I finally bought Tag&Rename

| Thursday, February 5, 2009

It's a program for Windows that tags & renames audio files.

I can be kind of anal about the way I organize my music, but I especially cannot stand it when my mp3 files have retarded naming conventions. It happens often because I torrent music constantly. Just look at these:



Messy, no?
Below is something I see more often, and it's even worse.



Although this naming scheme isn't that bad, I usually view my music files in the "Details" view in Explorer, and it's just not acceptable.



Do you busy yourself with that?
--Edgar, from King Lear by Shakespeare

Yes, yes I do, Edgar.

Below is my preferred structure for my music collection.



Genre, Artist, [year] Album (encoding or bitrate), Track# Title.mp3
Quality, am I right?

So I was using Tag&Rename a lot.

I'd been thinking about buying the program off and on for the past few months. I only had the trial version. I had tried more than one crack for it, but for some reason I could never follow the directions right, and I was stuck with having to reinstall every month after the 30 day trial ran out.

Until that stopped working too.

It was 4 in the morning, I had a few assignments due soon, and it had been a while since I had updated my music collection with my new downloads. It was past the 30 month trial for the nth time, and I'd carefully uninstalled, restarted, and reinstalled like I always did, but they must have fixed it because when I opened the program it showed me the nag screen at day 31 of my 30 days. If I had been a 1337 H4CK3R I would have found wherever they kept that info and modified it to my advantage (or have figured out the cracks in the first place). But alas.

I paced around, figuratively, going from Tag&Rename's site to various torrent sites to the program files folder to the Tag&Rename site again. $30. It wasn't that bad, and I would have it for a lifetime...

But there are open source options too. Like Ex Falso. That's what I used on Linux back when I had all my music on the other computer. After a few Google searches, I found that there were actually no open source tag/renamers for Windows.

Screw it. I went back to Tag&Rename's site and clicked through to the PayPal form. $30 wasn't too bad. Unfortunately there was some sort of fee for a service I didn't care to have but couldn't uncheck from the order form, and another fee for the PayPal service, so it came out to $40 or so in the end... ugh. Whatever. I had waited too long for this, I was just going to get it over with no matter what extra shit came up.

Did I really want to support a non-open source company though? This flickered into my mind as my cursor hovered ominously over the PayPal confirmation button. If only Tag&Rename was open source... contributing knowledge (in the form of code) for the good of mankind... but they were not. The purpose of this company was for profit, and I was supporting their very cause by buying their program. Did I really want to do this?

I shook my head. I had aspired to become an open source programmer when I was younger and first learned what it was. But how reliable is it for making a living? I have no doubt I will program for fun here and there when I have a real job "developing software" somewhere with a "development team", but indeed, that real job is how I would be making my $$. I would love to work on something like Tag&Rename; a quality piece of software it is. Popularly cracked. I wondered how much money they were making.

I can be a real hypocrite. Sometimes I just don't know what I mean. Sometimes it's just simpler to click the confirmation button than to make a giant diagram of my reasoning at 4am before several large assignments are due in hours' time. I don't like spending money, and I like the idea of open source, but sometimes other things just work better. And my mp3 files still looked retarded.

In a few short minutes, I had a serial.

So. ;D Anyone want to split the cost?
jk, jk.

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