Little plug here for Alsoft Disk Warrior. My not-very-old 500GB lacie eXtreme drive recently stopped mounting on my MacBookPro. If I fired up Disk Utility, it could see the drive but couldn’t fix it’s errors.
DiskWarrior however set to the task with with enthusiasm, and even gave me a delightfully detailed log as a PDF about what nasties it fixed. So much cheaper than a new Lacie!
Another top tip for Mac users, I am on a mission at the moment to sanitise my data; mp3s, video, work projects, photos, personal files and so on. Put them all in neat centralised places, no stray files, everything neat and tidy and easy to find!
Part of the solution was a new 120GB portable drive to consolidate and separate out my music collection. I have found two useful tools in this quest.
One is called The Godfather (Windows) and is a typically ugly programmer-designed bit of software that can re-tag and re-arrange your music. I only used it to grab all my files and put them sensibly in Artist/Album/ folders, although I suspect it could do so much more.
This has lead to what must be a universal conundrum How do you handle “various artist” albums in your music collection? Now, I am struggling here, so suggestions are welcome. I have moved my various albums into a folder called just that, thereby reducing the mass of top level artist folders, but, I still have a royal mess in my media player when viewing the artists list. How do I quickly avoid this? I don’t care to see artists with one song in my collection… ideas please?
OK, last top Mac tip. I forgot that my new portable drive would be formatted as NTFS by default (which OS X doesn’t want to write to..). Damn, but no matter, I found this NTFS-3g driver, which gives me full read/write/modify on the Windows formatted disk.