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.

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.

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.

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.

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