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?"

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LWN Review and the Free Media Revolution.

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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.