Cleaning up your music collection.

I have a pretty large music collection on my PC. It includes songs downloaded, ripped, transferred over the years. Earlier when ripping songs off a disc there was no way of picking up the correct artist information for some CD's also since  I had a dialup connection there were quite a few albums that were incorrectly marked when the net was down.

The old way of correcting this was to sit with the inlay or lookup the track listing on the net and manually enter the correct ID3 tags. Winamp has now included a nifty feature 'Auto Tag'. What you do is enque the songs that you want to tag in Winamp and  in select them all in the playlist window. Then right-click and 'Send To> Auto Tag'  This will then let Winamp look up the song details on the database and add the information to the ID tags.  Once the 

analysis and query is complete you can then verify that the details picked up for each track is correct by clicking on the track listing in the Auto-Tag window.  Please remember to check that the information is correct as the databasee sometimes makes a mistake. It is always better to do this with complete albums reather than a large compilation of songs. I say this because I once tried auto tagging a list of 180 songs and checking to see that they have been correctly identified is quite a task.

Another smart move when trying to organise your music collection is to ensure that you rename your mp3s for easy identification. A great lil tool that you can use for this is the ID3 Renamer   You  can configure this program to rename your files using different attributes like Track Number/Artist name/Album Name/ etc. It also has an option to rename the folder as configured. Using these tools will help you ensure that your music collection is always organised.