Hi,

Unfortunately there is no easy solution. Yate is not designed to auto tag entirely untagged collections. There are apps out there which claim to do the job but having tried them I can safely say that you’ll end up with a lot of incorrectly named and tagged music.

There are a number of things which can be done to ease the process of getting your collection into shape.

Personally I believe that the first step is to attempt to get some semblance of order into the folder structure which will make it easier to attempt anything.

When you say “untagged”, how bad is it? It you have no tags at all it it’s one thing….if you at least have an “Album” and “Artist” tag it is another. This simple item will affect all subsequent steps. If there are no tags at all, is there any useful metadata in the filenames?

I've posted a zip file at:

http://2manyrobots.com/actions/BatchHelpers.zip

It contains a few helper actions to be run as a batch process over your entire collection. These actions should help get you started.

Unzip the file and drag the plist to Yate's main window file list area.

Before you start you'll have to get a Discogs Authorization token if you have not yet done so. You can do this one time operation from the Yate>Force Discogs Authorization... menu item.

You will now have the following actions:

Find Folders Missing Info

The Access Discogs Access action requires you to have a consistent Album Artist (or Artist) and Album field across all tracks in a folder. It's probably a good example to run this action through the Batch Processor to determine which of your folders does not meet the criteria. Make sure you drag the root of your folder structure to the wizard. Auto-Save files does not have to be enabled by Verbose should be enabled. The resultant log file will contain a list of folders which are deficient. Hopefully there are not to many. By copying a folder URL from the log you can easily open the associated foler in Yate by doing a 'Open Path in Clipboard'. You can manually clean up the required tags or you can execute the 'Exclude from Master Matching' action (from the UI not the Batch Processor) to exclude the files from Master Matching.

Log Discogs Master Matches

Another Batch Run to attempt to file Discogs Masters matching each folders metadata. This variant of the action only logs the data and does not modifiy any of the files. Make sure Verbose is enabled when you run the batch process. By examining the log file (yes I know it's tedious) you can see what matches were made if any, against your files. Discogs Master matching always has false matches. No human intervention <--> False Matches. If for any reason you're not happy with a displayed result use the 'Exclude from Master Matching' action to disable matching the album.

Commit Discogs Master Matches

Same as the previous action but imports metadata from matched masters. Make sure Auto-Save is set when running the Batch Processor. If you're comfortable with it you can skip the 'Log Discogs Master Matches' action and go right to this one. If will not overwrite existingAlbum, Album Artist or Artist fields. However over a large collection you will definitely have incorrect matches.

Create Stubs and Process Stubs

These are actions you can use in a workflow to use iTunes to get missing artwork. A description of the workflow is in the online help for the same named action statements or the 'Using iTunes to Look for Missing Artwork' help topic on the main help page.

Let me know how you do with these and if you're getting anywhere we can move on to actions to restructure your folder layout.