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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?"
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
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
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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."
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...