So, my wonderful wife bought me an iRiver H10 as a wedding gift. Since I’m in the car commuting for about 1.5 hours per day, it has come in quite handy. I’ve learned a bit of German and blasted Texas Country to half of southern California. I don’t consider myself a huge music listener—I’m definitely not one of those people that you see with headphones on connected to an iPod or CD player 24-7 or who listens to music religously whilst doing other things. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these, it’s just not my style. But, over the course of my computer-owning days, I’ve managed to collect quite a library of music. Nothing like some people I know (*cough used to live with)—I only have about 10GB worth of music stored—but still enough to get into organization issues. The biggest problem was that over the 6-year period I’ve been collecting music, I’ve never really sat down to organize and standardize all of it. I mean, it’s kind of in folders by genre and artist, but beyond that the filename usually got me enough. Many of the tags haven’t been filled in, or all the info is in the filename with some strange convention.

The problem is, the H10 wants to organize by artist, genre, album, etc, and my first attempts of finding any of the music that I copied on the thing were less than fruitful. About half the way across the pond on the honeymoon, I figured out that a certain person really had put a bunch of music on the player, but the player hadn’t added any of it to the DB because the ‘proper’ tags weren’t in place. But, once I found the file browser, all of the music was there. So, for the first week or so, that was my method of playing what I wanted too. Since that method got old really fast, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks sorting and naming and renaming songs to get them close to the right places so that I could actually find them on the iRiver. Right now, I’m about 200 songs through the 700 or so that I’m sticking on the player. Fingers crossed, hopefully the iRiver will pick up all the information I’ve so labourously sorted through, and I’ll actually bea able to find and play what I want. I’m not holding my breath quite yet.