Retagging entire collection????

I have been thinking lately about finally cleaning up all the tags for all my MP3's.

But here is the problem:
I had a hard drive crash a while back and lost alot of the files I had on my PC. So I do not have the same files on my Empeg as I do on my PC. This squashes my plans of just fixing the tags for all tracks on my PC and then erasing all the files on the Empeg and re-downloading them to the player with the correct tags. That was my first idea but it is not too feasible.
Anyone have any suggestions about any software that can help me sort through the files on the player and the PC so I don't end up erasing any files that are specific to the plyer only? Or if not software, any ideas on how I should go about retagging?

jEmplode has the ability to download files from your player in a reasonably structured manner. I'd try using that first to recover any MP3s you lost on your peecee.

When I have to grab files off of the player and I'm not sure if their tags are right, here's what I do:

- Make sure the track information in Emplode is correct.

- Grab the files using Jemplode and using a custom file name like this:

{artist} - {source} ({year}) - {pos:2} - {title}{ext}

- Then I use MP3 Tag Studio to perform a filenames-to-tags crunch on the file set based on that pattern of file name (which I create using "advanced" mode in MP3 Tag Studio).

If you are using the latest bleeding-edge preview of MP3 Tag Studio that Magnus made available to us last week, you can even add {genre} to the beginning of that spec.

It has some drawbacks:

- Can't tag non-file-name characters such as ? / : etc.

- Can't have the space-hyphen-space pattern in any field except the song title. This could be worked around by using a more unique delimiter pattern.

Honestly, though, this is still a ton of trouble. What I really want to see is a version of Jemplode that writes V1 and V2 tags directly into each file as it downloads them.

The way you can work around the ? / : problem in filenames while doing the "Auto Write Tags Based Upon Filenames" is to use the feature in Auto Letter Case Fix to do custom translations. I translate:

^ to ?
% to :
_ to /

therefore:
Rock - Cake - 1994 - Motorcade Of Generosity - 08 - Is This Love^.mp3
is tagged as:
Cake - Is This Love?

Nice trick.

But wait. If it's got a question mark in the player, and then I use Jemplode to download the file with the file names, then Jemplode will make them underscores or whatever and I still have to deal with them by hand.

Does Jemplode have a translation table for that kind of stuff already?

Or what about web-style escape sequences like %20 ?

In addition to which, what if you want to use a caret or percent mark or underscore?