I was checking out the ten sample "chapters" of iPod and iTunes Hacks. They're mostly very "duh" like most chapters in the Hacks series (I find the value of the books in the few ideas that aren't, and the specific notes and recommendations about the obvious ideas). However, this sentence in "Clean Up Your ID3 Tags:"
Others insist, as if any other way were sacrilege, that organizing alphabetically is the only way to go. But where do The Shangri-Las go--under S or T? And what about artists like 10,000 Maniacs?!
plus having experienced the pain of having to retag and reupload the past couple weeks since I got an iPod, plus still having some albums split across multiple gave me an idea: you can use the new music search facilities of the Amazon API to canonicalize artist and album tags on your music files. For example, searching Amazon for "ten thousand maniacs" returns albums by "10,000 Maniacs." (This is where an All Music Guide web service would shine, but given that giving out that information for a fee is their business, we'll have to depend on someone who gives out data for free and makes money on the edge.)
I'll also take this opportunity to note that I would highly recommend Red Chair Software's Anapod Explorer for third-party iPod software, if:
- Red Chair published an open API for their Audiomorph automatic transcoding system. I bought the software hoping it would handle all the Musepack files that iTunes didn't/wouldn't/couldn't, and assumed that even if not, I could find/make a decoder DLL from the available Musepack decoder source code. Unfortunately, no; I even filed a support query asking if they had API docs I could consult, and they kindly replied they don't support Musepack yet. Gee, thanks.
- Anapod supported APE tags, or had a plugin system for supporting other tag systems. Some of the data on my iPod is truncated because foobar2000 tags songs by default in ID3v1 and APE, and of them Anapod only knows ID3v1.
- its audio track list sorting were as smart as the iPod's, which ignores "The" and would put the aforementioned "The Shangri-Las" in S. Where it should be.
