I’ve been working on organizing my music library so I can actually find the songs I feel like listening to. It’s proven to be a pain in the ass. Finding the tag information and updating them all manually is slow, tedious and just plain painful, even with help from CDDB (which it seems has only been automated for full disks only and not single tracks). That is until I found MusicBrainz! Basically it’s a member maintained DB of music information, however the client will go through your mp3s and compare a generated “fingerprint
‘ of the track to it’s database to identify and tag the file. Of course it’s not perfect, but it does have mechanisms (match %, unidentifiable list, etc.) that make it fairly painless to sort through the results given. I was actually suprised by the number of files it got right, and the database contained even some of the more esoteric artists.

MusicBrainz doesn’t solve all my problems though. For example, classic rock. True, the songs ARE from a “Greatest of…” CD and the CD DID come out in the 90s, but I want to show the original release information, otherwise I get “The Who” showing up in my 90s music playlist.

And genre isn’t even touched, but that’s a whole other post entirely.