MP3 Woes

[LetYouDown]

I have a very large MP3 collection that I've built over the past several years. I have meticulously maintained the ID3 tags the way that I want them. I recently purchased a Portable Media Center, which is absolutely perfect for me. I can sync it to my desktop computer, plug it into my car stereo on my way to work, unhook it, bring it to my desk and listen for 8 hours, then do the reverse.

The problem: it has a lot of features that essentially rely on Windows Media Player. Up to this point I have HATED WMP. I've been a Winamp user since Day 1. So, in this new found light, I decided to investigate WMP and found that I still don't like it...but it might be worth the switch.

My question list:

1.) How do I get album art for several thousand songs, in the most efficient way possible? I've ripped all of my songs from CDs using Winamp Pro, so I have MP3s that don't have any "extended" information (album art, etc.) and I've changed a lot of the ID3 tags the way I want(ed) them. I'd prefer to leave everything the same and just find the album art, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

2.) I have organized my MP3s into folders by Genre, not by artist. I don't have any albums broken down...and a lot of my tracks only have the artist/track name, no album info. From what I can gather, album art goes by folder, not by actual files. Is this correct? If so, how do I easily get my tracks into the Artist/Album/Track Name format...especially when a lot of the CDs are now missing. I don't want to do this entirely manually.

3.) I assume when I'm editing the information for an MP3 track in the WMP interface, that's changing the ID3 tags? I do like the fact that I can select an entire group of files and change the Genre, or the Artist, or whatever.

This isn't in direct response to any specific question, but have you used iTunes? I have a large mp3 collection also, about 17,000 songs and 100 gigs. I have about 400 cds that I'm going to rip as well. I find that iTunes works very well for me.

As for album art, I just pull up Amazon or Tower Records, then drag the image from their site into the appropriate part of the itunes window.

If you've got your files tagged by genre, you might like iTunes, which allows you to select or search by genre, and many other fields.

Besides, WMP sucks.