My wife and I are in the middle of a project of ripping our 1300 - CD collection, plus individual songs on CD's borrowed from friends or the library, to MP3 to store on a networked harddrive. So far it's going great but we're only halfway through it.

The biggest problem we have so far is that we miss the liner notes. Not necessarily the cover art, per se, although that and the pictures inside are sometimes interesting. But more importantly we'd like to see all the OTHER stuff that appears in liner notes, such as biographical imformation about the composer or performers, how the piece came to be written or its history, notes about the personnel, lyrics, etc, etc. Too much material to stuff into the "comments" tag and still read comfortably What I'd LIKE to have is an associated .PDF or XML or HTML file that is hard-linked to the MP3 so they stay together and so I can read it automatically when the piece is selected in iTunes or whatever I'm playing it with. If it was in those formats I could edit it myself to add richer information than what might have been in the original jewelcase.

Is there any currently-supported way of doing this with any off-the-shelf (sw or hw) players?

First, good luck with the conversion! That sounds like a lot of CDs and a lot of work. I myself haven't really started yet due to the task seeming insurmountable, so I do hope it all goes well for you. Not to diverge too much, but I will quickly suggest thinking about a lossless format since you do have so many in your collection. If you've thought it over and don't care, though, just ignore that.

Are the liner notes something you'd like to view EVERY TIME you listen to the MP3s? If not, I would suggest just storing the file (PDF sounds perfect) in the same directory as the MP3s (assuming you have some sort of album-based folder structure). That way, when you do care to see the liner notes, you can just open that folder and then open the file. For me (probably a plugin, and not sure which off the top of my head) right-clicking on a song in foobar2000 gives me an option to Open Directory which opens an Explorer window in that directory.

I think you would be hard pressed to find an elegant solution to opening related files that will work in more than one MP3 player. You may be able to store a file:// link in a WXXX (user-defined url) tag frame, but it won't automatically be used by any player. I'm inclined to believe that getting the file to open without shelling out to Explorer is possible in foobar2000, because nearly anything is possible with enough patience. Has anyone done something similar to that?