3. Prerequisites

Organizing The Library

First of all, it was my aim to make a nice list of all the albums I posess in my iTunes library. I am in the ongoing process of converting my whole CD collection, some couple of hundred CDs, to MP3, and while doing so, I try to keep a list. I used to do this by updating some spreadsheet file in GNumeric, which is still a viable approach, but this is nicer. However, I use certain rules to tag my MP3s:

• I don't keep track of Genres. They are never accurate anyway.
• I try to keep the Artwork of the tracks to just contain the Album cover art, not any other artwork, like singles cover art or logos.
• I try to keep the disk numbers up to date. They are often ignored but I want albums consisting of multiple CDs to be treated as one album.

Installing the software used

In earlier versions I used perl modules like MP3::Info to extract the images and ImageMagick command line tools to generate the thumbnails. However, things are much simpler now: I've made a self contained package which is downloadable and has everything you will need.