How to organise your music library and synchronise it to an external device, converting on-the-fly FLAC to mp3
Introduction
MusicBee is a music manager and player, useful if you want to organise your music library, fixing tags and storing files in a specified path and filename (folder Artist\Album and filename with track number – title, for example).
It also has a rare feature: it allows your to have your FLAC file stored in the library, and convert it on the fly to mp3 when you synchronize your library with another device, for example an USB pen drive for your car radio, the memory of your portable device or your smartphone.
Library Configuration
MusicBee Menu (top right) – Edit – Preferences – Library, check auto organize media files
Press Organization to set folders and file format
Set the folder of you computer where your music will be stored and the naming template for subfolder and files, renamed using data found in tags, for example the default, is very good: <Album Artist>\<Album>\<Disc-Track#> <Title>
Note that this default settings has two extraordinary hidden features:
- <Album Artist> will be:
- Album artist tag contained in the file if that tag is non-empty
- Artist tag if Album Artist is empty
- <Disc-Track#>, very simlilarly will be present in the file name only if Disk Number or Track Number is present. If only track number is set, filename will contain track number only
This simple but useful trick will be very helpful on devices that relies on path and filename to navigate your music library, e.g. you car audio system
Point 1 will help your browse album with songs form many artists because, if you set the Artist Album tag as ‘Various Artists’, all the album songs will be in the same folder, insetead of spreading in every one in its artist folder, point 2 permits you to sort correctly your files inside the album folder, even if it has more than one disc
Library Usage
To add music to the library: drag and drop files to MusicBee. Drag pressing Ctrl if you want to copy-paste files instead of cut-paste
If you want to add a folder:
- Folder must be in a computer hard drive, no removable devices like USB, CD, DVD
- Choose MusicBee -> File -> Scan Folder for New Files
- BE CAREFUL: file will be moved, not copied!!
In the Music panel, check and modify the ID TAG of your files by clicking on it, for a more complete ID TAG view, right click one or more selected songs, choose Edit, and go to the Tags panel.
In that panel you can also let MusicBee search for covers of your albums by right clicking the album cover and selecting Search Internet
Synchronize external device with on-the-fly FLAC to mp3 conversion
As said in the introduction, you can also set an external device to be synchronized, adding new songs you added to your library and deleting the ones you don’t want. You can also sync only a subset of your library’s folders
MusicBee Menu – Edit – Preferences – Devices, choose the device and press Configure
In the Conversion panel, check Convert to, select a profile (Archiving / Maximum Quality has the top quality, 320 kbps constant, you can see the parameters in File Converters the tab) and check Only convert files not already formatted in MP3
If you want, you can choose a different naming for file and folders.
In the panel Music, you can choose if synchronizing all the library, or only a list of folders
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