Sunday, February 25, 2007

Windows Media Player kicks ass

I just transferred whats left of my music collection from my mobile phone to my PC. It's small but I spent a lot of effort hand picking good songs for my trip to Minnesota last spring break, so it represents my favorites.

The mp3s consist of the usual grab bag of random eMule files, LAN party shares, and anonymous CD rips, so of course the names are all totally wrong and none of the meta data are worthwhile. I am a clicker (I just click on a random song that sticks out at the moment) so I never really used meta data for anything. I have finally seen the light; semantic mp3s are amazing!

I started up WMP11 to play some music while configuring my system and while playing the song, WMP started downloading album art for the songs. I was like... whoa.

So I looked into it further and found that you can have WMP search your entire library for meta data and "fix" all of your mp3s for you automatically. Wow!

I went to Library-->More Options and looked at the options under Automatic media information updates for files.

I chose Overwrite all media information which corrects your meta data even if it was entered incorrectly already. Good for those weird Kazaa rips.

Then I selected rename music files using rip music settings so that all of my music was correctly labeled and named. No more NiN-WiTH_teeTH(08)-jacktheripper.mp3 woohoo!

And for good measure I went ahead and selected Rearrange music in rip music folder using rip music settings. Now my music directory under Windows is properly sorted and catagorized using industry standard titles and genres. Each band is given a folder and then inside that folder are albums holding mp3s for that album.

I know you can do this with other media players, but I haven't actually tried it and WMP just kind of floored me with its simplicity and organization. I am so happy now that I have a properly labeled and searchable music library. It even changed me from a clicker to listening by genre. Nice.

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