Albums in MP3 Format (Sun Jun 13 21:17:21 2004)
I spent some time cleaning up the lack of useful ID3 tags in my iTunes music collection. When you rip from vinyl to mp3, cddb won’t help you. (Caveat: there are some tools that purport to do all that for you: given an LP, they will look up the track names, break the tracks on timed boundaries, and write out your choice of file formats with well-formed names. I have never gotten any of it to work.)
Morbus’ script does a nice job of organizing all this stuff, but his collection is not at all like mine. I have quite a few single tracks and partial albums (on Led Zep’s ‘four symbols’ LP, “When the levee breaks” is the only decent track, as far as I’m concerned, so the I didn’t even rip the rest of it.)
I made a couple of small mods to the script and sent a diff to Morbus. One of them was the option to add your Amazon affiliate tag to the Comments field in the ID3 tags: this means when you run iTunes2HTML against your iTunes library, the HTML page would have your ID and you might pick up a buck or two.
Morbus rightly points out that hardcoding your affiliate ID in the ID3 tag links the file back to you. I hadn’t thought of that, but the modification I made makes it possible to preserve your anonymity: it allows you to populate the Comments field with URLs but the affiliate ID would be appended only when you run the iTunes2HTML script.