Google Music Tip - Fix Your Tags Before Uploading

Reading about the likely features for Apple's iCloud Music service (which will be announced at WWDC) has me half convinced to reinstall iTunes as they not only will fix your tags, but fix your lower quality tracks as well. I'm curious how that would work if you had a "prereleased" album, but I suspect the "paid" access will be what ultimately keeps me away.

I was thinking about this because one of the most "notable" features of the new Google Music service is how much it functions like an infinite external hard drive. IOW, it will happily copy multiple copies of the same song if you have it on multiple computers. If you already have a local copy of a song, create an "Instant Mix" using the cloud version, and try to play offline, it will complain that it has to download the song first, even though you already have it and it is already cataloged by the program.

Finally, it uses your track tags to decide how to organize your music by artist and album, and if the tags are messed up and you go to fix them, you have to reupload the fixed version, and then delete the old version.

To help prevent that, I happily recommend the free MusicBrainz site, and their MusicBrainz Picard tool to finally get your digital music house in order. Run this before you upload the first time, and your life will be at least a little simpler :-)