Renumbering

I've admitted before that sometimes I'm a trifle slow on the uptake. Strangely enough the latest manifestation of this phenomenon occurred in the same context; digital music[^].

The penny dropped the other day, when, having reached the end of CD1 of Iolanthe and been forced to switch to the second CD it suddenly occurred to me that whilst the limitations of the CD format required that a 2 hour work be split across two surfaces such a split was by no means set in concrete. 30 years ago the LP format split the same performance across four surfaces.

In the brave new world of WMA and MP3 and 60 gig music players such a surface split is unnecessary.

Hence an afternoon spent renumbering tracks, both in filename and in track number metadata. All done the hard way, by hand. Yeah, I could have written a quickie program to iterate over the filenames, parse out the track number (always at the start of the filename) and add an offset. With enough searching of open source I could probably have found an MP3/WMA tag library to do the same for the tags. But I decided to do it by hand.

A decision made without realising quite how many multi-CD sets I actually have! My library track count didn't drop by even 1 but the album count did; from (currently) 434 to 366. But it's done now, backed up to bigboy (my HTPC) and burned in ripped form to DVDs.

But boy does my RSI wish I hadn't done it!