I dug up a Drive that I had encoded my entire CD collection (~150) on about 6-7 years ago. We moved, and it got misplaced in boxes. I hooked it back up and its good to go. I utilized .ape at the time and structured by rips as follows

/artist/album/xx-name.ape

Where xx is the track and name is the name of the song

I would like my GF to have access to all these via itunes for her ipod. In essence I am giving her all the cd's. But i need to transcode these all to mp3 for that purpose. I can find freeware to transcode apropriately but I am having a tough time understanding how to get the files to have the correct ID3 tags (I am not sure to tell how if they have it currently even). She wants to be able to have itunes grab the cover art etc like it does for a purchsed or itunes ripped songs. I can not seem to get this right after a week of trying.

To top it off she wants the track numbers out of the names, so they look just like itunes songs.

Any help on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated. It has been a long time since I was looking into how to do this and I have forgotten most of it. I would hate to have to rerip all these because of my own ignorance at the software level.

Thanks for any help

If you were to use foobar2000 to transcode to MP3 then you could use the tagging component to take the relevant parts of the directory structure / filename and tag the files accordingly.

Thanks, i will look into foobar2000. Can i set it to disregard the track number portion of the file names?

Also concerning the cover art, I am unsure how Itunes works, if I tag the songs correctly will tunes identify the song and grab the cover are appropriately?

About iTunes and cover art, i think iTunes only looks at the album tag to look for album art. But it's been a while since i used it so don't quote me on that.

To semi-automatically get the tags for the files you can use foobar too, if you install the freedb tagger component (comes with the foobar install.exe but might need to be manually checked when installing). After all the files are properly tagged you can convert them to mp3 with the filename pattern: %title% to get filenames like "name.mp3".
(may need to install lame if you don't have it)

Thanks for the help!

Ran a test with foobar2000 and it seems to have done the trick pretty well. I will test the album art with itunes tomorrow and see how that goes.