can sort by year,) all I can say is “you and me both.”

To answer that I’m going to get into a little Windows design. The type of folder you have open has the properties of a “music” folder. It looks like you are running Windows 8. Picture-type and Music-type folders can be displayed differently. You can change the way various folder types display their files. My music folders have the length of the song, the artist, the album and more listed for every song. In a minute I’ll tell you how to make all your music folders the same.

What you want to know, adding a “Year” column:
Open the Pink Floyd folder you used to make the screen capture.
At the top click “View”
You will see a section labeled “Layout” and probably the choice “Details” will be highlighted –Good!
Next to the layout section is the “Current View” section with several pull-down choices.
Pull-down “Add Columns”
At the bottom of the pull-down is “Choose Columns…” –click that
I just counted, a list of over 300 possible columns will appear.
Of course not all of these apply to MP3 files.
You want to add “Year?”
Strike the letter Y key on your keyboard, and the list will jump to the Y section.
Click the check box next to “Year” and tell it OK … done!
FWIW, in one shot you can check several check boxes, for instance “size, bit-rate, length, album, album artist, composer”
If you want “year” to appear between, say, Name and Genre, you can either re-open that list… highlight “year…” and use the “move up/move down” control
or (easier)
Simply within Windows Explorer grab the column header and drag it between the columns where you want it to be.
So that answers your “Year” question.

Now, if you want all your music folders to look the same:
Let’s say you are working in the folder in your screen shot.
Assume you have all your columns set up exactly the way you want them (for now any way)
Right click somewhere empty. (Be careful you aren’t right clicking a file, it won’t damage anything, it just won’t work right even though it appears to at the beginning. The folder and the file both have “properties” choices)
Click “properties”
Click the “customize” tab
Under Customize, in the “Optimize…” pull-down select “Music”
Click the check box for “Also apply… to all subfolders”
After that, up at the top of the window click “View”
To the right at the top find and click click the pull-down “Options” (go figure, there’s only one choice in the pull-down)
Select “Change Folder and Search Options”
Click the “View” tab
Work through all the “Advanced Settings” (this is where I always turn off “Show pop-up description…”)
When done with Advanced… click “Apply” (if you didn’t make any changes, Apply will be grayed out)
–Here is where you will lock-in the new columns
Click “Apply to Folders” (a dialog will pop up asking about “all folders of this type” i.e. the template.
Tell it “Yes”
Now, any folders you have designated as “Music” folders will now display with the new column setup.
If some music folder was open when you applied the new template settings you will need to close and re-open it for the changes to take affect in that folder.

However, I’m going to finish my bit and hopefully you will be able to REALLY customize the music.

There are two basic ways to update MP3 tags, through Windows Explorer and though a third party tool.
For MP3 tagging I really like MP3Tag, as mentioned above. You can apply tags to several files at once with these tools. With the Windows tool you can only work on one file at the time.
I use MediaMonkey as a DLNA server and think it’s a high quality product. It’s just I’m used to MP3Tag for my tagging.

A WARNING about tagging.
Windows Explorer and third party tools can get into a battle about tags when they are both open in the same folder at the same time.
That is, if you have “3rd Party” and Explorer open in the same folder and you re-name all the songs from, like, “Another Brick In The Wall” to “Another-Brick-In-The-Wall” By the time you’re done, half the songs will look the new way, the other half will look the old way. —Avoid that by only having one method open in one folder at the time.

Okay, I’m not going to get into a big third-party how-to. But here’s how to use Windows Explorer to touch-up an MP3 header if you just want to fix one or two songs without opening up the third party app.

Right click the song you want to edit… > choose properties
Under the “General” tag you can re-name the song’s file name (big deal, right?)
Under the “Details” tag you can edit all kinds of good stuff. <—this is the information that shows up in the columns and it's also what gets displayed in apps and portable players like "WinAmp" or the SanDisk Sansa player.

Something you probably will want to be careful about:
Automatic loading of information from the internet.
This isn't some paranoid "watching you" rant. Just practical tagging business.
When you download tags automatically, via the Windows Media Player or a service the 3rd party tool uses, it over writes whatever is currently in your tags. If you edited, for instance, "The Wall – Second Disc" and made it perfect for you, then accidentally let something like "freedb" re-tag the folder, you will be irritated.
Those tagging utilities are good to seed the tags. But you will find they might have too many artists for your taste, for example. Then when you open your music player it will look like you have an Ella Fitzgerald album, but when you open it there will be one song on the album. Then when you open your Cole Porter album you will notice one song is missing: the one where Ella Fitzgerald is singing. —end of rant!

Good luck, you should be able to figure out most everything from here!

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I use ITunes to manage my music; it is free to download. In ITunes you add Files and Folders to the ITunes library; once in ITunes all you have to do is highlight the file(s) and right click, then click on “get info” and alter or add any information you care to, including the year (all details are displayed in separate boxes]. You can also change formats, burn CDs from your own playlists and much more. To save space, once I have added a folder with say and album in it to ITunes, it goes into the ITunes library on my computer; I can then delete the original folder or keep it. Of course this all depends on whether you want to install ITunes on you computer. Hope this helps.
PS: I should have mentioned: If you do change the year, using “get info”, it will show up in the original folder also.:)

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You are all making this very hard.

It’s easy. Select all the files which have the same year. Right click and select properties. Click on the “Details” tab. Enter the correct year in the “Year” field and click “Apply” (or “OK”). Done! That will add the year to the meta data information for each file.

You can then see what year each track is, by displaying the detail of each folder and adding the “year” column.

Alan

Alan

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“Unspecified” is caused by the View, Group by setting. If (none) is selected, the heading will disappear.

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