A few months ago I decided to start using the Zune software as a way to manage my music library and automatically download the latest podcasts. Now I chose it over iTunes mainly for looks. Sure doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of iTunes, but at least it doesn’t have that gorram aluminum look. That look was cool when it first came out, but now it’s just outdated. The software also pushed me toward getting a Zune player instead of an iPod.

Back on topic after using the Zune software for a while I started to get annoyed by the lack of album covers I had. So about two months ago I went through and allowed Zune to automatically update my albums with all the right id3 tag info. Sadly though b/c of the plethora of foreign CDs and random tracks I’ve got it only updated about a third of my 10,000 songs. Needless to say I was disappointed. But I just shrugged it off and went on with my life.

Sadly though I was left with this nagging feeling and since I’m pretty much a perfectionist a few weeks back I finally decided I’d suck it up. So I took upon myself the challenge of going through all my songs, album by album, and write in the correct info on all of them. Naturally since I’m not an omniscient being I’d have to look up all the information.

But first I had to find a good id3 tag editing software since the ones built into iTunes and Zune are crap. After going through a few crappy shareware I eventually came upon Tagscanner. Not only is it a great tag editor, you can also use it to rename your tracks which was an “Oh my god why hadn’t I thought of that.” It had always bothered me all the random ways the files were named but I didn’t do anything about ’cause it’d be too hard to do one by one. Needless to say Tagscanner was a godsend.

So all this was probably four weeks ago and now I just finished the E’s yesterday. It’s tough work finding decent quality album art and romaji of all my Japanese songs. Also it was a hard decision for me to choose romaji over real Japanese characters, but it’s just easier for me to organize that way. I’m hoping to finish a majority of this over Thanksgiving break but I doubt I’ll be able to. We’ll just have to see.

Another thing I did was get rid of anything I didn’t like or didn’t have a complete album. I did this mainly because I don’t like having lone songs from an album. But if it’s a song I really like, I’ll scour the interwebs for the rest of the album and so far I’ve been fairly lucky. But I’ve still been deleting all the random crap I’ve collected over the years and now I’m down about 8,500 songs. I did hurt a little ’cause I’m also a packrat and hate getting rid of things. But it’s for the best so I just push aside that feeling.

So yeah, all I can say is that it sucks being a perfectionist. I have a feeling I’m going to go through the same thing with my anime/movie collection. Let’s hope that’ll be easier.