I have a small collection of MP3's that I ripped over the years from various CD's using multiple applications. One of the biggest annoyances is that the programs I used to rip these has changed over the years and no two applications have used the same naming scheme.

Thankfully better than 80% do have id3 tags, so making the naming scheme for my entire library is actually very easy with a command line Linux utility, id3ren.

First, get it using Synaptic or from the console (assuming Ubuntu) with:

sudo apt-get install id3ren

After installed, cd into a directory of MP3 files and enter:

id3ren -template=%a-%s.mp3 *.mp3

Now, you may prefer the default template, but I didn't like the brackets it placed around the artist name and song title. With the above command I've changed the template to rename the song using just the artist name, hyphen, song title.

There's a quick and easy way to help organize your library!