best ways to structure your MP3 database?

That depends entirely on personal taste, and the type of music. My collection is classical, and as such is much more difficult to structure.

Far more important than how you structure your database, however, is the attention you pay to setting up your MP3 tags. I know you won't follow my advice, because just like me and everybody else who ever got an empeg, you are going to be so anxious to get your music in that you'll rush through the tagging. But save this message just so you can look at it a month from now and give yourself a dope slap and say, "Doh! He was right!

It should take you nearly as long to get your tags set up right as it does to rip and encode the music. Get the bare information from CDDB, then go in and personally edit every tag to correct the spelling and punctuation errors, and make the tags read the way you want. Check and double check that the Genre, Year, album name, artist name, is correct for each track. Put as much information as the ID3 v.1 format allows you to cram in for each track. It's a lot of extra work now... but you will be *very* happy that you did it later on. There are more than a few people on this bbs who have re-ripped their entire collections just to re-do the tags.

In a related issue... hard drive space is cheap. Don't fall into the trap of encoding at a lesser quality in order to save hard drive space.

These are things I wish somebody had beaten me about the head with when I first got my empeg. I probably wouldn't have listened... but if I were to do it all over again now I would do it differently.

tanstaafl.



"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"