Cleanin' up the MP3 collection

So since building my new machine, I vowed to go through all the mp3's on my machine and fix up the tags, filenames etc. Yes, I know I'm a masochist. One of my pet peeves with digital media in general is that I don't agree with most of the cataloging schemes there are out there.

Most of my vexation has to do with the way they are represented in your filesystem. Sure, a filename is not the perfect way to catalog your data, but it shouldn't be ignored just because images can support EXIF data and mp3's can hold ID3 tags.

For digital photos, just imagine if your filenames could automatically be named with the date in the file. You'd be well on your way to being able to see a timeline of your pictures just from your OS. No more having to go into Picasa (which is awesome, by the way) to look at your pics in order. Yes, I know, you might not have set the date right on the camera, what if you took pictures at the exact same time and so on. Add some more info into the file name!

YYYY.MM.DD_HH.MM.SS_CameraName.JPG

That's a start. Might not be as pretty as IMG004546.JPG, but I think it's more useful. Include an optional suffix. Fix up dates when you forgot to change the time zone. You know, I think writing a tool to do this might not be a bad idea...more on that maybe.

Anyway, back to the topic of mp3 collection. I found a tool like this for mp3 management called ID3-TagIT. I've been using it for a while now, and it's awesome. The UI can be a little overwhelming, but it's simple once you learn the keyboard shortcuts. Lots of useful things like capitalization fixes, filename-to-tags, tags-to-filename, etc. etc. Anyway, you might enjoy it, if you have an mp3 *cough* collection like mine.