For the coming roadtrip for Max's wedding, I'm likely to be spending a great deal of time in the car with J and E. I suspect, but am not sure, that their tastes in music would include some stuff from my Anime collection. I'll describe again my tools for managing music, as well as the general scheme of things:

• Naming convention - In my collection directories, I have subdirectories which are loosely named artist-albumname (or just albumname if there is no single artist, or just artist or artist-misc if there is no albumname). Everything is lower-cased. Artists and albumnames are alphanumeric+underscore
• Within one of those subdirectories are files that are TRACKNUMBER-TRACKNAME.mp3/ogg/whatever (sans tracknumber and dash if I don't know or is not relevant). All this is also lower case, with no characters in the trackname apart from alphanumerics and underscore.
• Most of my music categorised music is under /media/music/collection
• I also have /media/music/misc which is just a big directory of songs where I have no other songs that should be grouped with them
• I also have other subdirectories of /media/music that are like /media/music/misc, except are special purpose (e.g. /media/music/anime). Many of the files in these directories predate my current way of doing things, and have odd names, no ID3/Vorbis tags, and/or are in some weird format (I have a few midis, mods, and the like)
• wrapid3 - A tool I wrote that, run on a directory with music in it, will completely nuke any ID3 (MP3) or Vorbis (OGG) tags for music in there, and then apply Author/Album information provided on the commandline to said files, also applying title information by intelligently parsing the filename
• banish - A tool I wrote that, noting the filename provided and the current directory, flips a file over into the /media/music-NORAND directory, creating subdirectories as needed to mirror the current structure of /media/music
• Putting things on the Neuros - I presently mount the neuros under /mnt/neuros, go into /media/music and do the following:
• rm -rf /mnt/neuros/music
• mkdir /mnt/neuros/music
• tar cf - collection misc | (cd /mnt/neuros/music ; tar xvf -)
• cd
• java NeurosDBM.jar
• (rebuild the database, rebuild my playlists, check the listing to make sure my tags are all looking ok)
• (sync, umount, and eject)
• To play stuff on the laptop, I use a tool I wrote called smart that understands directories and is a front end to playing things with other software (like mplayer, mikmod, etc)

Historically, I've only been syncing the collection and misc directories (and occasionally a mst3k directory). To sync the anime collection means that I need to go through, find and banish all the sound clips that arn't music, rename all the files to meet my current naming conventions, and tag all the stuff I want on the Neuros. I'll probably be doing that next time I'm bored. It will be nice to have the anime music back in my playlist -- I might also do this for some of the other folders. At some point, I should re-rip a lot of my classical music -- at some point in the past during one of my hard drive space shortages, I deleted a lot of it because I have it on CD.