I want to give my impression of two software tools that I have recently used: Mozilla Thunderbird – the open source mail client and Picard – the free MP3 tagger from Musicbrainz.

I have been a long time customer of Qualcom’s Eudora mail client for my home email accounts.  I started out on the Apple Macintosh and migrating to PCs.  I have convinced many of family members to use Eudora as well.  I have been at home using my laptop from work to answer email and browse the internet and using Dreamscape’s Webmail client was getting a little tiresome. I downloaded and installed Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/).  The user interface is a lot like Eudora and the free mail client that comes with Ubuntu.  So far I like it a lot and it is free.  There are some recommended plugins – such as a calendar function – that I haven’t used yet, but I plan to try them as well.

I had a bunch of albums on CDs that I had burned that no longer retained their ID.  Whereas MusicBrainz tagger operated on a track by track basis Picard (http://musicbrainz.org/wd/PicardDownload) is an album oriented browser.  It uses a clustering algorithm to associate the tracks with candidate albums and then the user selects the album and the song titles and IDs are re-labelled.  I had a couple of failures, when it seemed to find a match but didn’t re-label the files  but overall it worked well.