Well, I have been into MP3s for about three years now, and between downloading and ripping my own from albums and CDs have amassed a rather large collection. When I would download a song or songs, I would just stick them into my "my music" folder and add them to RealOne (yeah, I really do like it) and from there I would just make sure the names, albums etc were correct in Realone's catalog. I could make sense of my collection. Then this week the problem.

I decided to make a private webserver for my friends and family and share my music collection with them (need a password to get in) That is when I really noticed the filenames of all of those songs I have ripped, downloaded and received in emails. I swear, no one could find ANYTHING just looking at those file names! I never really paid much attention to the filenames because of my using a media manager. Well, I get to looking on the net for some way of making my job of renaming the files easier.

I had NO IDEA that renaming mp3s was such a big business! More programs out there than one could shake a stick at. I managed to find a really great program called tag&rename which made my job pretty darn easy. I was able to retrieve the information from my Realone Catalog to create all of the missing tags my collection had (it was awful). After creating missing tags, I was able to rename all of my music collection (sorry peerless) using this method: Artist - Title - Album.MP3

Now anyone using my webserver sharing service can scroll down the list looking at the file name and know exactly who the artist is, the title of the song, and the album (if there was on on the original download). It makes the collection look much better, easier to handle AND all tags have been restored in case I want to put it into a portable jukebox like the Rio. In this case all the files would HAVE to have all of their tags in tact for Rio to make sense of the music collection.

Sorry Peerless, I also share my collection on guntella too, and I hope it does not cause you too much pain, but it was something that was necessary, and much needed after three years of collecting. It was not done to hurt anyone, but to make my life easier (I am sort of an obsessive compulsive with organization).

Dennis