My own little OCD moment is renaming Gracenoted tracks where it’s Such-and-Such featuring So-and-So: the protocol is always “(feat. So-and-So)” after the song title, not “ft.” or anything else, and not after the artist name. Not sure why I went with that method but it’s too late to change now!

As for genres, I tend go generic so punkish tracks get filed under “Alternative” and all variants of dance music go under “Electronic/Dance”, rather than “Hard Handbag Trance”. Oh, and all artists must be tagged with the same genre, even if their style changes over time! (I’m looking at you Madonna).

Enough to keep a therapist in business for a good few days there, I think.

If I could achieve such a level of OCD I’d probably plough it into getting all the recording volume levels to match so I didn’t have to keep jumping on the wheel to adjust up or down when on shuffle mode. Procrastination wins wverytime though.

I feel your pain. I do a similar thing, though my pattern is:

1. If I can find out which album a particular track is from, I assign it that album name and image, even if it’s the only track I have from that album or artist (see: John Denver)

2. If I have other orphaned tracks by the same artist, or I can’t figure out which album it’s from, create a new compilation “album” called “miscellaneous tracks”, illustrated by a photo of the artist.

I’m surprised there isn’t a service for it, though – there were a bunch around for Cd ripping and even photo digitisation. I seem to remember reading something about Selfridges planning a service like you suggest…Here’s the link but I don’t think it came to anything, unfortunately.

Convenience aside, could CDs replace the sensory pleasure of vinyl, though? Another thing I was thinking about vinyl after writing this was the way that vinyl (and tapes, come to that) imposed an order on your listening. Albums were constructed like novels, with a journey of sound, to be consumed in a very particular order. The closest thing I’ve heard in recent years is Kate Bush’s Aerial. It just doesn’t make sense on shuffle.

@UW: I tend to edit ID3 tags for files in batches, to make sure I standardise genre and title information. It cuts down the nitpicky stuff, but not hugely, especially as I’ve got a lot of orphaned tracks.

My other quirk – possibly to the annoyance of the Last FM community, but hey, it’s MY music – is to rename the “album” titles for lone MP3s, as I hate having incomplete albums mucking up my sort. So I’ll give tracks titles like 06 Singles, Misc Oldies and so on – and I’ll always, always make sure that the “compilation” box is ticked, so that I can easily locate and drag them into my mixing software, for compilation CDs and podcasts. (A separate Windows folder for every single artist, even if there’s only one track? Ugh, no!)

I’m moving house in a couple of weeks, so i’m tempted to leave all the vinyl in the garage, then only allow albums into the house if I can rip them as i play them. But there’s a huge business model for someone to offer a swap for vinyl in return for MP3s – i’m sure i’m not the first person to rip loads of these tracks. Something like what mp3.com tried to do years ago…

*Raises hand nervously”

Well, in my defence, I don’t get out much. And for me, there is something so satisfying about sending an actual burned CD far afield (Australia and Canada being frequent destinations) rather than just bunging together a zip file and placing it online for donwloading somewhere.

Do you edit your ID3 tags within iTunes or using something else rather more, um, quick and user-friendly? I always mean to tidy up my tags too, but it just seems to take so long in iTunes …

How did you get around Amazon’s now annoying habbit of putting a big white square around the cover art?