I Thought I Was Cleaning Up My Music Collection. Then I Started Rediscovering It.

My music has been in a lot of places for a lot of years.

Decades, in fact.

CDs, computers, external hard drives, old iTunes libraries, DJ folders and backups of backups. Probably a few places I've forgotten about completely.

Earlier this year, I finally did something I'd been meaning to do for a very long time and brought most of it together onto one server.

That solved one problem: at least I knew where my music was.

What it didn't solve was the state of it.

Thousands of audio files accumulated over decades don't necessarily look much like a music collection.

There are missing titles, meaningless filenames, incomplete tags, no artwork, duplicates and CD rips from 20 or 25 years ago that I've long since forgotten what they actually are.

I've looked at sorting it out before.

Then I've looked at the size of the job and quietly closed the folder again.

Then an email arrived from the developer of an app called Truffle.

Disclosure: Truffle's developer, Marian Moritz Hildebrand, contacted me after coming across Electronic Production and gave me a licence for the full version. There was no payment or requirement to write about the app, and he had no approval over this post.

What Truffle Does

The idea behind Truffle is remarkably simple.

You point it at your music and it analyses the audio, attempts to identify the tracks and finds the metadata that belongs to them: artist, title, album, release information and artwork.

You review what it's found before anything is changed, and if it hasn't got something quite right, you can edit the information yourself.

Truffle is currently available for macOS and is designed to work with music from folders on disk, Apple Music/iTunes libraries and Rekordbox, Serato and Traktor collections.

That sounded useful.

So I downloaded it and, perhaps slightly foolishly, added a folder containing around 1,000 tracks.

The free version doesn't analyse all 1,000 – it gives you 100 analyses to try – but that was more than enough to discover what Truffle could do.

Then The Records Started Appearing

I started going through the results.

Some of these files have been with me for 20 or 25 years.

They've travelled between computers and hard drives, been ripped from CDs and copied from one collection into another.

And Truffle started identifying them.

An audio file I'd known for years by a meaningless filename suddenly had an artist and a title.

Then the artwork appeared.

And I recognised it.

That's where this stopped feeling like a metadata exercise.

A track that's existed for years as little more than an anonymous audio file suddenly becomes a record again. Artist, title, release information and artwork fall back into place.

I Started Listening

This was the part I hadn't expected.

I thought I was going to spend some time cleaning metadata.

Instead, I started rediscovering my music collection.

Tracks appeared that I hadn't heard for years. Classics I'd completely forgotten were there. Records I'd known but whose filenames had become meaningless to me.

So I'd stop.

Listen.

And remember.

At one point I realised that I wasn't really testing Truffle anymore. I was simply enjoying going through my own music.

For somebody who has spent decades collecting records, DJing and making music, that's quite an experience.

These aren't just files. Some of them are records I played, sampled, referenced or simply loved at different points in my life.

And some of them I'd effectively lost without actually losing them.

They were sitting on a hard drive all along.

I just didn't know what they were.

This Isn't Going to Be a Weekend Job

My first mistake was adding 1,000 tracks.

Not because Truffle couldn't deal with them.

Because I couldn't.

After going through the first ten or so properly, I realised that cleaning a collection like mine isn't something I want to automate blindly.

I want to hear things and check what Truffle has found.

Sometimes I want to correct something manually. Sometimes I discover a file I don't need anymore and delete it. Other times I find a track I'd completely forgotten about and end up listening to it instead.

So I've changed my approach.

I'm going to do this folder by folder.

Truffle seems particularly well suited to that because I can stop whenever I like, close the app, come back later and continue where I left off.

That changes the scale of the job.

I don't need to clean several decades of music in one enormous session.

I can do a folder, clean another 20 or 30 tracks, stop, and come back another day.

It Doesn't Get Everything

That's worth making clear.

Truffle doesn't identify every track.

I've encountered files where it hasn't found an answer, and occasionally things need correcting. But that hasn't bothered me because what it does identify removes an enormous amount of work.

When it can't find something automatically, the information can be edited manually.

I can also control-click a track and delete it when I discover something I simply don't need anymore, so the process has become as much about cleaning the collection itself as fixing its metadata.

More importantly, I haven't had to read a manual.

I downloaded the app and started using it. Within minutes I understood what it was doing, what it had found and what I needed to do next.

For software designed to deal with something as potentially messy as a decades-old music archive, that's a big part of its appeal.

The Free Version Is Actually Enough to Find Out

Truffle lets you try the app before buying it, with 100 analyses and 20 writes available for free.

I know that because I hit the limit.

The slightly ridiculous part is that Marian had already sent me a licence for the full version.

I just hadn't entered it.

I'd downloaded Truffle, thrown some music at it and become so engrossed in what it was finding that I simply carried on.

Eventually a message appeared telling me I'd used my 20 free writes.

By that point, I didn't really need convincing.

And I think that's a good way to offer a trial.

You're not watching a demonstration using somebody else's perfectly prepared library. You can give Truffle some of your mess and see what it makes of it.

A hundred analyses is enough to understand how it works, see how successfully it identifies your own music and, importantly, decide whether you trust what it's doing before letting it loose on a much larger collection.

I was in before I'd even activated the licence I'd been given.

A Note For DJs

This was something I particularly wanted to clarify before writing about Truffle.

Truffle writes its changes to the metadata inside the audio file itself.

It doesn't rename or move the files, and it doesn't write to the Rekordbox, Serato or Traktor databases.

That means existing cues, beatgrids, crates and sets remain untouched, while the files themselves stay exactly where the DJ software expects to find them.

Changes can also be undone individually or as an entire session, although deleting a file is permanent.

Truffle currently supports 17 audio file extensions, including MP3, M4A, FLAC, AIFF and WAV.

One thing worth knowing is that tempo and key analysis are carried out locally on the Mac.

The developer also tells me that above around 130 BPM, Truffle's tempo reading should be treated as an approximation.

For anyone with years of music already organised inside DJ software, that distinction matters.

Truffle is cleaning up the music files without trying to reorganise the DJ library you've built around them.

Putting Things Right

I hadn't expected cleaning up a music collection to feel quite so satisfying.

I've accumulated this music over a huge part of my life. Some of these files have followed me around for decades.

Even after finally bringing much of it together in one place earlier this year, it still didn't really feel organised.

Now, slowly, it is.

Watching that mess gradually turn back into a proper music collection feels strangely cleansing.

Every time Truffle identifies another old unnamed track and the artist, title and artwork fall into place, I get the same little feeling.

Something has been put right.

I've only just started.

There are thousands more tracks to go.

But for the first time, I'm actually looking forward to going through them.

Truffle is available for Mac from the Mac App Store.