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Managing a Huge Music Collection?
subkid asks: "I've tried several different solutions to manage my music collection; iTunes, WinAmp playlists, visual MP3, and so forth. but none satisfy my idea of what I want. I have many thousand files and things are getting a bit out of hand. I like the functionality of iTunes but not the memory it uses. WinAmp uses less but makes finding the song I want is even harder. Things like musicbrainz.org help for making sure the songs are tagged properly but is there an all-in-one solution? How do you manage your large collection?"
Simple as that.
Now we can be treated to a few hundred geeks arguing over who's music collectionis bigger.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
I use folders to organise my music... It sound simple and archaic, but it really works.
.m3u playlists for Winamp in Windows, none of which have full albums in them. If I want to play an album, I just open the album folder and drag the files onto Winamp.
What I have is a root music folder, in which there are 4 folders, A-F, G-L, M-R, S-Z. In each of those is each Artist. If I have a full album from an artist, then a folder with album name is in there. Otherwise, the tracks are simply dropped into the artist's folder.
That makes finding music easy, and I don't need to have a player open to browse. I also have around 20
"How do you manage your large collection?""
P2P
stop pirating music!
How about something like this? I personally haven't tried this one (I don't listen to too much music myself), but I'm organizing my movie collection using a mySQL database ("wuff's moviedb"). Incidentally, this looks like it can play your music too, and an awesome plus is being able to access your database from anywhere!
:)
You don't have to use that one...just go to SourceForge and search for something like "movie database". I personally prefer the PHP/mySQL ones, but you may have different needs
amaroK
ive got just over 5000 files
If i have more than 5 songs from one artist they get there own folder
if ive got complete CDs from an artist, each album gets a folder within the artist's folder
less than 5 songs, artists are sorted by name into and "A" folder or a "B" folder.
ive been using this system for 8 years and has worked out well for me.
with winamp there is an option in the context which can add the contents of a folder to a playlist. This gets around having the create them in winamp, than having to do something with those files.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
I use foobar for my music collection now. Its interface isn't the sleekest, but it's by far the most powerful and most customizable, and with a tremendously low memory footprint.
I'd definitely suggest at least checking it out.
I store my collection at /mnt/raid/MP3/
Each genre is stored in a subfolder.
Each album is stored in a subfolder depending on the month that I obtained it.
To find a particular song/album I simply issue the find command. For further info man find
Its just like a filing cabinet... oh wait, thats what a directory structure is...
Does it go on forever?
Stop assuming that "has lots of music on computer" means "downloaded lots of music onto computer." Ever heard of a CD ripper? People have every right to rip CD's onto their computer, whether or not RIAA wants to put their little "copy protection" schemes onto their CDs, and it's a hell of a lot more convenient than organizing and storing a physical collection of CDs.
I've found winamp to be the most functional when it comes to managing large music libraries. Large meaning 20,000+ songs. I find Windows Media Player to have the nicest interface for managing, sorting, and creating playlists, however it becomes dog slow when your collection reaches five digits. iTunes is also laggy, so I do not use that anymore. Winamp is always responsive (the player doesn't lock up while searching the library), but uses the most memory. While the UI isn't the best, it is better than iTunes.
I wish amoroK could be ported to windows (maybe a summer project, we'll see). It uses either MySQL or PostgreSQL for very fast response, has a very intuitive interface (better than iTunes, IMHO), and very stable for an open source application. It ties in to Last.FM and provides similar features locally, making it hands down the best for managing large music collections. Downside, it's UNIX only.
Not saying anything is wrong with UNIX or Linux, but lets face it.. Windows and Mac OS X rule the desktop. Oh, and FWIW, iTunes on Mac OS X is *much* more responsive than iTunes on Windows with the same media library.
Let the flames commence
You're already going to lose if you suspect there is going to be some perfect software to manage your specific collection. I manage a personal collection of hundreds upon hundreds of complete discographies (total of near a terabyte of music); this collection spans several rather obscure formats. You know how I pull it off? Folders. Simple as that! Artist, album, song name. Folders descending in that order. Movie soundtracks and video game soundtracks have their own exclusive folders outside of the normal contemporary music hierarchy as does classical music. Nobody I have ever initiated into my "network" has ever had a problem accessing or finding what they want. Part of it is because they don't have to fuck around with some proprietary dogshit software that involves typing in the backwards ROT13'd name of the firstborn child of the artist you're looking for.
That's all you need. Don't fool yourself.
I manage a collection of 120,000+ songs... I have found that a web interface to search the entire set by filename works pretty well. If you then have a link to convert the search results into a playlist, and configure the browser to automatically load the playlist into your music player, then you can start finding and loading tracks with very low latency.
MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/).
It is basically WinAmp with more database functions and so forth... give it a whirl. It's great for tagging (uses Amazon and even fetches album pics) and has iPod support. The down side is that some features aren't unlocked until it is paid for (cracked, serial'd, etc).
Supports most WinAmp plug-ins too!
Get your Unix fortune now!
I have just over 10,000 files and I use Windows Media Player. It seems to work OK. Only a few gripes - If you are not careful, when you add a file and then make changes to the ID tags sometimes you end up with two copies (one in the original folder, one in your rip folder). Also it would be nice if it had support for recording variable bit rate MP3s.
I tried using iTunes briefly and hated it.
I use iTunes. In one big folder, I move full albums that are in one folder, then I drag em in iTunes in order to make them have one playlist matching to each album, then I listen to each song of the album I just added, and when there's a song I like, I drag it on a playlist, that we'll call "~To Take", and then I create another list nammed "~To Take Not". Then, I create a smart playlist that lists all the titles in the "~To Take" list that haven't been played in the last 5 days, and that unlists the titles in "~To Take Not".
Then I keep listening to that smart playlist in a random order, and when I want to get some song out I drag it to "~To Take Not". Works real good for me.
And come on, don't tell me that you actually care about the few tens of MB's of memory that iTunes uses? And if you do, well, consider it the price to pay for the cool features.
You just got troll'd!
9k songs here. I use iTunes. Memory is cheap... If you can afford to own a big music collection *chuckle*... then you can shell out for the memory ;-)
If you're looking for a script to display your iTunes xml db feel free to abuse my server and grab a php for displaying it @ http://ehpg.net/~gmr/library.php (Source at http://ehpg.net/~gmr/library.phps) This will take a bit to load and is a very large page.
mediamonkey has always worked for me. It has great tools to name tags from Amazon.com, name from filename, etc. It doesn't slow down on my 4200 files, searching is very powerful, and it is skinnable. But the best feature above all, and this is what sold me, was the ability to organise my files on the drive using a string, so i can do D:\music\\\ - and it manages everything beautifully! free too.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
Folders are the most portable solution; I took my old unorganized collection, ran it through itunes (which I'll use to listen when I'm on my winbox) letting it create all the folders and directory tree for me, and now when I need to find something it's easy. The only issue I have is that there's not a decent program on FreeBSD that's small enough for me to manage all that info for creating truly good random/shuffle playlists.
I have about 17,000 MP3's (all legitimately purchased, ripped from my CD collection or bought online) and manage them with Slimserver from Slim Devices, along with three of their Squeezebox client/players. Works great: this provides a completely catalogued and automatable music system throughout my home. I don't care about portability outside the house, so YMMV.
You know those plastic crates the dairy industry uses? There's a reason God saw to it that they're just the right size for phonograph albums.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
We are talking vinyl too, right?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Am I the only one out here who's feeling awkward by the lack of an article to read? While posting I had the usual feeling that you have when you post as if you RTFA as you didn't, except that this time there was no TFA to read.
You just got troll'd!
I personally can't stand media management software such as Winamp Library (or whatever it's called), Amarok, or iTunes most especially. Just garbage IMO.
What I do is basically I am completely nazi-ish about how my music is named, and tagged. Every single piece of music that goes into my collection is first passed through musicbrainz, and then sorted into the correct folder. The root directory is called Audio. From there, it goes into category, such as Classic Rock, Metal, etc. After that, it's sorted into folder by artist. So you might have Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, or Bob Dylan. From there it's sorted by album.
I basically then load whatever artist or album I want into XMMS. Or even the whole damn thing. (I have a playlist for that). Then I can shuffle it, or skip to a specific song by using Jump To File (Winamp has this as well). Just hit "J". Then type something like "Rolling Stone Dylan" to bring up the song you want.
Nothing fancy for me please.
Foobar200, with its dynamially generated playlists, masstagging and basically superlatively superb playlist management does the trick for me.
I currently use this program:i nkshellext.html
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardl
though I am also looking for a better way to navigate my content. DRM as it is currently, only makes the process harder.
...I still sometimes call XMMS Winamp. The OP is using Winamp, so hes using Windows. Therefore, the suggestions should be windows only, right?
I've been using musikCube. It's wicked fast, pretty small, and allows you to use SQL queries to build playlists, as well as having a iTunes/Winamp like music library viewer. It's also open source and has a good api for plugins.
amaroK and MySQL
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I'm a new mac owner and am having a really hard time using iTunes due to its lack of .ogg and .wma support. More than 3/4 of my 40gb collection is in .ogg, and no, none of the "workarounds" have worked for me.
For now, I'm using VLC and very well organized folders, but I'd like something with an easily searchable library and nice playlist generation (think winamp). Any thoughts?
rm -rf *
Well, you won't have any more problems with the music collection, and you can also be 100% sure that you don't have anything unlicensed!
..but if anyone's interested in what I do on my linux running laptop, I'll explain it. I use KDE which comes with JuK and I put on Kid3. I keep the folders organized by genre then artist then album. Kid3 keeps all the tags neat and clean. I then pull all the folders in JuK and it's great. Simple and fast searching. I find amaroK to be too much and I prefer the interface of JuK. Of course, the key is keeping the tags straight with Kid3.
Found this recently: the media hive. It's got some rough edges, but if your collection is already well tagged, it's not bad. Unusual drag-and-drop web interface.
amaroK
I've come to like musikCube for a Windows player and indexer. It finds files automatically if you give it the directory and, if the files are tagged correctly, you get a decent search it seems. I don't have that much music ripped to my computer, though, so I don't know how it handles larger collections for sure, but it looks promising. (The support for FLAC is what made me download it in the first place.)
I would like to set up a hard drive on my dedicated Linux box with my entire music collection in FLAC format, then set it up as an SMB share so that I can access all my music over WiFi from wherever in the house. I teach music lessons, and this would be really handy if, during a lesson, I thought of a recording I wanted to play for my student and I had my laptop there. (Organizing/cataloging my CD collection would be another alternative, but not nearly as interesting.) Might be a summer project for me. I have come to like abcde as a ripper. Under Linux, be sure to turn off cdparanoia if you ever want the ripping process to finish (link isn't using abcde, but the reasoning is the same, and cdparanoia options can be specified in the config file for abcde).
I manage my 40,000+ track collection with Winamp 5.x. iTunes and WMP are absolute dogs, and foobar freaks out when i load all tracks into a playlist for randomizing. Winamp does the following for me:
- allows me to search, sort, and track all my tracks as responsively as can be expected without a full-on database server,
- the MLWWW plugin lets me serve my library via a web interface (which negates the need to set up a LAMP solution to run Andromeda),
- let's me skin, and
- provides me with ALL of the metadata (you know, the ID3 tags you're supposed to keep immaculate) information that i need to adequately manage all tracks.
I've wrestled with other solutions, and short of setting up a database server to do nothing but manage the collection (with 500+ tracks added weekly), Winamp 5.x with the appropriate plugins (and LOTS of ram) provides the best non-server-based solution.
Governments are not necessary.
Foobar2000 with all of my mp3s in one playlist.
E:\mp3s\artist - album - year\tracknum. title.mp3 preferably, but anything that would fly on a scene site is good enough.
Make sure its all tagged properly and get a good format string and you're good to go.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I have about 460 to 470 complete albums, all legally purchased as physical CDs if you care to know. All are ripped to MP3 and stored in following format:
MUSIC_ROOT/ARTIST/ALBUM
I looked for existing software to use for managing my collection and didn't find anything that I liked. So, I rolled my own using PERL and the browser as my interface. It all runs on a standalone Linux box in my A/V cabinet.
My software has been in development for about a year to year and half. No teasing, it is also about the coding experience, not just about the end result. It is also about free time and my being in the mood. It has been redesigned, rewritten, and tweaked many times over. The playback is by way of dynamically generated M3U playlists pointing to http streams.
A single track, a single album, and all albums by a specific artist can be played. Playlists shuffling is available. Random playlists from the entire collection and a specific genre had been possible until a couple months ago when I decided to rewrite the backend to use a database. I just now reimplementing by-genre browsing.
New music is uploaded by FTP, and I intend to do this by HTTP-upload down the road. It works very well, and I've been using a form of it since like week two of the project. It has also been heavily used by more than one computer playing different music. I also use it to load my iPod. The system will eventually be able to play through the stereo and support user-defined playlists. I love it and can't imagine having to use physical CDs again.
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
I run one of the biggest anime/video game music FTP servers on the 'net (90GB+ and still growing daily, and it's tuxedojack.dyndns.org, by the way).
I have a separate drive for my music, then on that drive are three folders - Distributable, for stuff that I can put on the FTP server (anime OSTs, video game OSTs, and stuff that I can legally distribute); Nondistributable, for stuff the RIAA would sue my ass off if I ever traded; and Incoming, for stuff that's torrenting and hasn't gotten a positive ratio yet.
Inside each folder, the songs are sorted by series/artist/title at the second layer, then album as the third, then disc as the fourth. All the while, I'm using folders, and actual file management, as this _is_ for a FTP server.
If you want to see a folder tree, take a look at this (warning, it's a 2.4MB text file, but it's an inventory of every song in the Distributable folder tree):
http://www.tuxedojack.com/publiclist.txt
Simple and clean, and it's worked for me since 1997.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
At The Internet Archive we have about 120,000 audio and live music shows, occupying about 53TB of disk space. We're always trying to think of new and better ways to present it to our users.
I'm going to look at all the solutions people have suggested here and try to glean some usability tips which might be implementable on top of our existing interface. Please keep up the good suggestions!
-- TTK
Plus foobar2000 is the first player I have found that has an interface that looks like all of my other programs. All of the other media players look like some amateur art student trying to reinvent a UI (and failing miserably). foobar2000 has a tabbed interface with separate playlists in each tab which is nice. I like the sparse interface. Some people hate it, although if you are willing to invest the time there are a lot of ways to customize it to make it look much nicer. foobar2000 is nice and fast too, at least until you try to seek through a MP3.
I keep my files on my Linux server. I have a raid array with a LVM volume called music with MP3 subdir (as opposed to other subdirs like C64-SID and AmigaMods). I then have the following broad directories:
LargeSets is for DJ Mixes and other MP3s that are over an hour long. If I have more than two items from a DJ or artist I create folder with their name and put the files in there.
All of the other directories have a subdir and file structure of artist/albumyear-albumname/nn_trackname where nn is the tack number. I find this method to be easy for me to drag and drop music into a playlist to play. I never have gotten used to the iTunes method of importing everything that you have.
One thing that I am going to focus on over the next several months is to sort albums and artists out by more broad genres as I have already done. Eventually I will go back through all of my songs and set the genre for each song. Right now I'm giving each album the same genre rather than tagging each song with the genre that that specific song falls into.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
yPlay
yPlay is a freeware MP3, Ogg*, WMA, WAV, FLAC* and Midi player with multiple playlists and a light, clean interface. But why did I write it when there are other free mp3 and ogg music playing software programs out there already?
First, I find too many music players have tiny, ambiguous controls and overly complicated menu structures. I want computer programs to look like computer programs so I can quickly work out how to use them. If I want something that looks like a piece of hardware, I'll buy the hardware instead.
Even worse, many players are the digital equivalent of having your teenage kids move back home. They take over your computer, leave odd things all over the place, and you never know exactly what they're doing behind your back.
Finally, as computers have become more and more powerful, media players have become more and more power-hungry. I'm only interested in quickly finding and playing a particular track or playlist, not swirly pictures and virtual lava lamps. yPlay has a filter built into the main screen - type in part of the title or artist and the list will only display matching tracks. Double-click the track you want, close the player to the system tray and forget about it. And if you don't feel like listening to the next track, the system tray icon has a right-click menu with skip, pause, play, etc built right into it. (I got a big surprise the other day - I dragged an MPG file onto the yPlay files list and it started to play - as a video. Not officially supported, but the progress bar works on those too.)
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
I wrote this over on last.fm, and it has more to do with with CDs than digital stuff, but it's just some thoughts on how to sort my own collection. Might as well paste it in here.
Haida Manga
floor in the back seat. All my 8 tracks fit in it. Reach behind, fumble, select at random. Retro reality coolness to go with retro reality gas hog lincoln! (down to once a month or so cruise in it now unfortunately....man, it's powerful and *comfy* though....)
...some other kind of music! It uses something like google "adsense" in a way, as you listen to it, you don't get charged for the service, no, no , NO you don't, you merely listen to some ads! With practice, you can ignore them! more fun!
Bet you think I'm kidding, too! I *ain't*, and it's the only music "collection" I own. My girlfriend owns a lot of CDs and cassettes,but those are hers, and wanted to be technically accurate in answering "how do you organize your music collection?".
DA DA DA-A-A-A, etc...S-M-O-O-O-O-K-E ON DA *click* W-A-T-E-R! duh duh daaaaa, whirr, snag, tangle cuss and etc..fun! The second way I organize is by use of high technology wireless connections, I have a pushbutton radio that actually *pre-selects* assorted radio stations, I can mash one and get..music!..or
Winamp + MP3Tag + discogs.com + a lot of spare time = perfectly organized collection.
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
Color me crazy, but I really love Windows Media Player's Media Library functions. I enjoy how fully-featured the app is. iTunes has built-in spyware and harrases you to convert files to a certain file format. I have thousands of MP3s, and I keep all the ID3 tags up to date so I can organize and pick what I want to listen to. I also enjoy that I can listen, rip, organize and burn from the same application without taking up too many valuable system resources.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
IF that's all that you have to say about it, the gestalt would indicate it isn't very good.
Well, much better than pretty good. Use a real database with it and its even better.
As for all yout files They really should be in a good directory structure. Be consistant in your structure! Don't have "Smiths, The" and "The Beatles" choose one way and stick with it. I use it like "Cure, The" but for a persons names I do like "Paul Oakenfold". Do whatever you want but be consistant. You might also have to worry about remixes. You might have say: "nightmares on wax - les nuits (dj spinna remix).mp3". Do you file that with Nightmares On Wax or with DJ Spinna? Agian Pick one way and stick to it.
ID3 tags are your friend! amaroK helps here. When you first scan your music directories amaroK guesses about its information using ID3 tags, filenames, and the directory structure. The info is saved in the ID3 and in a sql database. Once all the music is loaded you can go thru and tweak the information. The dialog lets you edit multiple tracks at once and one at a time. In one at a time mode there are filename schemas you can use. "%album/%artist - %track - %title" would match up with "God Fodder/Neds Atomic Dustbin - 03 - Selfish.mp3" and fill in all the data fields. The sql backend is really neat for external programs to access your file info. amaroK also stores ratings and statistics for each file in the db.
If you're on windows you're shit-out-of-luck in the amaroK department though.
I've had no problem with iTunes memory and my collection is 25k+ with album art on 90%+ of the files. It's fast and easy. Smart playlists carve things up any way I've wanted. And, explicit playlists handle the all explicit lists that I might want.
My favorite smart playlist is everything less than a minute, played from short to long. Try it for fun...
It seems like the "Collections" concept of the upcoming XMMS2 is designed to address your problem squarely. Sébastien Cevey, one of the developers, wrote a manifesto on the subject, claiming that collections (hierarchical, unordered subsets) and playlists (flat, ordered subsets) of a larger library are the solution to media file management. It also happens to be a good review of how different media players handle the problem.
Thanks for reminding me that I've been meaning to get some Acid Horse. In fact, I'm going to get the entire WaxTrax BlackBox collection thanks to your page. The KLF, 1000 Homo DJ's, ClockDVA, KMFDM, Ministry.... oh and of course Divine.
I haven't read most of the comments, but I have a related question. My Sony CD jukebox died after less than 2 years (Sony ain't what it used to be), and I am thinking I should replace it with PC/harddisk-based jukebox. Anyone with solution/experience in this area? My main concern is:
- The PC should be quiet - I always have this thing on.
- Display what it's playing without a separate 20" monitor
- Remote control
Things like organizing tunes and simple programming of playing order would be important features, too.
Care to share your experience/expertise?
I currently have 19000+ songs in my collection (thank-god for NFS) and Amarok easily manages the whole thing.
With the ability to connect to an MySQL DB (or it will use its own internal SQLlite if you don't have MySQL to connect to) it keeps track of ALL of you music information (including coverart and ID3Tags).
This is the best tool for music collections you will ever use.
Smart-Playlists
Score-based tracking of your music
full support for streaming.
"similar songs" suggestions
Music Brainz tagging support
and a metric ass-load of 3rd party scripts.
Version 1.4 is rock solid. I have converted several friends to using Linux strictly based on how powerfull Amarok is.
http://amarok.kde.org/
You won't ever need anything else.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Well, I doubt you'll run off and do what I did, but I'll share my solution to this problem: I use a subscription service, Rhapsody to be precise.
I pay $10/mo. and I have access to my music anywhere I have a net connection. There are many pros/cons to doing this, but here's why *I* do it:
1. I use 3 different computers a day. My desktop, my laptop, and my work computer. In the olden days, I used to have a multi-gig collection of music, but this became difficult to sync up. If I got something new on the desktop, getting it to the laptop was easy, but getting it to the work computer was not.
2. I always want new music. If I find something, it appears on my list, and the other computers get it, too. The side benefit of this is that if a song I'm interested in comes my way, I'm listening to it within 15 seconds.
3. I grew tired of trying to keep gigs of music backed up. I've had two hard drive failures in as many years, and I really don't want to go through the ripping process again. Now I just pay the $10/mo. and I no longer need to keep anything backed up.
4. When I get tired of a song, removing it doesn't mean removing it for good. I suppose the same is true for having your own collection, it's just not something I've ever really liked trying to manage. My playlist shrinks and grows every week. I'm able to keep it managable without it needing to reach the thousands.
5. I'm spending less a year than I used to with albums, but getting more music. I have, however, purchased music that only gave me the 30 second sample, and wished I had my $.99 back.
6. The player isn't half bad. The 'hidden' bar is useful and not an eyesore. You can drop MP3s in there no problem. Searching's easy.
5. The music is cached so you can play when the net isn't connected.
There are other pros, but these are the ones that interest me. To be fair, though, I'm going to list off some cons:
1. If I discontinue, I lose all the music I've rented. (Except the music I've plunked down the money for.) Personally, this is more of a pro to me, but I've heard disatisfaction about this before.
2. They have a WONDERFUL collection of music, and you can start listening to it pretty quick. If some song crosses your mind one day, it's very easy to get it here. BUT: Sometimes their songs aren't there or they disappear. I've had a couple of albums disappear that I had really enjoyed. I'm guessing they had rights issues with the group or something.
3. iPod users need not apply.
4. As I understand it, Rhapsody is Windows only. It *might* be available on the Mac. Last I checked, it wasn't, but that was nearly a year ago. Definitely no Linux support.
5. Although music is cached, you cannot control the size of the cache. (THAT I KNOW OF. Corrections appreciated.) It's always a gig. For 128k music, this is fine, but I've been bitten before. Three is a way to download the songs to alleviate this problem, but I only had this work successfully once. I suspect this is because I had more than one computer using the account, so that was the only computer I could do that with. Weak.
Yep, it's not for everybody, but this service is nearly perfect for me, big music collection and all. I originally only planned on subscribing for a month or two just for shits, wasn't expecting it to suddenly take over as my music collection. I'm not interested in twisting your arm into trying it out. Your question reminded me of the joy I felt recently when I started a new job, downloaded the client, and was listening to all of my music. Before that, it was a long long copy from my laptop. When I read your question, this was immediately the first image that popped into mind. I don't miss the days of massive CD-R backups. Heh.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Tuniac
There are two types of people in the world: 1) those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.
Well, I have around 130gb of music. (Most of it legal, if that matters. When my wife and I got married, we had over a thousand CDs between us, and that was years ago.)
I use iTunes, on an old MDD G4 with 768mb ram. Runs just fine, and feeds our various iPods just fine. I try to manage organizational matters as I add new stuff, because otherwise it's just too big a chore.
Yes, I know it's a lot of music. Hey, some people smoke, I buy music.
M-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
When kde libs are ported that only means it will be possible to port it, not that it will just automatically work.
I have found that MP3 Cat is the best for this sort of large music collection. I have ~3000 songs, and this seems to organize them very well. Also, it doesn't take up all that much memory. Unfortunately, there is a charge of 15 Euros to get the full version. Like I said, http://tellini.info/software/mp3cat/MP3 Cat. what can you lose?
is Musicmatch. I know, some of you are cringing now, but honestly, it has an interface that I really like, mainly, collapsable lists. I sort by artist, then below that I can choose to make albums into a list or just sort by album then track number. It does use a bit more memory than I'd like and is a bit more invasive than I'd like, however, I just can't get over the system. I double click on a song, it adds it to playlist. I can choose to make them add or automatically play. It have a nice burn feature as well as tag feature (SuperTag and Rename File). I've tried iTunes, MediaMonkey, Winamp, and random other things and just haven't found something I really like. Musicmatch, so far, is what I like!
Xhentil Do'ana
This isn't targeted for the average person, but to some people, they will find it a helpful idea. I've been working for a while coming up with "custom" genres since there will be such a variety in the tone of music in something's that's essentially the same genre. By custom genres, I mean coming up with your own criteria to classify music, such as what kind of imagery it produces in your head. So you can have a mix of industrial, heavy metal, and some other stuff I'm not even sure what it would be called, provided it all sounds like music that would be playing in a club full of vampires, that sort of thing. It's obviously a very subjective process, but the results can be amazing. My main motivation for this is that as my music collection grows, I find that it'll become impossible for me to listen to all the music I have without a lot of songs turning into archeology digs because I forget about them and only play the stuff I'm familiar with or that is by the same artist. With my genre system, i can simply pick the genre and assign random play, giving all my songs equal representation and not having stuff get lost in the collection. I don't like having to "think" about what music I'm going to play, I like that thought out ahead of time. That being said, I'm still revising the process and I'd be interested in discussing it with people who are interested. If you are, either post here or email me at ross @ outgun . com.
Oh, LOL. This gets more hilarious every time I see it.
There's a revolution in content going on. Between Amarok and the Internet Archive, free canned music has never been easier or richer. There's already good collaboration with other free efforts like Wikipedia, I'm looking forward to more to take mass culture back from RIAA flunkies. The non free players, hobbled with DRM, will never match the performance of the free players. This alone is sufficient incentive for people to migrate to free platforms. The whole package is greater than the sum of it's parts.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have 27,000 MP3s to date. All legit - big CD collection. It takes up about 140GB. I store all the music in folders like this Music\Artist\Album. If I don't have a full album for songs purchased from iTunes or similar, they just get dropped in the Artist folder loose. The problem with this is that when I open Explorer to view that Music folder it takes quite a while to load (yeah, Windows). Luckily, I don't do that much.
I use J. River's Media Center for organizing/playing music. I guess it isn't terribly popular as I see almost no references to it but I think it is great. It works with my iPod so I don't have to use iTunes and has some nice extras like automatically recording scheduled webcasts. It also serves as a general media player for video and other things though I don't usually use it for video much (Windows Media Player works well for me in this case).
For me the biggest issue has been backing up all the songs. I used to keep 2 drives mirrored but I needed the extra disk space so I just set about burning all the MP3s to a series of 40 or so DVDs. Now when I buy new music and rip it, I just backup the MP3s to a DVD and always have a spare copy of stuff and can use my disk space for other things. Seems to work!
dick: "i guess it looks as if you're reorganizing your records .. um .. what's this? chronological?"
.."
rob: "no."
dick: "not alphabetical."
rob: "nope."
dick: "what?"
rob: "autobiographical."
dick: "no fucking way!"
rob: "yep! i can tell you how i got from deep purple to howling wolf in just 25 moves."
dick: "oh my god!"
rob: "and, if i wanted to find the song "landslide" by fleetwood mac i have to remember that i bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile but i didn't give it to them for personal reasons."
dick: "that sounds
rob: "comforting."
dick: "yes."
rob: "it is."
Just use folders. Forget the stigma of not having a shiny program do everything for you. 99% of those suck, and you end up having to retag everything whenever a new album comes out anyways. Using folders is the cleanest option.
http://www.rhythmbox.org/
Seems decent enough to catalogue everything from ID2/ID3 in MP3.
Searchable.
How about trying not to steal music? How does that sound to you? You fucking thief.
And don't bullshit me. I know you're a fucking thief. If you weren't you'd not worry proper tagging.
Thanks for ruining it for everyone else. Shithead faggot.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
i keep track of my music by putting descriptive words in the comments fields of all my songs. then i create smart playlists that are based on the contents of those fields.
I like the boredoms.
After all, I am strangely colored.
To Actually play the music, I use Winamp. I have Winamp Media Library scan my music drive every 6 hours, remove any entries in the library where the mp3 no longer exist, and add any new additions. I can then go through the media library and sort by album or artist, or search for a song. May seem extreme to the casual person, but I'm kind of anal about organization and I like how WMP organizes it so I've been using it.
IMO, different people have different tastes. Personally I don't like the interface of iTunes, but the guy next to me could love it. It's all a matter of personal preference. Each method probably has its pros and cons so maybe your best bet would be to combine methods into something that works for you.
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
Windows?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
After scanning this thread I haven't noticed what people are doing with *seriously* huge collections, I admit i've never even tried another peice of software but i've had success using Winamp's Media Library.
:)
It drives me crazy sometimes and I wish it has more features but it remains mostly fast (it sometimes chokes and hangs for a few seconds every once and awhile). My collection at this moment is 43,048 tracks and Winamp has scaled very well for me.
Of course without every file tagged and named properly it would be a disaster (I made this mistake for a long time and when I finally decided to go through and tag everything it took me literally months (I dont trust auto-taggers) I do all my tagging within winamp. Theres also a nice little plugin that allows the Library to read and tag FLAC files easily.
I also *rarely* search, I prefer to browse and pick something, I also *never* use playlists, and it's mostly electronic music so sorting by genre ends up being just silly. I browse the lists of artists and pick what I want to listen to.
We'll see how long Winamp holds up for me, as I add more and more the strange delay gets longer and longer and i'm usually adding 40+albums/week.
I highly recommend Winamp, it's definately worth a shot. I don't believe there is a 'killer app' out there for this sort of thing. But if its worked for me with a nearly 50,000 song collection it has to be doing something right.
Btw, anyone else with a disgustingly large electronic music/underground hiphop collection interested in doing some trading shoot me off an email plutonic(at)gmail(dot)com. Also if your in law enforcement i'm in Canada where downloading is legal
I've done winamp, xmms, and fubar2k for considerable amounts of time. Shuffle sucks on all of them.
Maybe you heard of them. The RIAA. Just let them know how many songs you got, and they'll gladly send some people over to your house to help you out with that...
I use foobar2000 to manage my collection (about 10k mp3s). It's got a real low memory footprint, easy search, plugins to do just about whatever you want (I believe there's a musicbrainz plugin, but I know there's a freedb plugin, which is similar). Anyway, checkout http://www.foobar2000.org/. Windows only, unfortunately.
After you get so big, nothing but a real DB seems to really cut it. Even apps like SlimServer start to really slow down (even with the SQLite backend).
One of these days I'll clean up the code, update to icecast 2, etc, and release it out on sourceforge so that we can have yet another mostly dead project out there. :) [Actually, up until I decided to do some upgrades, it hasn't really needed much maintenance since it mostly "just worked".]
ampache seems to work pretty well.
Current I've got about 115 GB of MP3's (Live shows downloaded from archive.org and bt.etree.org, and ripped CD's). I use EasyTag to make sure everything is tagged correctly and the filename in a format of "Artist - Track#(Leading 0) - Trackname" then off they go to a file share with a FirstLetterofArtist/ArtistName/Album format. This makes it pretty easy to find something to burn, transfer to the iPod, or play on XBox Media Center. For playing on a computer however, I've installed Ampache. This makes it pretty easy manage/playback the whole thing in a easy to navigate format that will automatically pull cover art from Amazon and keep track of most popular played and recent additions automatically. It seems to work overall pretty well.
j for jumping to any song, and hope that you know the author or the song title, because that seems to be the best way to isolate it. and then intelligent use of enquing. That, is how I find a song I want played within my playlist of 2k+. Hope some of the info helps.
my collection has some 20000 songs, still i use directories.
root music directory, then subdirs like rock, soundtracks, synth, relaxing, fun, strange shit and unsorted.
then each of these subdirs has subdirs itself - artist names. each artist has subdirs - album names.
very easy actually. i browse the subdirs with total/midnight/norton commander anyway.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
The Columns UI is enabled by selecting the "Foobar2000" menu, then selecting "Preferences," then "Display," then changing "User interface module" from "Default User Interface" to "Columns UI." I think it should be easier to find the Columns UI, but I don't want to complain too much about a great app with so many great customization options.
Here's an example of what Columns UI can look with a few more customizations:
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Quod Libet is the answer.
Written in PyGTK, GPL'ed, it is the ideal solution. Advanced searching, browsing, mass-tagging and best of all: it has a play queue. What else do you need? And if you do find something missing, you can easily write a plugin.
See http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet for more info.
...I'd suggest JuK and amaroK, they work just fine. Better yet in tandem ;) I don't know why, but for me JuK is much better for tagging and physical organizastion of collection, while amaroK is better for selecting music and it's playback from well organized collection.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
For Linux/BSD, there are quite a few choices. AmaroK or JuK are the obvious one for KDE, and usually included in most distros. If you prefer Gtk applications, the best one out there is probably Quod Libet (I would not recommend Rhythmbox as it used to be rather slow and unstable). In the console, there's cmus for an iTunes-like ncurses interface, and plait if you prefer the good old command-line. Or you could go for client/server approach with mpd and its plethora of clients.
I use Tag&Rename to organize my collection. It has excellent features for tagging, and you can use the rename feature to implement a directory structure like artist/album/NN - Track.mp3. It also support MusePack.
WinAMP has a good music library that makes finding what you want quite easy. The only problem is that it does not support Unicode, so no Japanese track names.
iTunes has good features for managing your files - it can automatically do the directory structure but lacks support for anything other than MP3 and AAC.
What would be ideal is a program that can take a directory of music files (MP3, AAC, MP3, MPC etc), tag them and put them in a structured directory system. It would also look for image files (.JPEG) with album art and keep them together too. Unicode, APE tag and FreeDB/Amazon support is a must. So far, nothing like this seems to exist, at least for Windows.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
http://squentin.free.fr/gmusicbrowser/gmusicbrowse r.html ...
Is great for big music collections, fast, custom flags, good masstagging, customizable wheighted random mode, customizable interface and more
http://www.jrmediacenter.com/ Works fantastically on huge music libraries (e.g. hundreds of thousands of songs), huge amounts of customisation (browse your library by genre/artist/album, year/genre/chartposition) etc. Not free or opensource, but well worth a look if you're on windows.
Not popular with everyone, as it requires a certain meticulous attention to detail that doesn't appeal to everyone, and uses stable, very well tested versions as opposed to the latest new cool shiny thing. But...
I run Windows on my personal box here, and use the ÜberStandard, and ÜberView (and foobar2000 0.8.3).
Works for me. Very, very well - and I have a big music collection. ReplayGain (album) is made of GOD and WIN, and foobar2000 can make a really nice DSP chain if you have a nice soundcard, or make a really nice resampling DSP chain which can even make your awful onboard or Soundblaster sound a lot more tolerable.
I have over 60,000 mp3s. About 10,000 of them are CDs that I have. The rest are downloaded. Fuck all you snivelling sheep, way to teach the RIAA that bullying solves their woes.
I use the typical folder system. Genre / artist (for artists I have more than 4-5 albums of, otherwise just artist-album) / album.
I have over 4,000 CDs that I've bought legitimately, so fuck all y'all. I'll download until they pry the mpeg audio codec from my cold, dead fingers.
I use iTunes on Windows. It's usable although I wish it was a bit faster.
When I add large collections of new music (like from www.legaltorrents.com) I prepend the artist's name with a three-digit identifier. In the case of Legaltorrents, there are archives from record labels like 'Monotonik' and 'Kikapu'. The 'Monotonik' bands get 'mtk:' before their names, the 'Kikapu' artists get 'kpu:' and so on. That way they are nicely grouped UI-wise. And when they appear in the Party Shuffle I know directly where the music comes from.
Here are my measures: 11k MP3 files, 87 G, almost all legit from CD, etree, archive, etc. When it is not legit it is probably something I forgot to download after I listened to it and decided I didn't liked it so I wouldn't buy it.
...).
There are different things to make it happen.
First - you need to properly fill all MP3 tags. The less an MP3 is tagged, the less it is searchable...
Secondly - I don't want to have to play music via my PC and soundcard when I'm at home. More - at home, my PC is not the center of attention - so I bought a squeezebox from slimdevices.com. Go to their website to see what it is capable of. The gist is that you run a service on a computer (this can be a PC running windows, linux, OSX or another device, as long as it runs a new version of perl). This service stores all relevant tag-information in a database and makes it searchable via the squeezebox.
So, my PC (running linux) serves the mp3's to the squeezebox that plays these via the normal speakers. Quite a quality difference, of course. (Needless to say, that the squeezebox also can play other music files such as flac, ogg,
The interface via the remote control is much easier than using it via winamp or fubar or whatever you have. A remote control just feels better.
It also streams music from the internet, of course.
Thirdly - when I'm on the road, I copy some of the files to my portable (running windows) and there I have the same service and a programme called softsqueeze that performs the same functions so I can listen with the same interface to the same songs when I'm on the road or at work.
The perl service and the softsqueeze programme are GPL and downloadable from the slimdevices website. The only thing you need to buy is the squeezebox: $250: go and have a look! http://www.slimdevices.com/
I'm very very happy - the hardware is very stable, the mp3 decoder is really good, and - because the service is written in perl, it is extensible. It is written with plugins in mind. I already have plugins for the weather, # of e-mails in my inbox and the from/to/subject, etc, etc.
-- Mark
Until now I've used Winamp but finding the piece of music I'm looking for is a daunting prospect that gets larger as my music collection grows. I originally disliked iTunes because all my songs were in one huge list that was simply unfathomable, however, after recently being forced to try the latest iTunes, courtesy of a Quicktime 7 download, I decided to give it another try. Here's how I now think I may finally be able to tame iTunes:
I have tons of classical music, sorted into folders for each composer. Beneath each composer's folder is a sub-folder which is roughly equivalent to an album, so, for example, I have the following structure:
d:\mp3\Beethoven, Ludwig van\Symphonies (Karajan)
d:\mp3\Beethoven, Ludwig van\Symphonies (Zinman)
d:\mp3\Beethoven, Ludwig van\Symphonies (Furtwängler)
If I update the ID3 tags in my collection to include the name of this second-level folder in the album field, as well as using an appropriate genre (classical for Beethoven, baroque for Bach, etc), I can finally get to the music I'm looking for quite easily by choosing classical for the genre, Beethoven for the artist, and then any symphony by conductor. Without specifying the album field in particular, iTunes would list all the first movements of Beethoven's 5th symphony together, all the second movements together, and so forth. By having the right ID3 information in my files before adding them to my iTunes library, iTunes is finally usable.
It would be nice to be able to have more control over the quick search facility in iTunes, and the ability to specify that the minimise button activates the mini-player instead of minimising, but I think I can live with what I've come up with. Now I just have to write a perl script to go through my many thousands of MP3s to fix the ID3 tags. Without the right tag setup, iTunes is just hopeless!
When you have a huge music collection, things get damn difficult to find. I can't understan why a lot of post suggest using iTunes or Winamp to manage it. What you use to play a file is whatever you like, it may even be mpg123 or alsaplayer etc... But i think that the submitter is really looking for a full-featured app or script to do massive tagging, massive renaming, rational organization of files in folders and so on.
It would be really useful to check missing tags on musicbrainz and detect double files (in huge collection is common to have more copies of the same file in different locations, and maybe with different tags!)
Tagging and renaming may be done with easytag, but everything else?
The only useful thing in iTunes is the "Show Dupluicates" menu entry.
How do people handle podcasts, audio books, etc? I like to be able to play random tracks from my library, but I'd also like my audiobooks and podcasts to be excluded from those playlists. Are there any players that use separate databases?
I don't "get" the concept of sorting music in folders.
If I want to listen to "Jam" by "Michael Jackson", I can't necessarily remember which one of his 10 albums it's on.
Therefore I have all my music "sorted" in one huge folder.
This obviously requires utterly perfect file naming, but that requirement is trivial with proper tags (which is the real hurdle) and a good file renamer.
For albums I use: "Artist - Album - Track # - Track name"
For compilations it's: "Album - Track # - Artist - Track name"
This way the tracks are always sorted in the folder in the order they are on the album. In actual use, this method is far superior to the folder-concept due it being easier to spot the correct artist name and there being no frantic movement through subfolders.
In order to achieve the above i use:
Max for ripping
Media Rage for retagging/renaming/etc.
iTunes for retagging/playing.
On Windows I would use EAC, Tag (although with the "Tagger" frontend) and Foobar2000.
What's to manage? Mine are organised in directories A-Z, then artist, then album. If yours aren't, then, sort it out!
All you people saying you organise like /root/music/$genre/$artist/ are limiting yourself a little - I turn off the Genre browse option in iTunes because a) they're mostly labelled wrongly (in my mind) and b) I can't categorise most of my music into one label, unless I invent tons of hybrids. It'd make finding stuff a lot harder.
/Records/$Band Name/$Album Name/$Track # $Disc # $Song Name/ which works fine for me. It used to irritate me that it truncates filenames at times but then I realised I'm not really interfacing with the files themselves that much anyway. iTunes' search function is wonderful (it is when you're used to Windows', anyway) and Smart Playlists are also cool concepts; I have one setup for songs I've yet to play which I try to shrink day-by-day. Despite being far from a mac fanboy, I tell all my friends that iTunes is just nicer than whatever they use (WMPlayer, in some cases..).
All I do is let iTunes manage my files (there's options in the Advanced tab). It automatically adds music to the 'Records' folder I have, in this format:
I've used Madman for over a year now on my home Linux PC. Its AutoDJ feature alone blows anything else I've tried out of the water; typically when I'm at home I don't much care what I'm listening to as long as something's playing in the background. So I click AutoDJ and forget about it, though I may skip past the odd song I'm not in the mood for, or that I don't like at all - and since play count is one of AutoDJ's rules it'll take that into account as it continues. Add a built-in webserver and I can stream my tunes to my computer at work, or my brother can download them. You can also write plug-ins for it. I can't think of anything else I need to do with it, and I certainly never want to go back to organizing my tunes manually, with directory structures and standard file names and that stuff. Gets really cumbersome when you've got thousands of files.
I have my music collection organized sorta like this: Start with a single directory to store all music stuff in; I use ogg/ because most of my music is in Ogg Vorbis. Then, each new artist gets their own subdirectory, and from there I usually put in another for each individual album, and then any other miscellaneous songs I may have I'll just file under the artist directory. For example:
:-)
:-)
ogg/The Beatles/The White Album - CD 2/29 - Revolution 9.ogg
would get to The Beatles' "Revolution 9" (note the fact that it's numbered 29, because even though I tend to have individual directories for each CD so I can make copies more easily – for my own personal use of course, like say having the same CD in both my alarm clock and my stereo system – I usually keep the track numbering consistent). And then
ogg/misc/starwars-imperial_march.mp3
is the Imperial March from Star Wars, which doesn't have an album to go with it. And yes, I just left it in MP3, too lazy to convert to Ogg yet.
Most of the time I just rip everything on the command line with cdparanoia, then ogg-encode it with a shell script I wrote for that specific purpose. Why? I don't know, but it tends to be much faster than most of the GUI front-ends I know of. I'm weird like that, I guess
As for playing the songs, I usually either use ogg123 from the command line, or else import the ogg/ directory into JuK so that I can play it from there. Really depends on how powerful a system I'm working with, I've got a few and a couple can't run aRTS so JuK doesn't work.
And if you're wondering, I typically use gnupod to convert everything from Ogg to MP3 so I can play it on my iPod nano. Right now just about everything fits, although then again I will admit I don't have that big a collection.
Oh, and yes, I'm a Linux hacker
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I manage a collection of... ahem... some size.
... well ... tag & rename my collection. I think these four fields are the most one needs to have in the filename. Some people go with \Artist\Album\Track. Title, as I believe iTunes does if it manages one's library, but I like to minimize the number of directories. Anyway, related to that, if an album is two or more discs then I use the "Disc" ID3v2 field and then use T&R to number the album from track 01 to track xx, with all discs having the same album title. Likewise, year should only be in the ID3 tag.
Everything's in \Music. \Music has no files, only directories. Most of these are band names (e.g. \Music\Built to Spill) or compilation titles (e.g. \Music\Wedding Crashers). I have some genre titles and decades for assorted songs/singles (e.g. \Music\80s, \Music\Techno, \Music\Jazz) but I haven't fully come to a decision on what to do about those, yet, in this broader framework.
In the individual directories under \Music I have all albums named in the format Artist - Album - Track - Title. I use Tag & Rename to
So. HTH.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
Setup a UNIXy box (Linux/BSD/etc.) running Apache.
Add the Apache::MP3 module.
Copy or link your song files where Apache::MP3 can find them.
Edit your client hosts files to include your music server under the hostname "music".
Fire up a Web browser & enjoy your music files and browser-based playlists.
Even cranky security-conscious OpenBSD has packages to make this easy. If you have a spare box, I'd suggest something in the 500-MHz speed range or faster (although I used an old P-Pro 180 for this for several years). If you like, share the files using Samba as well.
If you already have a home Web-server, setup a name-based virtual host to distinguish it from your "real" site.
Like many here, the organization system that I use is ~/artist/album/00 - title.flac. As far as finding particular songs, I'm just extremely familiar with all of my music (>1000 CDs) and usually just know what artist a song is by and what album it is on (and probably what year it was released, who produced it, and the name of the guest didgeridoo player on tracks 3 and 7). If I don't know, it's usually a fun exercise to track it down.
At my age I find coming up with a witty signature too exhausting.
switcher \'swi`ch &r\, n.
A person who thinks that they are a Mac user but are really just trying to be. The mistake they make is to try to become a Mac user, when real Mac users are all about not trying to be anything and following your own rules. There is no fashion code to being a Mac user. There are no rules as to what applications you have to run.
Recent converts like you are ruining the old school Mac community because you are posers. Apple releases one OS that popularizes Fitts' law and the Genie effect, and suddenly people assume being a Mac user is all about owning a Mac. But a real Mac user is born, not made. You "switchers" are misrepresenting yourselves and the Mac platform. You're giving people the wrong idea of what Macintosh is.
switcher: shops at hot topic, thinks Firefox is a good Mac app, waiting for OS X port of PayrollPro 2000, follows any hint of a fashion trend (instead of setting them!), wouldn't know Clarus from Carl Sagan.
real Mac user: someone true to who they are, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world.
However, after using both for a period, I switched back to iTunes because it just works all-around better, and with the Multi-Plugin you can set it up with a foobar passthrough and through some mysterious setting drastically reduce the memory usage when it's minimized to the tray. If even this isn't enough for you, I'd say just man up and throw down a little under $70 to get another GB of memory. It's way more than iTunes will need and it will make your system snappier anyway.
iTunes and other music library apps generally work well as long as all the songs in your library were either downloaded from the built-in server or ripped from CD using that app.
The more difficult problem (that none of the apps solve well) is how to take an existing, huge music collection on disk and accurately import it into something like iTunes.
Example: I had thousands of MP3s I amassed while back in college, back before anyone preferred to use ID3 tags. Some of these were organized into folder hierarchies by album, artist, genre, etc. Others contained all of these attributes in just the filename, with varying syntax. Some of the files weren't in MP3 format (WMA was popular for a short while), and almost none of the files had attributes stored in the official metadata header of the file format. Some of the MP3s were probably corrupt because they'd been burnt and read off of questionable CD-R media a number of times. Some of the MP3s had lost vital info from the folder names or filenames due to length and character limitations of pre-Joliet CD-R formats.
Upon buying n iPod and getting iTunes installed, and realizing that iTunes (and most other music library apps) only know how to deal with ID3 tags (or equivalent), what I really found myself wishing for was a powerful set of smart features for importing the files I had and fleshing out the tags accurately.
Some things that really would have helped:
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I have over 150,000 songs on my 800gb (2x400 gb drives in one enclosure) setup.
I start out with creating directories based on genres.
anime (about 80,000 songs here)
artists (regular music)
games (game soundtracks)
soundtracks
mod2mp3
misc
And then from those directories, I create new directories for each given artist name, then for the album, and then the songs go there.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
For the past 4 years I've been using J River Media Center.
http://jrmediacenter.com/
It seems to handle very large collections without any problem (I probably have in the upwards of 7-8K of losslessly encoded music. It's interface is slightly cluttered but still extremely usable and very powerful. Sorta like iTunes on steroids.
The community around it is very supportive and the developers respond quickly to problems/bugs and are open to feature requests. On their forums, you can see the updates as each new version gets created.
-gk
Note that this won't necessarily prevent the RIAA from suing you after being "tipped off" that you've been downloading music...
- chrish
Even if it is technically superior, I'm still boycotting it until they change the name because now a variable name used by every computer scientist in the world will be infringing on the trademark of some guy that couldn't think of a real name for an mp3 player. *sigh*
... but whats wrong with just all the files in a directory? I use filenames to search for songs and keep winamp playlists around.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Have your tried http://www.musicmatch.com/
I have over 25K mp3s and it works great and uses about 40MB RAM.
It seems to be getting a bit worse with each new release thou.
I'm using Winamp 5, and I'm rather fond of it. I used to be against media jukeboxes, preferring just using a well-structured folder tree and well-labelled files. However, that has its limits. I switched to Winamp 5 a few years ago and haven't looked back. I still keep the folder tree and files up to my stringent standards of naming, but with Winamp if I want to listen to AC/DC's "Big Balls" I can just type in balls and it searches the database in real time as I type, eventually narrowing it down to Great Balls of Fire and Big Balls.
I've got it set so that the winamp window is in the top left, the playlist window fills up all the empty space to the right of that, and the media library takes over all the rest of the space (I prefer maximized windows).
It grows larger every day, please help!
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I have all my CDs ripped to MP3 and stored in folders. I have a "walkman" and car stereo that play MP3's off of data CD's that I create. The problems I'm having are tracking which songs are on which CD, how many songs are left I haven't burned to a CD, can I fit all my Steely Dan songs on one CD, etc...
:)
Anyone know of any software that can keep track of all this for me? Almost sounds like I need more of a file backup to CD program than a music manager, but I've never been able to figure out the media library stuff in software like WinAmp and MusicMatch, so maybe I'm overlooking something.
(and if I knew this type of possibly lame question to Slashdot would actually get posted, I would have submitted my problem a long time ago
Just call 1-800-BAD BEAT. They'll be glad to help you solve the problem.
I have one 250gb drive for music strictly, and sub-categorised by band or miscellaneous category thereafter (and then by album in order of year). So, something like:
e:/music/ramones, the/1977 - rocket to russia/
I find it works very well for organising large quantities of music, as my collection is currently around forty thousand files.
As for choosing what to play, Winamp has "jump to file" feature accessed by hitting J, thereby enabling you to do a search for what you want. However, the list it shows organises everything by filename, and I prefer to be organised by directory order. Which is why I use AMIP, a plugin for mIRC (I don't use mIRC, and it's not required to be installed for one to use AMIP) which organises files as I want them to be organised. To access the search dialogue just hit ^J.
Hope that helps.
I use two methods.
First off, my music folder is very organized. Each major genre has a folder. In each of these folders are any sub genres. Inside the sub genre folder are all the artists, then each album is a folder in the artist folder.
So "Down In It" by Nine Inch Nails would be located at:
C:\greg\My Documents\My Music\Rock\Industrial\Nine Inch Nails\Pretty Hate Machine\Down In It.mp3
Also, I make use of smart playlists in iTunes. Each of my Genres gets a playlist. I have playlists that only consist of songs I haven't listened to in in a while, a playlist for my favorite songs (based on song rating of 4/5 or better).
I have a "new music" playlist that adds any song without a rating to it.
Between these two systems, whether I have iTunes open or I'm using explorer, I can easily find whatever music I'm looking for.
Great shareware program actively developed and highly polished, MuzicMan, http://www.muzicman.com/ try it out, very nice without all the hassles of commercial programs taking over your computer.
Not dvdcsslib, libdvdcss.
Perhaps rather pedantic of me, but it's quite possible that some 'how do I get DVDs to play in Linux' newbie will read this and go off to google with quite the wrong search term...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I don't know how many songs I have, but it's about two solid weeks' worth. I use gmusicbrowser. It's got integrated tagging (no more opening EasyTag to change the artist name on one song), mass tagging (select a whole album and it brings you to a really slick dialogue where you can change the artist/album/genre/etc. en masse, and in a lower pane, the song names individually). It also has autofill for mass tagging (looks at the filename, you can specify it to read as artist, album, track, song or what have you).
The search and filter functions are fantastic, and the ability to delete tracks from the disk without leaving the application is handy.
It can use either gstreamer or MPG321 and OGG123 for playback. In the fords of Ferris Beuller: "I love it. It is so choice."
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!