The Musical Gardener's Tools: Introduction

A large part of my time is spent either actively or passively listening to music. As a rule, I don't really like radio, because of the repetitive and predictable music on it, and carrying CDs around is impractical, so what I usually do is listen to my collection of oggs and mp3s.

To keep things interesting, I check a lot of sites periodically for new songs to download, and I tend to throw a lot of them away again after listening, the theory being that my collection is forever getting better and better through constantly keeping an eye on what grows there, and culling the crap, sort of like gardening. Or so I imagine.

I'm also a big fan of last.fm, where everything I play is registered, (guilty secrets and all,) and which regularly recommends me some great new bands in return. Because last.fm only works when the id3 tags in your music files are correct, (*and*, I suspect, because I'm anal about categorizing stuff,) I also tend to do a lot of editing of same tags.

Taking the above as a given, I'm constantly searching for the best tools to make my life easier, and I thought I'd share some of my favorites....