Let's just say that after a year of thinking about buying an MP3 player, I finally broke down and bought an iPod Classic 160 Go. I'm not an Apple fan by any mean, but I figured that it was relatively cheap for the storage space, and I could get double the warranty time by buying where I did with my mother's credit card.
My biggest fear was actually having to deal with iTunes, as being a long time Windows user, I'm used to micromanaging my files instead of letting programs handle everything themselves. How would an idiot-proof program mesh with a very hands-on user? Not very well at all it turns out. I simply have way too many music files that aren't tagged properly so when I tried adding everything I had in iTunes, the resulting mess was completely unusable.
I'm now faced with having to tag close to 10 000 files (in addition to converting all the files that my iPod will not read like OGG, WV and WMA, thank you very much Apple) and from reading around the net, the whole process feels anything but straightforward. I'd love it if I could just start a program that would scan all my files and automatically and accurately tag everything following some universal standards but the few programs I tried were pretty bad when left alone to tag even a simple album.
Now granted, I own a lot of illegal music though in my defense, I've bought in MP3 or CD form everything that could be at a reasonable price; but since a large part of my collection is made of video game soundtracks that are for the most part expensive imports, yeah I've downloaded a lot of stuff.
Anyway, this leads me to my main point, which is that I need help for a few things:
1) First, does anyone know of a program that makes tagging MP3 easy if not automatically? And by tag I obviously mean ID3 tag.
2) Is there some sort of standard for tagging and naming the files? Most programs, if told to manage the files themselves will name the files with the track number and name, and place them in a directory with the album name which is itself in a directory with the artist name. But what do I do with soundtracks where there are more than one artist, or where there is only one but being less important than the album I *don't* want it to be placed in a folder with the artist's name? And how do I best use the Genre tag if I want to keep track of sub-genres like a "Soundtrack" which is "Techno" style?
I'm literally completely lost as I usually am when faced with complex and intricate information processes (like whenever I have to fill a government form or insurance claim which usually makes me want to scream in frustration because everything is needlessly ambiguous). As it is, my iPod is useless because there's very little music I can put on it without having to do lots of editing.
VGMaps posters, I need you
