[geeks] Weird MacOS issue

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 08:57:30AM +0200, sammy ominsky wrote:

>Well, in my case, the problem was iTunes.  It's not an unsolvable  
>problem.  On the contrary, once I took the time to fix it, I now have  
>a meticulously tagged music collection!

I did the opposite with mine. I make my MP3's using a program called 
Audiograbber on Windows and it uses the freedb for tagging and file names.
I also get lots of MP3's from other sources, with random naming standards.

I keep them on a Linux based file server, and prefer to manipulate them
using console commands, so I wrote a PERL program that converts them to
what I consider a reasonable format for a name, lower case letters,
spaces and special characters converted to underbars and double underbars
converted to single ones. 

This is not well appreciated by the rest of my family members because they
have songs in Hebrew which the Hebrew gets lost. Luckily for everyone it
does not effect the tagging, so if a song is properly tagged, what is shown
by the player is the tag, not the file name.

This worked well for me until my wife got an MP3 player. I keep songs in the
form where the highest level directory is the artist, the second level is
the album and the third level is <track_number>_<song_name>.mp3.

The problem with that is about 500 of my MP3's had no song name, so they were
01.mp3, 01_track_01.mp3, or something else similar. Most of these dated
from before the existence of the CDDB and Freedb, and come to think of it,
ID3 tags.

Since they were in a hierarchical directory structure it did not matter,
but she copies them all to the root directory of her player (a 2gb solid
state device).

I had to write another PERL program to go through and find the ones with no
identifying information in the name and fix them to at least 
<track_number>_<artist>_<album>.mp3 so they were unique. 

The irony of this is that she never actually uses the player. I made a
backup of it to a DVD for her by copying it to her hard drive, and she
plays the songs using Winamp, at home from her hard drive, and at work
from the backup DVD. :-)

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM