You are absolutely correct about how these online offerings work. Its beyond frustrating, and most people would definitely not bother with what I went through. I suspect they’d be discouraged and give up pong before me.

Out of curiosity, how much time did you spend researching as you went through this process of hitting speedbump after speedbump?

That’s a great question. It was evening when the download completed, and by noon of the next day, I realized that my intended method would not be sufficient. I think it wasn’t until the third evening that I had Picard downloaded. I spent part of an evening learning how the system worked to get better recommendations and grouping. Before I found Picard, though, I bumbled through probably three or four tagger apps that weren’t really built to handle thousands of files at once, so reviewing proposed changes was unweildy. To undo the errant changes the apps made, I had to start over from the tarball.

All told, I think I had about 12 hours (over three or four days) into the process before I got it streamlined to where I am now. And Google could have simply preserved my metadata OR sent the files in “artist/album” folders.