A colleague of mine at GO media had a problem. He pulled a bunch of music files (mostly MP3's) off of his iPod and noticed that it had automatically given them unreadable names. So, for example, a normal MP3 music file might be named something like James McMurty – Childish – Things.mp3. Instead, his iPod had renamed it to something like ZVXSDR.mp3. Obviously this would make burning to CD's or categorizing his music very tedious. He would have to listen to each track, one by one, and figure out who the artist was, what the song is, and what album it belonged to and manually rename them.
We both began searching the web for MP3 renaming tools and found a few. However, because I'm a programmer I naturally figured there had to be a relatively easy way to rename / copy them through code so he didn't have to buy software. After searching the web for a little bit I found an awesome open-source Java library written by Charles M. Chen, called MyID3: a Java ID3 Tag Library, that reads (and writes) the meta data associated with MP3's (current support for ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags). After a little tinkering I was able to get it to work. I threw together a little GUI for my co-worker and away he went. It successfully converted thousands of his tracks in no time.
