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Managing a Huge Music Collection?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tracking-your-tunes dept.

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?"

12 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe archaic but... by Doytch · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I use folders to organise my music... It sound simple and archaic, but it really works.

    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 .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.

    1. Re:Maybe archaic but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      People bitch about iTunes memory consumption because it is abhorrent. I have iTunes opened to my Library now, and have the browse option enabled. My current selection is the Default All Genre, Artist, and Albums. iTunes is eating 186,172K of memory. When I'm trying to find music in its Library interface the memory consumption never drops bellow 100MB and often climbs near 300MB. When I first open iTunes regardless of where I am in the interface, 90MB are used. I currently am playing music and have my winamp Library open and it is using 19MB of memory which is far more tolerable. The other issue is that iTunes won't play over 12,000 tracks that are in my library while I have plugins for winamp that open them all. I can only imagine how much memory iTunes would use if it could include all of my music in its library. Most of the people who are saying iTunes doesn't use much memory have only around 5-10k tracks in thier library. I have 60k and iTunes doesn't handle it well. I should note that it performs equally poorly on win32 and os x (20" iMac core duo 2GB RAM, Similar speced PC w/ AMD X2 4200+ running XP)

  2. one word by xhorder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    amaroK

  3. my method by thesupermikey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  4. Just like a filing cabinet... by scum-e-bag · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?
  5. a better idea... by frazzydee · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:a better idea... by ScriptedReplay · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Make no mistake, "ripping" you CDs is definitely illegal.

      That is usually called wishful thinking.

      Almost all CDs today come with some form of ant-ripping technology.

      OK, that was probably anti-ripping - myself, I wouldn't much care for ripping ants, whether using CDs or not. But nevermind that - you might as well have dropped 'almost', as all CDs come with a copyright notice and in some people's mind that in itself should make ripping illegal, right? Well, let's see

      By admitting that you have "ripped" your CDs, you are admitting guilt to breaking the DMCA laws.

      Implicit assumptions: an existing DMCA law and either no Fair Use laws or precedents of the DMCA-like laws trumping Fair Use. Let me assure you, frient, you're on VERY shaky ground here. You might also not be aware that some countries allow by law one copy for non-commercial use (private copy/fair use/backup copy, etc.) so your sweeping assertion is clearly wrong in those cases.

      In the end, you come off sounding suspiciously like a RIAA troll. There are still legal exceptions to the author's rights, no matter how much the entertainment industry would wish otherwise. Please take your FUD elsewhere.

    2. Re:a better idea... by ScriptedReplay · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, unlike DVDs where ripping requires decrypting the signal, CD ripping saves un-protected audio output to a file. The CD drive producing this signal is not breaking any copy protection, as that is its intended functionality. Your argument would work for the proposed anti-analog-hole legislation, but even that would only be for the case of CDs having the audio signal watermarked/whatever so as to mean 'copy forbidden' - leaving plenty of CDs legally ripable.

      OK, so to restate my points: first, there is no DMCA case in ripping CDDA tracks off a conforming audio CD - the proper argument here is copyright, not DMCA; second, not all countries have DMCA equivalents, so saying DMCA breach == ilegal is only true in some particular jurisdictions (hence false as an all-encompassing statement)

      Anyway, concerning your encrypted backup argument, I have some doubts that it would work in a technical enough court. The case is, while I can certainly make a backup of the encrypted content, DVD writers will not allow me to restore it to a perfect equivalent of the original, since I cannot write back the disk key. Thus my 'backup' copy is all but useless. If I am legally entitled to make personal backups under some fair-use exception in the local copyright law, then the backup should better be restoreable, which only leaves unencrypted backups.

  6. Winamp by dknj · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

  7. Smart playlists by 4D6963 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Well, you're far from the only one to have thousands of files, so if you care to know (since you're asking you probably do), here's how I do to manage my music collection.

    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!
  8. iTunes... by gavinroy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. musikCube by Saxophonist · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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).