Hi all.
My MP3 collection is growing huge because almost everything I buy its ripped to
my HD (today I hear most the music at the computer)...

And I have a "trouble" finding the interesting tracks passed a time...

I mean, a pair of times in the year I get invited to DJ'ing in several parties
organized by my friends, and the week before I go crazy looking for these themes
I don't remenber In what album are... So I spent three or four days looking for
songs... and most of the times I'm unable to find some songs...
(I get really tired)

So this year I'm decided to change this mayhem!

What do you think that can I make?
I've been thinking in set a comment in the MP3 files (that is really easy to
do with foobar while you are hearing a great theme), for example "DJ: GREAT
HOUSE THEME", and when I'll need to find these theme perform a search over all
the MP3 files looking for "DJ*" at the comment tag field...

Any another idea?

I also suposse that this is the moment to add all my MP3s files to database
utility to... sure this helps me too to find some themes... or the comments that
I'll add...
any suggestion about a MP3 database utility?

Thanks a lot for your help.
Regards.
b:.

I had the same problem, I had about 10,000 mp3s, but I wasn't listening to ANY of them because I could never find anything I wanted to listen to. But thanks to iTunes, smart playlists, and some time spent tagging the ones I really wanted (it's a LOT easier to tag them while ripping them from a CD than later ), I can always find ones I want. I highly recommendAllmusic.com as a good starting place. I just copy the style and tone information into the comment field, I used to copy the album cover too before all ther programs popped up that got it from Amazon (their's are better quality). Using the smart playlists feature, I can now create automatically updating playlists such as "Angry Music" or "West Coast Rap from 1990-1995". I only use iTunes, because it's the easiest, most powerful way to manage my MP3 (and growing AAC ) collection. I'm going to assume you don't have a mac, but you can obviously still use the comment suggesiton and iTunes for windows should be coming out this summer. Can anyone tell me what players for windows have smart playlists? The other fieleds that are useful are the rating, playcount, date added, and date last played so you can create playlists like "5 star songs that I added this year, but haven't listen to in the past month" or other random stuff like that.

Don't yell at me for using allmusic, it's just a good starting place to tag 3,000 mp3s without thinking too much, you can obviously change them later after you listen to them.

I too had the same problem with an mp3 collection in excess of 11.000 tracks. The program I swear by is "MP3 Collector". It is a database/id3 tagger and stripper/playlist creator that has many additional features including the ability to export the whole collection to html for posting on a webpage. One time purchase of $25.00 gets you a lifetime of program updates which come several times a year. The software author keeps tabs on the MP3 Collector software forum and is very good about implementing suggestions from users in updates. I swear by this program - give it a try

You can download a fully functional demo at:
http://download.com.com/3000-2141-10059092...page&tag=button

Or use a program like directory printer to save the content of the directories to a .txt file, then you can find the wanted song using windows search.

There is Mpeg Audio Collection too, here is the link

I also use MP3 Collector, which is very good. Lately, however, I have been using Media Center from J River. http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/

It has some very powerful file management features and includes Smartlists. Once you start using Smartlists, they become indispensible.