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It seems that my MP3 collection has exploded overnight. I went from my collection of about 18 GB of music to well over 23, and I am still not finished ripping half of Kristin’s CD’s to my machine. I am also going to pull about 20 GB of music from a couple other machines.

This has created a new problem for my collection. How can I categorize it, and mix up what I listen to? These questions have led me to 2 new utilities. MusicBrainz Tagger is an application that searches your music collection against an online database and automatically creates / updates your ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags, as well as renames the file formatting to your preference. For mixing, I have discovered MusicMagic Mixer. It reads the ID3 tags of your MP3s, and aranges them into Genre and Artist categories. You can select a song and select “Mix” to generate a playlist of similar music. The full version, obtained by entering in a registration key (Google, people) will allow you to create “Moods” where you create a playlist, and it is automatically mixed against your collection to create a new list each time.

I find both of these utilities essential to managing a large collection, and an interesting and fun way to mix up what you listen to. The MusicMagic utility supports Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, and is free, so everyone who is interested – check it out.