Collection

Ever since I've had my own computer (before this millennium began), I've had problems with my music collection. Putting aside the almost negligible cassettes and vinyls, my current music collection is split between CD's and MP3's. A few years back, pre-broadband, my problem was that if I really wanted an album, I would buy it on CD, while my MP3 collection was made up of odds and sods; this meant that my computer-based music library gave a very distorted picture of my taste, since it was missing all my favourite albums. Granted, I could walk across to my shelf, pick up a CD and play it, but that seemed a bit low-tech.
Fast forward to mid-February 2008 and, after a recent spate of downloading, coupled with a concerted effort in 2007 to rip my CD collection, the vast majority of the music that I own exists in one sprawling folder. I'm missing a lot of genre descriptions and a fair bit of album artwork, but that doesn't worry me unduly. What worries me is this:
I have this utopian vision of firing up Windows Media Player and having complete confidence that everything in its library has the correct title and artist, is correctly sequenced within a full album, and is something I actually intended to have in the library. I want there to be no albums that play in alphabetical order (unless they happen to be that way, but a quick bit of maths says only about 1 in 4000 albums would coincidentally occur like that) and most of all, I want to be able to click 'shuffle' and have complete confidence that every track I hear is meant to be in the library. I actually don't like the idea of the shuffle function, since I'm something of an album purist, but it's like when you're climbing and someone tells you that you could hang a Land Rover from your carabiner; you never would, but it's nice to know you could.
I've been meaning for ages to purge the unwanted tracks from my library, but they pop up from so many sources. Rubbish free songs that come with Windows, albums that I don't like but that happen to have been ripped and burnt using my computer, songs I've downloaded for people without the internet and, most annoyingly of all, hundreds and hundreds of individual sound files that went into recording my band's songs. When I do occasionally relax my morals and put Windows Media Player on shuffle, I get a run of maybe two or three decent songs before I hear a fluffed guitar solo, followed by twenty seconds of hissy would-be silence. A couple more pearlers by Radiohead or Grandaddy, then an entire four-minute drum take. Worst of all, I can be shredding on the air guitar to Bohemian Rhapsody, only to find the next track is one of my own dry, horribly off-key vocal takes from a song with bad lyrics that I've written. No-one wants to hear that, especially me.
And suddenly I realise that in the time it has taken me to write this, I could have pretty much sorted out my library. Then again, if I had a model railway, I'd hate to finish it; the fun is in the design and construction, and I guess the same is true of this. Maybe I'll be happier if I ration the gradual improvement of the library to a few deletions a day, the odd venture onto Wikipedia to look up a stubbornly obscure track listing, at least until I actually do get a model railway, which is the only thing that stops me from being terrified of growing old.