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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?"

6 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Windows Media Player by ScottyH · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I used to use WMP until it couldn't handle the amount of music I had anymore.

    I HATED iTunes at first, and went to winamp. When I bought an iPod, my tune changed pretty quickly (ark ark). Just give it a chance.

    It's very good.

  2. Re:Folders by Eideewt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Same here. It's not like the songs in my collection change much. If a song belongs in the ~/music/Rush/album/ folder it's pretty much going to stay there.

    I also like to use mpd (Music Player Daemon) with mpc (a client for it) to play my music. I don't even have to worry about folders then. Playing songs is as simple as "mpc search artist Coheed | mpc add; mpc play", or somesuch. No need for some bloated piece of software when I can just ssh to my music holding computer and ask for what I want.

  3. Re:a better idea... by nitrocloud · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I hate to say it, but no matter how awesome the encryption schemes might be, we don't listen to digital signals, in the end it is all analog and has no right under DMCA with the use of a stereo patch cable and being stored at a 1x transfer rate. Sure this is technically circumvention of the encryption, but as I see it, an analog signal will never have a place under DMCA in most aspects, then again, this is just an engineer's opinion of the signal, DVDs could be copied in a similar manner or maybe we humans are too analog?

    --
    Karma: Good, or bust!
  4. LWN Review and the Free Media Revolution. by twitter · · Score: 3, Interesting
    LWN reviewed players back in November of 2005. It's a nice article which ends up recommending Amarok for all the right reasons. Amarok has gotten better since and now works out of the box on Debian Etch.

    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.

  5. Re:Maybe archaic but... by voice_of_all_reason · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have to use Itunes because I haven't found anything better to copy stuff to my ipod, but it really is the 5th horse of the apocalypse.

    Whenever it's doing
    anything     ... loading up, copying, or playing, my system flat out stops all other processing. Like the Pakleds in Star Trek, my computer simply "will not go."

    That is made of Fail and More Fail.

  6. Re:Slim Devices Squeezebox and Slimserver by Xenna · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Same here. One Linux media server running MythTV (3 tuners) and SlimServer, 4 Squeezeboxes v3 & 4 TV sets.

    Nothing else needed. I don't have a CD or DVD player left in the house (apart from the ones in my PC's).

    Outside of the house we use an iRiver H40 and an H10.

    X.