Whipin’ my MP3 library into shape

I reloaded my wife’s iPod Nano over the weekend and listened to one of the playlists this morning while I was snow blowing the driveway. Almost immediately I was reminded I’d been meaning to run MP3Gain on the whole library for quite some time - any two tracks that are more than 10 years apart in release had massive volume differences.

Lo and behold, just after I kick the process off in the background - it’s a feature on Lifehacker today. Weird timing. As noted in the comments there, it needs to be run in Album mode. I tested a few albums I knew were vastly different and it worked perfectly (at least to my ears).

Rick’s article hints that it is the first in a series. I’m curious what else he’ll cover as I’ve “groomed and combed” my own library ever since ripping my entire CD collection to one massive library. My workflow was pretty much.

• Rip in WMP10 (this was pre-WMP11) to WMA Lossless. Purist will scoff at me using anything except EAC in secure rip mode, but the meta data in Media player comes from AMG. EAC uses freedb and most of the time, the tracks are mis-spelled and I don’t get cool info like composer. This file is my archival copy. To date, I haven’t heard any bad rips yet.
• Correct album art if needed. (with a cool utility I can no longer find that scanned the WMP library and allowed you to pull down JPG’s and import them)
• Since the WMA Lossless format doesn’t play well with iTunes/iPod, I wrote a custom app that used the Windows Media SDK and the LAME library to transcode to MP3 and pull along all the beautiful meta-data from WMP. This file goes into iTunes.
• Before iTunes 7, I was SOL for album art (iTunes automatically uses its own from iTMS), so I leveraged the script interface to iTunes, and ran through the whole library and pulled in the JPG that WMP had stored in each album directory.

Seems like a lot, and there is probably an easier way out there (one would be to ditch my OCD tendencies and just live with bad data and no album art). If I was a real geek, I’d automate this whole process so it is streamlined, but I don’t really buy CD’s anymore, and the occasional addition to the library can be done fairly manually.