[lug] audio questions

[dio2002 at indra.com]

> I like to use Amarok to listen and manage the files/tags after I've 
> ripped them.  I've also use kid3 to edit tags for flac/ogg/mp3.

my mp3 collection is at least 7 years old.  i know, i know. get with the 
program. my excuse is partly that most music today kind of sucks ;-)

back in the day i mostly used napster to supplement what i already had 
on cd.   so most of the mp3's i have are already id3 tagged.
occasionally i'd copy songs from my own cds but they weren't in mp3 
format. i believe they were wavs.  there weren't sophisticated tools 
back then to do any of this.  needless to say, i'm a little behind the 
times on the whole diy mp3 tools media library thing although i 
understand id3 tags, rippers and the like.

general questions.

when you rip from cd with something like amarok, is it smart enough to 
pull the artist, album, track info from the audio file on the CD (wav?) 
and insert that as appropriate id3 tag info in each new MP3 file?  or 
does one have to manually tag every song post rip?

assuming you have a bunch (a crapload) of MP3 files already on disk, can 
tools like amrok be used in "bash script" mode to mass id3 (re)tag the 
existing file collection to speed up the ops?  i'm thinking if the files 
were organized in artist and album directories and the file names were 
equivalent to track names, this could be scripted to put the info in 
there.  does amrok make this easy?

same goes for tagging existing mp3s by categories (artist, album, genre) 
so that i can organize the music without having to rely on directory 
structures?

how do the media libraries implement the mp3 file categorizing?  do they 
use a separate metadata db proprietary to each media lib to store the 
category tags and use a file pointer field or do the cat tags get 
inserted into the mp3 itself?

what about other id3 taggers and media lib tools other than amrok?  if 
someone out there uses something else please chime in on the same 
questions asked above?

fwiw, my current mp3 collection is on a windows box but i'd happily move 
it to linux if i can bash script process the files when and if needed.