My girlfriend is visiting her parents I spend my time with closed shutters, fastfood and my computer Well no… not exactly… I spent some time with bringing some order into my MP3 collection and checking out new software. I own a Rio Carbon Player which organizes the songs by ID3 tags only. So having correctly tagged files is essential. I tried a few tools until I found EasyTAG. A great tool to quickly tag and rename whole albums. You can scan the tags from the filename - or better - just use the built in FreeDB search.

During my search for tagging software I stumbled across Album Cover Art Downloader - which does what the name suggest: it downloads CD-Cover pictures from Amazon for your MP3 collection. It can store them directly in the MP3 files (in a ID3 tag field) or can save it in a Windows-Mediaplayer-recognized “Folder.jpg” or add a freedesktop.org-compatible ”.desktop” file.

Now having Covers for all my albums I needed a viewer for them of course. I tried

Amarok which received some publicity lately but wasn't really satisfying - I never really got warm with these iTunes-like stuff. I eventually settled with a XMMS-Plugin called CoverViewer.

And finally I got IMMS - another XMMS plugin - running. It automagically rates your MP3s based on how you play them. If you skip a song it gets a lower rating. If you play it fully it gets a slightly better rating, if you directly jump to a song its rating is increased some more. IMMS stores it's data in a SQLite database so it's open for some scripting which brings me back to my RIO Carbon. I think I could hack a script which automatically copies my best rated music to the player