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After waiting what seems like an eternity for Media Center to catalog your library of MP3s, WMAs, and other digital audio files, it finally presents all your songs and albums. But what fresh hell is this? Album art is missing for half your library; some artist names have been duplicated; and you have a big chunk of songs in a folder called Unknown. Hey, is this My Music or The Devil's Workshop?

It's both. For reasons unknown, Media Center acts a little flaky when cataloging music. You need to make sure that your songs' ID3 tags--which contain information about artist, album, title, and so on--are uniform and accurate. If they're not, prepare to pay the Devil's due.

1. Install Tag&Rename.

Keep your music collection in tune with corrected ID3 tags and cover shot downloads from Amazon. Click to enlarge

True to its name, Tag&Rename (www.softpointer.com) was designed expressly for fixing ID3 tags and filenames for MP3, WMA, iTunes, Ogg Vorbis, and various other digital audio files. The software costs $29.95, but there's a free 30-day trial version available for download. After installing the program, use it to locate the songs, albums, and/or artists that were giving you trouble in Media Center. Follow the instructions to tweak their tags, making sure to save the changes when you're done. The next time you load My Music, most of your songs should be cataloged correctly. (You may need to make manual adjustments to some songs, especially when dealing with song-compilation albums.)

2. Fetch album art. If you're missing album art for any given song or album, take advantage of Tag&Rename's Amazon.com lookup feature. Click the check boxes for the songs that lack art, then hit F10. Click the Start Search button and wait for the software to find the corresponding album. When it does, click it, then click Get Info. If the proper album art appears, click Write Tags to add it to the files' ID3 tags.