Ever tagged/renamed whole bunches of MP3s? Know how much that sucks? Well, tagging choir practice MP3s is like the worst ever. Why, you ask?
1) They're a mix CD, burned off of various CDs, thus not in any CDDB
2) They're obscure songs
3) It's always like 28 little 2 minute songs
4) They're full of special characters
5) They have subtle differences between versions and weird naming schemes
I defy you to come up with a more annoying set of music to tag.
That is all.
PS. I'm only in the 1st and 5th ones, and they're short samples, but have a listen!
Tagging and organizing...
Indeed. I'm in the middle of a several-year long project to sort, tag and add album art to all (or as many as possible) of my MP3s. It's a time-consuming (if not fairly complex for some) procedure which involves the following steps (and not always in the following order)...
1. Find the existing song.
1a. If the song has too-low a quality or is corrupted, then I would attempt to find and download a better version. Russia's allTunes is my personal favorite due to its library size and cheap price per song. Otherwise, there's always the [ahem] "free" P2P alternatives.
2. Verify its name and album through sites such as cdnow.com.
2a. If CDNOW has little to no info on a song or album, then the search is expanded to Google.
3. Move and rename the song with the following convention...
Artist\Album (Year)\Track# - Artist - Track Name
4. Verify ID3 tag information.
5. Use cdnow.com or albumart.org to copy and apply album art to the track(s) via MediaMonkey.
6. Analyze the volume of the tracks of newly added songs to ensure proper volume leveling.
7. Plug-in my iPod and sync the songs to the device.
7a. Sync (or more accurately "echo") the songs from my desktop computer to my laptop for increased portability.
My collection began as a bunch of MP3s that were ripped from CDs and downloaded from the Internet (usually by KaZaA and Napster) beginning in the late 1990s on a shared computer. Imagine doing this over a dial-up connection that didn't get over 26.4 kbps [shudder]. Once we acquired broadband cable access, things got easier. In the early part of this decade, my bro and I copied our collection onto our own newer PCs. I soon began to concern myself with the proper naming and tagging of my music collection. While many of the filenames were correct, even more of them didn't have existing or proper ID3 tags. The incorrectly tagged songs were usually quickly corrected, but more obscure songs required some lyrical and historical research for accuracy (e.g. the year the song was produced).
The research turned up some interesting things. For example, the "The Legend of Zelda" song many thought was played by System of a Down was actually sung by Rabbit Joint. The bluegrass cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" was not done by Phish, but rather by The Gourds.
As for the manual sorting, one would argue, "If you have a media library program such as MediaMonkey, why even bother manually sorting them into proper folders?" Perhaps I want a great level of control of where the physical music files are stored. This allows for even better organization--especially if I don't want to utilize my media library program to find songs from a particular album.
The album art aspect wasn't that important at first until I found out about my iPod video's ability to display album art on its screen. Therefore, I added the new objective of embedding all the pretty pictures into as many MP3s I can find the art for. Sometimes that becomes quite a challenge!
Anyway, in (not-so) short, yeah...tagging is an annoying process.