100 Gigs of Untagged MP3s and an Ipod Oh My
I love my iPod! I have long been using iTunes for my music management even before I got an iPod. The problem was they are systems completely dependant on ID3 Tags. I had a 100 GB collection of largely untagges MP3s (RIAA if your listening they are all from CDs I own or from the public domain). The only thing I have going for me is that the mp3 are storred by Genre, then Artist, and in some cases album below that. How do I tag some a really large collection of music?
Well my first thought was writing a perl script that went through the collection and based on the foldername would tag all mp3s with the artist tag. The Artist tag was the only really important tag in my opinion to be able to effectively manage your music collection in itunes. If there is Title tag then the filename is used and although the files used many different filenaming conventions they were named with a portion of the title somewhere in the track. The problem with this approach is there are many folders that there are many exceptions to the rule.
Then I started looking at software to acomplish the task and came across a program that stood out from the rest, MP3 Tag Studio. This tool was able to mass set tags based on the folder name. This handled both Genre and Artist. For instances when there was albums I could tag those. For comilation folders or soundtracks I could set the ID3 tages based on the filename of the track. The set from filename feature was extremely flexible and could always find the format I was looking for. I now have a properly tagged collection.