This drove me crazy enough to give up on managing a music library. I had about 45k songs and was pretty meticulous on organization at a folder level. In Winamp the dashes for filenames were slightly different from dashes from ID3 tags, and this was unacceptable, so I decided I wanted to fix all the terrible or missing ID3 tags. Manually looking up every song/album to find the release date took forever. A lot of the original tags were for the remastered year, so I'd manually look up the release date to "correct" it. If I wanted to make a smart playlist of "00s Music" I didn't want an album from the 70s showing up (or vice versa). This was often easier said that done in some cases, as release years weren't always clear, especially for albums that came out near the end of the year.
I tried one of those software packages to fix tags and that was an unmitigated disaster. I kept the blast radius small, but it trashed everything I put through it, so I gave up on using anything automatic.
I think I only made it through the Bs or Cs (going alphabetically by artist) when it came to the level of detail to get release dates.
As you mention, steaming platforms have the same issue, which I find annoying, but at least I don't feel like it's my responsibility to fix it anymore.
Oof. I recently embarked on a similar retagging project, but since I'm not that big a music listener and only had a few thousand files, I actually made it through.
On the other hand in a similar vein I decided that I wanted to geotag all my old pictures and I've got no idea whether I'll ever make it through that project, or not…
>I decided that I wanted to geotag all my old pictures and I've got no idea whether I'll ever make it through that project, or not…
This is something I should probably do as well. Lucky for me I've had an iPhone since 2007, so a good number of my stuff is geotagged, but I do have older photos and gaps due to photos given to me by others.
I just made a Smart Album in Photos to show me all the photos that aren't geotagged... Just shy of 2,000. That seems like something I can chip away at while bored.
I tried one of those software packages to fix tags and that was an unmitigated disaster. I kept the blast radius small, but it trashed everything I put through it, so I gave up on using anything automatic.
I think I only made it through the Bs or Cs (going alphabetically by artist) when it came to the level of detail to get release dates.
As you mention, steaming platforms have the same issue, which I find annoying, but at least I don't feel like it's my responsibility to fix it anymore.