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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?"
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.
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.
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 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.
I will agree that iTunes is the best solution...on a Macintosh. My G5 runs iTunes so smoothly with 12000+ songs, and is easy on my system resources.
However, I have found the Windows version of iTunes to be sluggish, even on newer machines.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
iTunes is currently using 35 meg here, and I have a pretty large collection. Winamp must use something insanely small for people to be complaining so much about iTunes memory usage. CPU usage seems to be fairly low too, at 4.5%, I'm not complaining. Also nice frontends to iTunes make searching and playback even easier. Have a crack at CoverFlow.
I organize my music several ways by having separate directory trees with hard links. I can have several directory trees arranged by artist, album, date, genre, all pointing out to one copy of the file.
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
You can get a Quicktime plugin for Windows Media here and a Quicktime plugin for Ogg here. iTunes just calls Quicktime to play all your music, so if Quicktime can play it, so can iTunes. Knock yourself out.
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.
Same cpu/ram/os here, i have 20K songs on a raid 10, search is instantaneous if itunes is loaded into ram. But if I have something running that makes it page out (vpc, wow, etc), it takes a minute to respond. I guess if I had another gig I wouldn't have this problem.
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)
Pirated? Allofmp3.com has a license to sell music.
Try again, Slappy.
Allofmp3.com has a license to sell music in Russia. Importing (most of) this music to the US is not legal. The same goes for many other developed countries.
Realistically, you don't have to worry about landing in jail, or even about exorbitant fines. In the US, the RIAA basically goes after people who redistribute RIAA-owned music without proper license (a description which fits many p2p users), because those are the people who can incur legal penalties of tens of thousands of dollars. The law is written under the assumption that each song you make available may have been downloaded by around 100 people, so damages come to around $1000 per song. If you're only receiving a song, and not redistributing it at all, then they can only hit you for around $10 per song.
But make no mistake. While it is perfectly legal to use allofmp3.com in Russia, it is definitely illegal (due to import regulation) to transfer this music to the US. Whether it is immoral or not is of course another matter.
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!
FYI, if you are on a windows box, the latest version (5.2) of winamp allows you to access your ipod in the same way that itunes does, through thier Media Library plugin. if you hate itunes then you never have to open it up to interface with your ipod. it is even stable.
However, the 5.2 version breaks the 5.1+ml_ipod plugin combination's ability to *rip* music off of ipod onto your computer.
Specifically, under section 1201, subsection c, you will find this text:
The really atrocious thing about the DMCA (IMHO) is that while it allows users to all their fair use defenses that are provided in normal copyright law (including reverse engineering for interoperability, ripping media you purchased legally for personal use, etc.), it outlaws the distribution (and manufacture, which may or not be the creation) of tools which facilitate such actions. We're being fundamentally dishonest with ourselves: we allow people do engage in certain activities, but disallow the distribution of tools that make it feasible for common users.
This, for example, is what makes certain Linux distros have to use offshore (or volunteer run) servers for programs like dvdcsslib, which is used in lots of programs like Xine and Mplayer. It forces distributions like Fedora and Suse to rely on 3rd party servers like livna.org and pacman to host mplayer RPMs.
ml_ipod does a better job of syncing too. Just dont install the winamp media player stuff and instead just use ml_ipod. It only breaks it if you install both at once.
Bottles.
I've been using it for quite some time, its organization features are great for finding and grouping your music by artist, album, genre etc. The ability to download album covers and identify music through musicbrainz is nice, you can edit the m3u tags at runtime, the playlist is easy to use - drag and drop from the filesystem or click inside the collection browsers, and it has a nice interface for browsing and listening to Internet radio streams. It rates the music by frequency as you listen to it, allows you to set up and organize multiple playlists as well as automatically creating a few special types of collections, and it has a scripting interface with a nice variety of pre-written scripts downloadable through an internal dynamic "hot new stuff" interface. It interfaces with iPods, finds duplicate music files in your collection, helps you find lyrics for your music, locates new music files even while it's playing and adds them to a "newest tracks" list, assists in creating your own music CDs as either data (mp3) or redbook audio, and (this is getting a bit long, isn't it?) many more useful features.
To be fair, it doesn't have an association with an online music store, and it may not perform strange acts on llamas, but as far as a player/organization tool goes it's well worth a look.
GPL: Free as in will
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...
Actually, that's not true. CDs have a "copy inhibit bit", much like the proposed broadcast flag.
Right. SCMS. Which is supposed to forbid copying a copy, not an original. Ripping/copying original disks is still technically legal (remember, SCMS it's supposed to say 'original, copy allowed')