Over the past few years of this column's existence it seems that you, dear reader, like what we have to say. In the last few Network World readership polls you've rated this "the most useful column" as well as "best dressed" and "most likely to get down and party" (OK, so we made up the last two).

Anyway, with such kudos in mind and here, not far from the start of 2003, it seems a good time to ask once more "How are we doing?" From the e-mail messages you send it seems that we're successfully addressing technical topics you are interested in and at a level you like. The categories we've tackled:

• Tools and utilities.
• Standards.
• Product reviews.
• Programming.
• Tips and techniques.

So, given that background, here are our questions for the future:

What are the hot topics and technologies that you'd like to see covered in future Gearhead columns?

What level of detail are you looking for in each topic: summary, analysis, primer or soup-to-nuts?

What don't you like?

While you cogitate on that and get ready to let us know your thoughts at gearhead@gibbs.com, this week we'll look at a couple of MP3-related tools we stumbled across over Christmas that have impressed us.

First, there's a tool we now cannot live without - MP3/Tag Studio published by Magnus Brading. This software is the answer to every digital audiophile's problems.

MP3/Tag Studio works with MP3 files that you can select individually or by whole directories, directory trees or custom selections. It can read ID3v1.0, ID3v1.1 and ID3v2 tags (MP3 "tags" are information embedded in MP3 files about artist, album and title) and fix poorly tagged files. It can even copy data from any tag format to any other tag format.

You can set tags based on parsed filename and directory path name and you can define more-or-less any possible splitting of strings into tag fields. You also can rename files based on tag data and create simple or complex subdirectory structures based on tags and or filenames.

Because these operations can be complex, a simple mistake in, for example, specifying how to rename files could result in chaos. Because of this, MP3/Tag Studio has a preview mode so that you can check what the result of your transformations will be before they are written to disk.