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?"

Comments

Great...

[aywwts4]

Now we can be treated to a few hundred geeks arguing over who's music collectionis bigger.

one word

[xhorder]

amaroK

my method

[thesupermikey]

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.

Foobar!

[axiem]

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.

Just like a filing cabinet...

[scum-e-bag]

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...

a better idea...

[frazzydee]

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.

Re:a better idea...

[ScriptedReplay]

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.

Re:a better idea...

[ScriptedReplay]

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.

Re:a better idea...

[rpdillon]

The DMCA has a specific fair-use clause. Which means, if the action you are engaging in constitutes fair use (i.e. ripping media you already own to watch it on your computer), then it is not illegal. This specifically means that the whether the content is protected by encryption has no bearing on what constitutes fair use, and therefore no bearing in whether or not the use is actionable under the DMCA.

Specifically, under section 1201, subsection c, you will find this text:

(c) OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED
(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

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.

I've come to use...

[ImaLamer]

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!

iTunes...

[gavinroy]

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.

Re:iTunes...

[Quaoar]

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.

Slim Devices Squeezebox and Slimserver

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The dinosaur consensus

[unitron]

"How do you manage your large collection?"

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.

Thanks for the ideas, guys

[TTK Ciar]

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

foobar2000

[Matt Perry]

I use foobar2000. I migrated to it after almost eight years of Winamp usage once I noticed that Winamp don't support Unicode.

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:

• Audiobooks
• Classical
• Comedy
• Folk, Ethnic, & World
• Jazz
• LargeSets
• Miscellaneous
• Other

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.

Only solution: Amarok

[B5_geek]

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.

LWN Review and the Free Media Revolution.

[twitter]

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.

Re:Maybe archaic but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:Maybe archaic but...

[L7_]

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.

Don't forget to mention foobar2000's Columns UI

[MojoStan]

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.

Many of those people that "hate" the default sparse interface (including me) will like the less-sparse but still simple Columns UI (the Artist, Title, Album, etc information would be there if the files were tagged correctly).

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:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Imag e:Columnsui.png