Adding your digital audio files

Introduction

Before you can start exploring you music collection you need to add your files to the database. Since this task is one of the most important and most used tasks in Helium Music Manager, we have tried to simplify it as much as possible.
During the addition process, meta data is collected from the files that you have chosen to add and pictures are collected from either tags and/or disc.

Tasks

• Preparations
• Selecting the files to be added
• Adding the files to your database
• Completing your collection with pictures
• Tips and tricks

Preparations

It is recommended that the digital music files you add to your database contain at least some basic tags (Artist, Title and Album are recommended as a minimum). A strong recommendation is that each album that you are going to add to your database should be contained in a unique folder on your storage medium. Storing albums in unique folders will result in the best possible album separation, which means less manual work for you!
Click the Tools | Database | Add Files to Database... menu entry on the main menu to start adding files to your Database.

Selecting the files to be added

When the Add Files to Database tool starts you will see a screen similar to the right image.

Select which folders you would like to add files from by clicking the checkbox infront of that folder in the tree control which displays your hard discs.

By default you don't need to choose which Library/Volume (the virtual Database structure is built on Libraries and Volumes), but you can easily choose where the files should be placed by clicking the Select button.

Helium Music Manager can catalogue your mp3, MPEG Plus, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, FLAC, Monkey's Audio and Apple iTunes/iPod (m4a, m4p, mp4) files.

Adding the files to your database

Simply click the OK button after you have selected your folders to start adding them to your database.
Helium Music Manager will display a progress indicator for the file it's currently importing as well the total number of files that are being added.

The adding in Helium Music Manager allows you to continue to work while the add is being performed. You can close the progress screen to be able to work with Helium Music Manager. The adding will continue in the background.

Completing your collection with pictures

Helium Music Manager automatically tries to locate and match pictures with the files you have added to reduce the manual work for you. Pictures are recognized from the music file source folders, as well as from the tags of the files which you have added.

 

Adding pictures to your albums is highly recommended as album pictures are displayed within several views in Helium Music Manager, when you browse your albums in the Album Browser, as well as in the Music Information Browser just to mention two major views where album pictures are used.

There are several tools available from Helium Music Manager which allows you to quickly manage your album pictures. The Album Cover Manager is one of them. You can read more about managing album pictures from the help files.

Tips and tricks

• The automatic picture matching will help you to save lot's of time by automatically adding pictures to your albums during a add operation.
• If your files are missing relevant tags, such as album and/or title, you can use the My Computer node in the Music Library to locate your files/albums stored on disc. By using this approach it is quite easy to locate your albums and update their tags so that they can then be correctly displayed in the Album Browser.
• Organize your albums on disc in separate folders: one folder per album.
• If you don't store pictures in your tags, you can specify in Options that the database adding should not try to locate pictures in tags.
• You can control the picture quality (for the pictures that are being added to the database) in Options.