Some background: Like most of you, I'm a pretty serious music fan, and have pretty decent equipment. I also have extensive computer experience, as I started my career as a programmer (we didn't call ourselves software engineers back then) and have had a number of technical positions where I've had to become pretty familiar with different operating systems etc.
About five years ago, I decided to make the jump into putting all my CDs onto a computer. I figured if I could do away with searching, sorting, and replacing all my CDs, that would be a major benefit.
I did a little looking around but didn't research the topic as deeply as I should have, so I made my first mistake: I selected Windows Media Player as the player, since it was already on the Windows machine and I figured wtf, I could always switch later.
Then I made my second mistake: Being somewhat unfamiliar with lossless formats, and wanting to lose nothing in terms of sound quality, I decided to rip the CDs as WAV files. At this point, I was ignorant of two things, the first being WAV had lousy support for tagging and the second being that WMP actually started ripping the CDs as soon as they were put into the drive, BEFORE it had looked up the disc in the online database. As a result, for awhile all my CDs had as a first, second, and sometimes even third file labled as such.
01 Unknown Name Unknown Artist etc.
Ok well eventually I wised up and started ripping the files to WMP lossless and waiting until the data showed up before starting the rip.
Recently, the disc I had my files on crapped out and it was at that point I realized that if I was ever to make a change, this would be a good time. Some research led me to JRiver and I now knew that FLAC was really the best format for me.
Of course, all the files that I imported into MC had all the existing tagging errors that had been inherited, so I spent a ton of time during the Christmas holidays tagging files. Which made my wife real happy but that's a different story. I was greatly helped by the Library "get tag from file name" command, except all the file names have the track number as part of them hence I have a lot of files that are "01 Title of the song". Yes, that was a reference to Davinci's notebook.
I was under the impression that since I had now properly tagged the files and they were FLAC, I was set forever, given proper backup. And backup I did not only doing a system backup but on a separate network drive creating a duplicate of the directory.
Then I was on another computer and I accessed the backup drive, and wtf? The same tagging errors that I had thought I fixed were still there. So now I think that the tag information is actually in the library instead of with the files and I'd better be damned sure I keep a backup of the library somewhere else I'm screwed.
This confuses me because it contradicts what I thought I understood about tagging FLAC files, and I also thought I'd ticked the right boxes regarding associating tags with files.
So here are my questions:
1) What have I stated above that seems wrong? Do I understand where the tagging data reside? And if so, does that mean that when accessing the files remotely I must also provide the library name on the server?
2) is there some batch tag capability where I can take all the files that start with 01 and just remove that bit?
Thanks