I've finally gotten around to purchasing an Empeg, that is currently somewhere in Tenessee with Mr Fedex. I was originally on the waiting list way way back in '98 (IIRC!), but lack of cash prevailed, followed by other expensive life events such as emigration, marriage and fatherhood, so it didn't happen.

But, finally after a long wait, my Empeg is on the way, and it is time to prepare my mp3 collection for it. My mp3s are currently named trackname.mp3 in a folder structure root/artist/album/ with relative m3u files in root/ and I need to rename the mp3s to artist-album-track#-trackname.mp3 for Empeg use. I don't really know what state my tags are in...they were encoded/tagged using bladeenc under linux, and up 'til now I haven't had any use for tags - the filename structure has worked for me, although getting my tags organised will also help for my network jukebox

I have Win95 and Win2k boxes on my home network, so I can tidy up my filenames and tags from these.

My question to everyone here is simple: Given my current situation, Which of these 2 pieces of software should I spend the cash on?

BTW,
It's great to see so many of the original Empeg team active here. Kudos to Hugo, Patrick and the rest of the team!

I've used both programs and IMO tag&rename is much faster, more flexible and easier to use.

The beauty of your situation is that you can try both of those products at the same time and choose the one that works best for you. Both of them will get the job done, the choice comes down to which one fits your personal work style the best.

Personally, I keep them both handy. There are some things one will do that the other does not, and vice-versa.

And let me suggest Tag-It to Tony and anyone else. It comes up strong where both Tag&Rename and MP3TagStudio fall short. Very strong. Tag&Rename has its pluses, but has quite a few possibly dangerous bugs and paradigms right now.

Bruno

For empeg use you don't need any type of logical filenaming structure. You just need ID tags for it to pull information from for its database.

MP3Tag Studio will probably be your best bet for the renaming operation you want to do, as well as your initial tagging (if pulling the tags automatically from the filename). It is mroe robust than the other programs and has some excellent naming rules for case as well.

When you want to manipulate tracks based on anything other than directory structure, you will have to use Tag&Rename or Tag-It. MP3TS doesn't have support for anything other than recursive folder structure (or specific files within one single folder).

Bruno

Do you have a link for Tag It ?

Here's the link - http://www.id3-tagit.de

Bruno

Thanks for the link.

I've been playing with Tag&Rename. It looks quite good as far as tagging goes. The internet lookup is useful, although I wish it'd make a stab at matching retrieved Track names to existing filenames, but at least it's a start.

I discovered that about 95% of my collection has no tagging whatsoever.