Metropol

I've put my geek hat on this weekend; I've finally updated my Winamp, sorted out the Music Library and got round to undusting my Last.fm profile.

(For those who don't know, Last.fm is a site that keeps a running list of the mp3s you listen to, and uses this growing data to analyse your music tastes in a very clever but 1984ish sort of way).

Last.fm uses the wonder of ID3 tags. Unfortunately, ever since I started to accumulate my thousands of mp3s, I have deleted the ID3 tags because they are generally a nuisance in my opinion. Is there a way to redo the ID3 tags for each mp3 file so that I have an artist name and track title based on what the title of the file is? All of my mp3 files follow the format of Camera Obscura - Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken.mp3

Winamp has a groovy, editable tool for doing this when it loads the files into a playlist. However, it also has the habit of either guessing useless stuff such as album title or misunderstanding which bit of the file name is which field.

YOUR GENERAL INPUT AND DISCUSSION IS WELCOME.

please respond.

I to name my files uaing "Artists - Album - Track No - Title" format, and generally use winamp to play them. But I've used iTunes to ID3 everything as you can select all the files in an album and name the artist, album, cd cover in one go. As long as you turn off the *mess about with the files* option it'll just update the mp3 where it is and you're done. Rather than let iTunes move everything randomly which it will do if you don't keep an eye on it.

ID3-TagIT is an excellent piece of kit http://www.id3-tagit.de/english/index.htm

Tell it the format of the filename eg. <A> - <T> (artist - track) and it will fill in the tags for you.

It also lets you do all sorts of editing of single and multiple tracks, converting between all the tag standards, and - cleverest of all - if you have an album of mp3s in a folder, it can automatically work out the album they're from and update the tags.

Tagscanner is good too