So my wife asks me...

My wife asks me to "consolidate" all of her crappy music on our new computer in anticipation of getting a new iPod for her birthday.

I just was amazed that I could take a burned CD with MP3s all over it, import it into iTunes, use Shazam on my phone to listen to the first 3 parts of the song, get the title, album, and artist in like 20 seconds. Then I can right click on the song in iTunes and 90% of the time get the cover art from the CD in like 2 seconds....

Man, we've come a long way from "ripping" CDs and converting them from WAV (or whatever it was) to MP3 for storage. Including waiting like 20 minutes for a single downloaded song (I downloaded the entire "Pink" discography in the time I spent typing this).

The only question I have is why isn't Shazam a part of iTunes yet?! I should just be able to click a button and the computer can listen to the song, name it, and do all that updating stuff....Probably because it would make pirating songs too easy for Apple to stomach or something.

Get MediaMonkey.

It reads the MP3 file name, goes to Amazon, and then tags with all the appropriate ID3 information, including album art.

It's a little more manual, in that you have to go into MediaMonkey, grab the 15 tracks from a CD you just ripped and then it'll find, tag, & rename the files, but it's very slick and I've been using it for years.

or play Mortal Kombat with a friend from Vietnam!