Better Jukebox Software for Bigger Libraries?

jimjenkins1975 asks: "I recently ripped and encoded my entire CD and Vinyl library, as well as merged my home and work computer's libraries (I work at a music company so my work library is very very large). It resulted in well over 750 GB of MP3's. I was hoping to get away with using iTunes to manage this, however the XML database file has grown very large, and the application itself is non-responsive or very sluggish at best, once it has loaded up (a process that takes several minutes itself). Is there another application (preferably for Mac, but I do have a PC) with similar features out there that can handle a library of this size with aplomb?"

Comments

Amarok in Linux

[rhythmx]

As a GNU/Linux user, even though I refuse to run KDE, I have had the best luck with Amarok. My archive (only about 150 GB) is nearly entirely rips of my albums. It has just about the best interface I have seen for dealing with a large (and sorted) archive. The features I like most are album cover manager, last.fm integration, ipod-style (artist->album->track) menus, the wikipedia info and lyrics based on context, and the random-album play mode.

There is a gnome equivalent but it is not quite as stable. I can't speak for the MacOSX crowd, but when in Win32 (rare these days) I reluctantly choose to use Winamp.

Some tips from my experience:

• Be an ID3 tag-nazi - No player can compensate for 750 GB of badly named media. MP3Tag is your friend for batch editing ID3 tags.
• Sort all your files using a resonable naming system. I use '/path/to/archive/%Artist%/[%Year] %Album%/%02Track% - %Title%.%Ext%'. This comes in real handy for writing scripts to deal with an archive to large to manage by hand.
• Backup. Backup. Backup.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Curien]

Question asked and answered. Discussion closed. Next!

Re:Amarok in Linux

[willpall]

Don't forget that Amarok can use PostgreSQL or (I believe) any other standard database for handling it's database. I'm sure that will make dealing with 750 GB of music MUCH more efficient.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Goeland86]

For tag edition, consider Picard, from musicbrainz.org
It may not have all of your music files, but the ones it does it will make sure they are tagged properly, and it can move the files into a specific folder arrangement. If musicbrainz doesn't have those tags, well, upload them, and be safe in knowing that the tags will be available for your files, so even if they get screwed up, you can find them again.

Now, for managing something that big, something along the lines of Amarok is recommended, where it uses an external DB, like SQLite or MySql, or other.
Try looking around on sourceforge.net, or any other famous OSX software download sites.
Not a OSX user myself, my meager 50GB of music loads just fine in Amarok on gentoo.
Good luck with that repository.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[bhima]

You know the exact same can be said of iTunes. I have about 350GB and have noticed a slowdown myself but when it was 150GB I saw no speed problems at all. 750GB is a lot of data, no matter what kind of data it is... I'd hate to use my old G4 cube to deal with an music library that large.

So I think the real answer lies along the lines of what would a database pro do if his application got so big it started to slow down on his existing hardware?

Answer: Buy more, better, and faster hardware.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[spagetti_code]

I'd like to amplify the comments about being an MP3 tag nazi
(does that count as Godwinning??).

The beauty of spending all your time getting the MP3 tags right and the
album art and lyrics *embedded* into the tags is that
someday, guaranteed, you are going to have to move
from one media organiser to another. Amarok wont always be
the killer app and some other smart organiser will take its place.

If you're tag data is good, that switch will be trivial. If, like
itunes, it stores some data in a DB rather than tags, you get locked in.

Tagrunner (commercial s/w) is my pick.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[BrokenHalo]

I guess Amarok is good if it works for you. I found the interface a bit counterintuitive, but that might just be me.

However, I have a 600GiB music library at my workplace sitting on an old PII 400MHz using Rhythmbox, and it seems to work just fine.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[fph il quozientatore]

hmm... Maybe I am a bit out of date, but when I last checked the ID3 tags seemed to have too short a maximum length to be the Definitive Way(tm) to indexing music collections. Their maximum length was too short to hold long titles such as "It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)", or even "What's the story (morning glory)". Do you confirm it?

Re:Amarok in Linux

[dc29A]

FLAC playback doesn't work in Amarok at the moment. You have to use an older version along with older xine libraries. I wouldn't recommend Amarok until they fix it.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[KDan]

*Dzing* Incorrect answer. Thank you for playing

A "database pro" would look for unoptimized queries and missing indexes and speed up the database on the current hardware. As a matter of fact, most "database pros" work in environments where commissioning new hardware takes 6 months or so and goes through some ridiculous approval processes, so that's actually the hard option.

Daniel

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Corwn of Amber]

Wrong! :D

ID3 version 2 : http://www.id3.org/ID3v2Easy

Re:Amarok in Linux

[marsu_k]

Or when using Amarok, use a proper database like PostgreSQL or MySQL. SQlite is fine for small databases but the big boys are better when you have hundreds of GBs to index.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[byolinux]

If you haven't already, please consider joining the Rhythmbox group on Last.fm

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Dogtanian]

Besides, if he really cared about his music, he'd be using something other than a lossy format linked with hearing loss. These sorts of stories pop up all the time. If this threat was really worthy of taking seriously, I'm sure we'd have heard a lot more about it since it was first suggested in 2002.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[SenorCitizen]

You are out of date. ID3 v1 tags had a limit of 30 characters per field, but nobody has used those for years, save for compatibility with some hardware like MP3 capable DVD players. ID3v2 tags can have frames that are up to 16 MB. ID3v2.3 is the most widely used version these days.

Back to the topic, Foobar2000 for Windows handles crazy big music libraries with no slowdowns, and is extremely customisable.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[ajs318]

Wait ..... did I just hear "MySQL" and "proper database" in the same sentence?

Oh, you were comparing it to SQLite. Sorry. Point taken .....

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Giometrix]

Unless the actual music is being stored in the database as binary, I highly doubt that the database would be even close to 1GB if all they do is maintain track information and point to a filepath. SQLite scales well to around 4GB, according to some sources I've read in the past.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[bhima]

Your explanation is completely contrary to my experience in dealing with DBA's. When dealing with code they did not design or implement (or as the case with iTunes, even have access to it) suggesting to upgrade the hardware is among first things that comes up. No one, who has ever been part of a validation process, is enthusiastic about moving production code back to development and repeating the cycle.

Anyone who's got "well over 750 gigs" of music needs to look at the hardware they manage the library with. That old G4 with 256 meg of RAM may well be able to play any music just fine... but it's not the thing to manage a library of that size with.

But hey, don't let me get in the way of your childish sound effects.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[phoenixwade]

I'm sure we'd have heard a lot more about it since it was first suggested in 2002. We might if we could still hear......

Re:Amarok in Linux

[OAB_X]

As for MP3 tags, that is only partially true. I have moved songs from one iTunes library to another, by moving only the actual audio files itself, without moving the database, and it works perfectly, and it automatically re-imported the "default" metadata. It did loose play counts, star ratings and the like, but that is to be expected. It did keep the song title, artist name, etc. just fine (the file names were random too), so I have found that iTunes in that regard is pretty smart.

The trick is to get the tags right the first time, otherwise its a royal PITA, which I had to deal with when I was using 'amp.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Carthag]

iTunes only stores play counts and ratings in the internal DB, the rest goes in the id3 tags. I assume they keep those things out of the tags to avoid updating the files continuously, as there is both PCNT for play counts and POPM for ratings in the official spec. However it's fairly easy to extract the relevant information from the iTunesDB and add it with a script so it's not a big deal if you do want to switch to other software which may or may not use those tags.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[twistedsymphony]

From:

So I think the real answer lies along the lines of what would a database pro do if his application got so big it started to slow down on his existing hardware?

To:

Your explanation is completely contrary to my experience in dealing with DBA's. When dealing with code they did not design or implement...

Nice switch there...

As someone who designs lots and lots of database application, managing nearly 30 years worth of engineering data, as my full time job... I'd be looking for a new job pretty quick if my solution to every performance slowdown was to just throw more hardware at it.

If your saying: How can I get iTunes to run faster then yes, throwing more hardware might be the answer but that's only because you don't have access to the actual code that runs it... there isn't much of anything you can do about it. Chances are when friends and family ask for help getting things to run faster "buy faster hardware" is the only thing a DBA would have to offer because they didn't build any of the applications in question.

Though, you posed the question as if someone was building an new application from scratch, or at least had the ability to modify an existing application, in which case any DBA worth hiring would look for ways to optimize their queries. Nevermind the fact that iTunes uses XML to manage it's data as opposed to a more conventional database.

Sometimes better hardware is the answer, but it's never the first one you go to. More often then not in the business world you're required to build your application within the constrains of existing hardware.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[missing000]

Wha? Can't quite make you out, gonna have to turn up my text to speech...

Re:Amarok in Linux

[powerlord]

Anyone who's got "well over 750 gigs" of music needs to look at the hardware they manage the library with. That old G4 with 256 meg of RAM may well be able to play any music just fine... but it's not the thing to manage a library of that size with.

Interesting idea, I hope the original poster comes back with some specs on the hardware he is currently using. If it is a G4 era mac (or even a mac mini), the first suggestion of getting a MacPro ... or even better, contact apple's business support division and ask them if a MacPro would support what he needs (for instance they might suggest more memory specifically to handle the index without it having to swap to disk).

Alternatively, again trying to stick to a Mac centered approach, as the poster asked, perhaps Leopard (to be released Q2 this year), supporting 64-bit CPUs, might be better able to take advantage of a Quad Core MacPro w/muh memory, to better handle the index and increase responsiveness.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[LWATCDR]

"750GB is a lot of data,"
It is but itunes should be dealing with a tiny fraction of this.
An MP3 might be three or for megabytes is size. The tag information should be far less than one kilobyte and probably a quarter of that. So let's say that he has 100,000 songs. So at one kilobyte per song runs to a grand total of 100 megabytes of data and 100,000 records in the database. That isn't a big database at all. I have one that I run on an old 300 Mhz P2 using Postgres that has over 400,000 records in a single table. Look uptime for any record is under .1 second using an indexed search of course.
SQLite would handle it with NO problem. Heck a good Xbase system could deal with it.
The problem with Itunes sounds like XML addiction. I swear people think of XML as the perfect tool for every problem. An XML flat file sucks as a database. Itunes is probably reading it all into memory to parse the file which will most likely cause a thrash unless you have a lot of memory free.
It is a fine solution for small datasets but as people here have found it really starts fall apart once the data set gets too big.
I haven't gotten into yet but SQLite looks like a great solution for many programs that need some type of data storage but don't need the complexity of a full blown database.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh, two points to that one.

1. ID3 data will be in the low hundred meg range for a library this big... My guess would be that he/she has an iTunes library file approximately 150mb. My own library is ~230G/30k files @ 196k and my iTunes library file is ~50mb.
2. The problem is the actual nature of the beast. It's an XML file not a database. It's not a make room for the big boy issue at all. It's a need to understand when a method of data storeage/management is no longer efficent and needs to be addressed. Any database (oh Jesus please take this sweeping/generalizing statement in context...) will handle this more efficently

Re:Amarok in Linux

[jessecurry]

Case in point; A friend of mine who is a "database pro" entered a new contract and began looking at some of the logic and calls behind the data aggregation that was currently taking place. One particular report, that he was supposed to be working on a UI for, took about 6 hour to run to completion. After 3 or 4 days of careful consideration he was able to reduce the time it took to run the report to about 6 seconds.
Same hardware, same data, just a better method of access.
I think that Apple may actually be working on using SQL Lite to manage iTune libraries in the future.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I've been a user of armoK for several years, but since I switched to Gnome last June I've found Exaile to be quite nice. It doesn't have all of the features of amaroK, but it's still an excellent player and integrates very nicely with Gnome. Don't bother with Banshee or Rhythm box. With my collection (~200GB of mp3s (encoded with lame --preset standard -m s -q 0 --vbr-new -p --replaygain-accurate)), both of those crawl and crash regularly. amaroK and Exaile both handle my collection perfectly.

There is a gnome equivalent but it is not quite as stable. I can't speak for the MacOSX crowd, but when in Win32 (rare these days) I reluctantly choose to use Winamp. I've been using Exaile on my desktop, work computers, and laptop (PowerBook, with Ubuntu PPC) for a while. I have not had it crash once on any of those. Are you using the binaries from their site? Even the betas have been stable for me.

Be an ID3 tag-nazi - No player can compensate for 750 GB of badly named media. MP3Tag is your friend for batch editing ID3 tags Easytag is also quite nice.

Sort all your files using a resonable naming system. I use '/path/to/archive/%Artist%/[%Year] %Album%/%02Track% - %Title%.%Ext%'. This comes in real handy for writing scripts to deal with an archive to large to manage by hand. That is a must.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Eagleartoo]

I failed out of my computer science major my first year of college so while I understand what you're saying about databases, I'm not qualified to comment, HOWEVER I have been using a Mac since OS X came out (G4 Powerbook) with iTunes v. 2 I think it was, by v. 4 it had grown into a burdensome music application (which i believe was due to the addition of the store) now we're on v. 7 and they tacked on more bloatware that is fun to look at but can get old after a while and when it comes down to it you want your music to play. It's not a simple matter of indexing a library, it's trying to make that indexing look suavé. I'm a Mac user, and I get a lot out of my computer when using it for 3D rendering from a terminal, but as far as normal user applications go, they work and they're fairly solid and easy on the eyes, but they're aimed at an average user, not someone who is going to be indexing 750 GB of music. Enter Linux -- What do you need the computer to do? Have a really cool look and cool feel while playin my cool tunes? Or index 750 GB of music and launch them faster. So use the code that does exactly what you want it to do and nothing else. As far as trying to explain this stuff to my pointy-haired boss . . . forget about it!

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you have a backend engine problem - rather strange, as both xine and gstreamer support flac without any trouble. Anyway, it should not be an amarok issue - check that you have the appropriate flac handling libs for your current backend.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[karnal]

Odd. My fresh install of Ubuntu with amarok and the .flac decoder works just fine????

Re:Amarok in Linux

[dc29A]

Kubuntu out of the box doesn't work. Upgrading either xine or Amarok, no use either. And older version of xine has patches for FLAC fix but I couldn't get it working on latest Kubuntu releases.

Haven't tried Amarok on Ubuntu, I don't like Gnome. :(

Re:Amarok in Linux

[jythie]

For just the meta-data and such, sqlite does just fine. I use it for managing a catalog of around 300,000 tracks including album/artist information on a PII-500 with only 64mb of ram, holds up just find even with all the UI stuff (including X11) loaded. Search time is less then a second for most cases.

The catalog for all that data only comes out to about 100MB, and I would put the total mp3 size (back of the envelope) at around 900GB.

For applications that do not need remote socket connections and can keep the db access to within the app, sqlite will generally handle the situation better back-ends like mysql or postgress.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[dborod]

A lot of people in this thread are just comparing the disk space consumed by their music libraries without regard for the number of tracks in the library. The issue isn't the size of the music library, its the amount of metadata that comes with the number of tracks.

I have a MacPro and an iTunes library of around 80,000 songs and I can tell you that iTunes gets bogged down at times. I support more RAM would help.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[gregmac]

Since this is straight from the Sqlite web page, take it with a grain of salt (but also realize they're not trying to sell anything, so don't really have any reason to lie).. but they claim a practical upper limit is 100GB (http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q10), and theoretically 2TB.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Dr. Jest]

I've used Amarok on Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian Unstable recently and it played both flac and shn files without a problem. The engine you're using may not have been compiles with support for these files.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[spagetti_code]

Not quite true. Album artwork is also not stored in ID3 by default.
However it turns out you can "convince" itunes to use ID3 for artwork
with a clever trick

Re:Amarok in Linux

[VJ42]

replying to undo moderation; stupid scroll mouse!

Re:Amarok in Linux

[bhima]

I saw on MacSlash he is using a G4 powerbook with 1.5gig RAM and USB drives. That just hurts my feelings thinking of it.

I've wound up with Highpoint RAID (with external drives) with my PowerMac. A very unsatisfactory solution.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Nutria]

I'm sure that will make dealing with 750 GB of music MUCH more efficient.

Why load 750GB of music into a database?

Or is PostgreSQL "just" used to store the catalog?

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Nutria]

Wait ..... did I just hear "MySQL" and "proper database" in the same sentence?

Oh, you were comparing it to SQLite. Sorry. Point taken .....

Yes. MySQL is a total POS and SQLite is an excellent choice for small, embedded systems.

Like managing an album catalogs.

Re:Amarok in Linux

[Nutria]

If you're tag data is good, that switch will be trivial. If, like itunes, it stores some data in a DB rather than tags, you get locked in.

How would you get locked in by storing song metadata in SQLite?

Re:Amarok in Linux

[willpall]

Yeah, just the metadata. But like the submitter was saying, using an XML file to track the metadata for that much music is not very efficient. A "real" database will have much less trouble with 100,000 songs than an XML file will. (I have ~40 GB of music, which is about 5500 tracks, so I'm guessing that his is probably on the order of 100,000 tracks give or take)

legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

"merged my home and work computer's libraries"

Uh oh..

Re:legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is perfectly legal in my country....

Mediamonkey

[afidel]

mediamonkey claims to handle 50K+ files without slowing down. It's amazing what you can find in seconds with google =) The search was mp3 media manager.

Re:Mediamonkey

[bigmouth_strikes]

> It's amazing what you can find in seconds with google =)

I'm sure most /. users know about Google. Asking a question on ask./. is about getting opinions, not so much about getting information.

Re:Mediamonkey

[MyDixieWrecked]

I've got nearly 40K MP3s (mostly 192kbit, but most recent ones are higher) and it only takes up around 220GB.

this guy has 750GB. Being in the music industry, I assume he may have everything encoded higher than 192kbit (he sounds like he may be an audiophile), but I still find it safe to assume that he's got at least 100,000 files in his music library.

Personally, even though I've got 40,000 tracks, I really only *like* about 3000. My iPod's got all the music that I'm either trying to get into, was into recently or currently into on it and it's only got 3200 tracks on it right now. Because of this, my iTunes library only has what I feel like listening to at any given moment. I've got a an external 300GB drive where I have everything sorted by artist and album and when I wanna listen to something, I just pull it off and drop it into iTunes.

I'd hate to see how 100K tracks would perform trying to browse on the xbox360. browsing through 5000 tracks is a pain enough.

Re:Mediamonkey

[abbamouse]

Interesting -- I assumed he had perhaps 5000 miscellaneous MP3s and everything else would be FLAC or some other lossless format. This would be around 25,000 lossless tracks plus 5000 MP3s = a library of about 30,000 tracks. Of course, we're both just guessing but I know if I had 750 GB for music, I wouldn't be encoding anything in a lossy format.

Re:Mediamonkey

[MyDixieWrecked]

...but I know if I had 750 GB for music, I wouldn't be encoding anything in a lossy format.

technically, yeah.

I've got a friend who's got a nice 2TB RAID in his personal fileserver (mostly filled with pr0n, movies and music). He's a big stickler with the quality of his files and everything is either Flac, aiff, or 320kbit mp3s; he accepts no other formats. The problem is that when he wants to transfer his stuff onto his portable player, he's got to re-encode to lower-quality mp3s to fit enough music on the player (I believe he's got a 30GB Zen Touch).

for me, I've got my 500 CDs in 2 binders for emergencies and 192kbit mp3s on my drive for casual listening.

Media Monkey

[complete loony]

I've used Media Monkey on windows for a 45GB archive. I went looking for a replacement when winamp stopped being useful.
The only other thing I can suggest is just using the filesystem to organise your music.

Re:Media Monkey

[Corwn of Amber]

When did WinAMP ever stop being useful?
No, really, I'd like to read up on what you reproach the definitively ultimate best media player ever...

Maybe you didn't use it like I did? I had the MMD3 skin, activated only the iPod and Local Files support, didn't install anything else at first (then I needed input plugins, found them all easy on the official site).
So I had an iTunes-like browser, a window-shade line with the player and the playlist - mmd3 in horizontal winshade mode has a drawer for the EQ - and the "search library" option is faster than my iPod's when it holds over 10G.

Re:Media Monkey

[LunaticTippy]

I used winamp up until 2000 or so, when it started getting bloaty. The later versions really bug me. Why does it take so much memory and cpu and internet access to play a frickin mp3 file? Now I like vlc. The only media player with a traffic cone icon. Plays everything, very low resources. Works on my p-133 laptop.

Re:Media Monkey

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you were using version 3 of Winamp? That was a disaster.

Using Winamp 5 with the version 2 style interface has the same performance of the 2.x series of Wnamp.

Re:Media Monkey

[Anonymous Coward]

I use MediaMonkey everyday, it has no problems with managing over 22,000 files. It does not keep track of file locations based upon [Drive Letter]:\[Directory] but rather [Drive Name]:\[Directory] and therefore does not have the issues iTunes or WinAmp does if a harddrive doesn't mount to the same drive letter.

Quod Libet, of course

[keitosama]

Quod Libet is a fantastic GTK+-based music player designed for gigantic libraries. There are so many ways to search in it (for instance, you could search for &(genre=pop, genre=rock, #(lastplayed > 30 days)) to find every pop rock song you haven't been listening to for the last month, if you've got the tags right), so finding the tracks you're looking for shouldn't ever be a problem either.

amaroK

[wall0159]

amaroK works really well for me on ~14000 tracks (80gb). It uses either a mySQL or SQLite database for indexing, so I would expect it to scale pretty well. It supports mp3, ogg, aac, wma, ipods, irivers, ... it's the best and most flexible music player that I've seen.

Re:amaroK

[Drantin]

FYI, they changed the capitalization a few releases ago...

Amarok again, but with some tips

[aitikin]

Amarok is by far my favorite "jukebox" program. There are only two things it doesn't have that iTunes does and those are the jukebox look (coverflow) and the APE (air port express) integration. Now, you mentioned OS X. Amarok is a great program, and when it's finally ported to Qt4, I will no longer use iTunes unless I have to. Here is a guide for getting Amarok running in OS X, and here is one to get it running "natively". There's a bit of a conversation as to an .app package for it.

albumplayer

[Anonymous Coward]

Using windows i'd recommend albumplayer. It places an emphasis on albums though - whereas itunes i find the emphasis is more on songs. My 2.4ghz with 256MB loads albumplayer in 5 seconds with 200 gig mp3's in the database. Have read that other people have gone to 1000 gig and have had no problems (though it helps to split mp3s into batches when adding them) It's the only shareware i've ever bought.

MPD

[the_g_cat]

I use the "music player daemon" to play my music, and it does great with my somewhat big (17,5k titles for 50 days straight listening) music collection, link here: http://www.musicpd.org/ . Memory usage at the moment (playing some FLACs...) is somewhere around 8MiB. You also have a ton of clients available, so you should be able to find one that suits your needs :-)

Re:MPD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you choose to go take the MPD route, don't miss out on what's in my opinion the best MPD client out there (and certainly the best one for the Mac), Theremin (https://theremin.sigterm.eu/cgi-bin/trac.cgi)!
It's open source and development is going forward at a very quick pace.

VLC?

[Redlazer]

I havent used VLC too much for a music player (WMP works fine for me), but i have dabbled with creating playlists and the like, and its seems to be a pretty quick little program.

Im pretty sure theres a Mac version, so why dont you go check it out?

-Red

Re:VLC?

[Anonymous Coward]

VLC doesn't support playlist searching or any kind of media library that I'm aware of.

mpg123

[Zork the Almighty]

I use mpg123 and the file system hierarchy to organize and play my mp3s. I have no idea what the hell you kids are talking about.

Re:mpg123

[Corwn of Amber]

I see drawbacks to that approach:

• limited search capabilities
• madplay sounds better
• the player interface is ugly
• the player can not be controlled from everywhere (within browser, gkrellm, other gadget)
• jump-to-time is VERY limited (try going to 12:35 "just because that's the good part of that set")
• no playlist management
• no ipod support (import and export) (unless you write that in bash, but if you do that, you are very crazy.)

I have used mpg123 (well, madplay) and found it so impractical that I ended up installing XMMS to use with 20-song-ish playlists.

Re:mpg123

[ajs318]

That's the way I did it too -- all directories are named for groups, within which are subdirectories for albums. I even built a CGI-based front end so I could play tracks with a web-based interface. It turned out to be less useful in practice just because I was running the machine without a display. My TV set has RGB inputs (and I know how to generate csync from hsync and vsync) but I'm not sure the machine's onboard graphics will run down to 15kHz.

Are you programmer?

[ThePhilips]

If you programmer, you can try to find some simple DB tool a-la M$ Access or KDE's Kexi.

Once you would put meta data along with file names into database, rest would be pretty easy. You can also implement something simple to convert track selection (SQL query) to play list and add button to launch external player on the play list.

Though I'm not sure about state of DB software on Macs.

www.foobar2000org

[doofusclam]

Foobar2000 is my choice for *managing* my collection, which is currently about 55000 tracks split equally between aac and musepack files, totalling about 320gb.

The tagging and conversion features are unsurpassed and it's still nimble even with a collection that size. I don't use it for actual playback, for that I use mpd on my linux box.

hth

Amarok - Thumbs Up

[cwraig]

Just another very happy amarok user.

Works really well, i use a shared mysql database throughout my house so all my stats playlists etc are all stored in the same place.
I have about 100gb of media and it doesnt even blink.
If you can use linux this is the best way to go.

well over 750 GB of MP3's

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrent, please?!

Mmm, pop rocks...

[Chris Pimlott]

for instance, you could search for &(genre=pop, genre=rock, #(lastplayed > 30 days)) to find every pop rock song you haven't been listening to for the last month

Mmm, pop rocks...

WinAMP

[Corwn of Amber]

I use it with an already huge collection, 20000+ files, no problem whatsoever.

I'm even thinking it could run in Wine, so that I'd finally have a usable music player and manager on Linux : I tried Rhytmbox, it sucks (scans my whole library EVERY startup. Can't deactivate that) so does Banshee (same problems, almost-same interface), and I'd rather run Windows programs than install anything KDE on a GNOME desktop.

Re:WinAMP

[Risen888]

Assuming these are mp3, at an average size of 3.5 MB per file, we're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 GB. Correct me if my assumptions are unfounded. I'd call that "medium-big," but not huge.

Anyway, if you're looking for a good GTK jukebox (and yes, Rhythmbox totally blows), check out gmusicbrowser. Excellent browser, can use gstreamer or mpg321/ogg123/flac123 or mplayer as a backend, very adaptable interface, snappy as hell with my 80GB or so (mixed bag of flac/ogg/mp3), I can't speak for how well it'd hold up under a heavier load. It's initial scan with that much data takes a goddamn long time (start it before you go to bed), but once the files are scanned, you're golden. You can set it up to scan for new/deleted/changed files on startup, which is much faster and less processor-intensive than the initial scan, but even that can be turned off or done manually from the prefs menu. Enjoy!

Re:WinAMP

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, you can disable the library scanning thing.

External HD

[polar red]

Currently I use CD's exclusively, but just now I bought an external HD to put my music on; so i just have to lug that thing to my work and back. Problem is : I want to be sure i could hook it up to a windows and to a ubuntu and have it work both ways. Any tips ?

Re:External HD

[Corwn of Amber]

• Be an ID3 tag-nazi - No player can compensate for 750 GB of badly named media. MP3Tag [mp3tag.de] is your friend for batch editing ID3 tags.

• Sort all your files using a reasonable naming system. I use '/path/to/archive/%Artist%/%Year %Album%/%02Track% - %Title%.%Ext%'. This comes in real handy for writing scripts to deal with an archive to large to manage by hand.

• Backup. Backup. Backup.
• format the whole thing in FAT32

... and the story ends.

Amarok - Potential Problems

[penguinchris]

I started using Amarok to do this recently, but I've found that indexing only 40-50 Gb of my collection it chokes up my computer for ten minutes or more. It has completely frozen my computer several times doing this as well. Not just the first time, either, but obviously whenever it needs to re-build the database. It unnecessarily does this if you add an additional folder to the database, which is annoying. It recursively scans your folders if you want it to, and it adds things to the database quickly that way, so why does it have to rebuild the entire database if you add a folder?

Some annoying problems often occur when transferring music to my mp3 player (jetaudio X5L), which it does in a customizable and convenient way so I would like to keep doing it in the future. For now, though, I've gone back to just copying files from konquerer directly. Sometimes Amarok doesn't name the files correctly and album tracks end up out of order on the player, sometimes it claims to have transferred files but they are nowhere to be seen when I'm out somewhere and really want to listen to that new music I thought I just put on the player, and things like that.

Your mileage may vary of course. It's a great program, and I highly recommend it over anything else that I've tried. It's very possible that it's just my particular setup that causes problems with it, considering that the other comments indicate that it works well with much more data than I am using it with.

Of course you're asking about Mac software specifically; maybe this wasn't the best place to do that.

Slimserver supposedly scales that high

[martinde]

Slimserver, while traditionally used to drive a Squeezebox, can stream to any player that can stream MP3 format. (And probably FLAC, AIFF, or WAV, I've never tried it though.) The latest version uses mysql as a backend and I've seen people talk about very big collections like yours on the mailing list. FWIW, I have a squeezebox (rev. 1) and I love it.

At work I have done the other thing people mention, which is attempted to rigorously organize the directory structure my MP3s are stored in, and then used good old xmms to play directly from the filesystem. I see other people talking about amarok but every time I have attempted to use it it's very unstable for me. (My collection is about 80G and it never seems to make it through scanning it.) Is the secret to backend it into mysql instead of letting it do sqllite? Or maybe it's artsd that is problematic? Would anyone like to share their Amarok best practices?

Re:Slimserver supposedly scales that high

[neophyte13]

This is what I use and I open up port what ever on my router to allow me to stream my music to me at work or where ever. SlimServer has a great interface to listening but you should set a password if you open the port or else someone will be downloading you collection and the RIAA Mafia will be after you. Although SlimServer is good you ID3tags must be set to use the random playlist generating feature.

Specs:
AMD Duron 900MHz
3 x 250GB EIDE - {ALL MUZIC}
1 x 250GB SATA2 - {Systems Partition}
640 MB RAM
32MB Video
Apache hosts 5 sites {Alternate MySQL DB server}

Re:Slimserver supposedly scales that high

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously since I modded parent up. Slimserver is your best solution as you have more capability than anything else that I'm aware of. I have 3 Squeezeboxes at home and it is nice to b able to browse my collection by remote or through a web browser. You can also stream to nearly any client including Audacious, XMMS, & Winamp. "Your music library contains 294 albums with 5077 songs by 1859 artists." That is the extent of my collection at this point. I only have about 250 physical CDs that I never touch anymore. I buy it, rip it, put it away. Tend to also gather up free (Creative Commons) music whenever possible.

MusikCube

[fozzmeister]

Is a better iTunes in some ways, worse in others, but its built on an SQLLite backend which is semi-exposed and is _super_ quick on my 120GB collection

Re:MusikCube

[poopie]

I have to agree. I've used MusicMatch for years, and while I like the overall interface and *LOVE* the supertagging feature, I've found musikCube to be much faster, much lighter weight, and more flexible for playing my music collection on Windows

foobar2000

[Fweeky]

fb2k is known for being very effecient, even in the face of crazily huge libraries. I dare say you'll hate the default interface/config, but it's not difficult to bend it to your will (though it's not exactly iTunes; more like vim/mutt for music).

Windows only unfortunately, though it is supposed to work well in Wine. Significant chunks of it are BSD licensed.

MySQL and mpg321

[ajs318]

What's wrong with MySQL and MPG321? As in

$ for SONG in `echo "SELECT full_path FROM songs WHERE group LIKE 'kylie%' | mysql music"`; do mpg321 $SONG; done

Re:MySQL and mpg321

[Corwn of Amber]

What's wrong is that, in the case you don't know SQL and bash already, you need to learn both just to listen to music.

Obligatory IDeal quote

[Anonymous Coward]

"Imagine getting a blow job with this stuff. Your cock would feel like a sparkler!"

Same for video?

[LordSnooty]

Has anyone come across something similar for video? I've seen videodb but that seems more geared to DVD. I want something that will catalogue all my downloaded xvid so I can tell straight away if I had a particular title, instead of hunting through a stack of discs. Hashing or fingerprinting them files in some way would also be good, so I can start to share my collection with other people.

Imagine this: set up a torrent tracker, get your members to catalogue their video collection, combine that into one list of all available video, then if someone wants a particular file, the tracker will be able to ask all members with that file to start seeding.

Re:Same for video?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have too much porn. Seriously.

I have my own software

[hesaigo999ca]

I created my own software based on vb6.0 ,easily updatable to .net if neccessary...
it uses excel file to set up a pointer and info database...

this contains the artist and all their mp3s....how it works is, the program creates a hyperlink within my application on the intro page( which lists all the artist and # mp3 and sizes)
By clicking the hyperlink on the intro page for that artist you to go to their page(worksheet),

once there...you have a hyperlink created for each mp3 that when you click on opens the default mp3 player and plays the file. For my 120 gb library, my excel file is only 3 mb. and lists all that i have in an organized alphabetical order.

I do not keep the album name as some of the songs I have I could not tell you where
they came from, but I do have a multi classification schema for the gendre.
I use this because I p[lan to in the very near future set up my personal website for my friends and family to be able to view all my collection to make their selection. The website already is built and uses this same excel file as its back end.

Re:I have my own software

[Anonymous Coward]

Because nothing scales like VB6 storing its data in an Excel spreadsheet. Are you an MCSE by chance?

Re:I have my own software

[Anonymous Coward]

http://worsethanfailure.com/

'Nuff said.

Ever considered more than one library ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Split it up a bit. Why have one, huge, monolithic library ?

Brave Brave man

[loftwyr]

I wonder if the RIAA reads this site... 750GB of MP3s at 5meg per song... carry the one...

I can see the dollar signs in these thieves eyes now.

Merged home and work libraries?

[Shabbs]

merged my home and work computer's libraries And the RIAA wonders where all the illegal, high quality MP3s come from...

Sigh.

Re:Merged home and work libraries?

[Anonymous Coward]

They do not wonder. They assume.

Not wanting to change the subject but since the door is open... Why have we not seen a concerted effort being organized to take on the tactics that we see EVERYBODY bitching about? All it would take is a good legal company (who may have written a seriously good letter recently...) with the backing of ohhh say law students who read EFF or /. and a few $ from all of us who appear to have an opinion. Voila, problem solved with the focus of the populace against the monster that is the corporation gone wild.

Just a rumination...

Oh, and you were doing so well .....

[Anonymous Coward]

"group" is a reserved word in MySQL, even if you spell it in lower case. You need `backticks` around it (which you'd have to escape with backslashes, lest the first be mistaken for the closing execution backtick). Or "double" speech marks in Postgres (which you'd still have to escape with backslashes). Or you could rename the field as band or artist or something.

SubSonic

[xseedit]

I use SubSonic: a free, web-based media streamer, providing access to your entire music collection wherever you are. This way I don't need to fill up my laptop drive and I can access my collection from anywhere (provided I can SSH to my home firewall to port tunnel access to my SubSonic). It allows me to browse my collection, generate and stream my playlist, or download the songs I want. It also has features for album art and lirycs. There is also Ampache, but I have not used that.

Slow Mac?

[Yvan256]

You omitted the one crucial information about your system: how much RAM do you have? The best way to speed up Mac OS X is usually to increase the RAM.

Running Mac OS X with 512MB is painful, 1GB is the minimum for a responsive system, 2GB and more for power-users. With the size of your music library, I'm guessing you have less than 2GB.

I could be wrong of course, but that's the first thing I would check.

iTunes FYI

[dave420]

iTunes doesn't use the XML to store its library - the XML is there purely to be used by *other* applications. iTunes keeps its library in its own proprietary format, similar to the format of the iTunesDB file on iPods, which is completely binary in nature, and muuuch smaller than the XML spat out :)

I like iTunes because of the COM object, mainly. I wrote a script that uses MusicBrainz to tag my music in iTunes automatically, getting Amazon artwork for that missed by the iTunes Music Store (and embedding downloaded artwork for those with only the downloaded variety, which iTunes doesn't like putting in MP3s on its own).

If I could find an application that allowed media management just as good as iTunes, with the playback features, artwork shits, etc. then I'd jump ship in a second. Especially if it had a SQL back-end. dirty. :)

Re:iTunes FYI

[dborod]

Hmmm. On my machine, iTunes Music Library.xml is 133 MB and iTunes Library is 141 MB so your theory seems incomplete.

Re:iTunes FYI

[dave420]

It all depends on what you have in your library, I guess. The structures in the data file are different to that of the XML, so filesizes are not proportional. It's all about how quickly the file is passed, and the binary file will be passed much more quickly than the XML, regardless of size.

I'll add a vote for Amarok too

[dalesc]

I used to use Winamp on Windows and then XMMS when I switched to Linux. I always preferred a lightweight interface, something that would play files and keep out of the way.

I started Amarok by mistake one day and thought I'd take a look anyway. It is now my player of choice and has transformed the way I use my music.

It's not simply a player but an excellent music organiser. I'm a fan now.

XMMS2 + MusicBrainz Picard

[cparker15]

I've had pretty decent experiences with XMMS2 for playing music from my library and MusicBrainz Picard for organizing it.

One of my requirements is the ability to add an SMB share directly to the media player's library, as my entire music collection is stored on a media server (Maxtor MSS Plus) and accessible via an SMB share. Amarok is unable to add an SMB share directly to its Collection, and requiring root access to mount an SMB share is just stupid, IMHO. Rhythmbox is capable of using GNOME's solution to the problem, the "Network Places" shortcuts, which are GNOME-specific connnection configuration settings saved in GConf and represented as "shortcuts" on the desktop and within Nautilus (and applications that use Nautilus in them). However, as we're all aware, Rhythmbox totally blows chunks.

XMMS2 even runs efficiently on low-end hardware. I turned an old Dell OptiPlex GXM 5166 I dug out of storage (specs, picture) into a headless XMMS2 box. I control it using TurboX2, which is also installed on the old OptiPlex. Playback is perfect, even with a 166 MHz!! clock speed.

I have a little over a month's worth of MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and MOD tracks in my music library right now, and I'm adding more on an almost weekly basis (I <3 Used CDs).

Winamp 5x

[casualsax3]

I have around 20,000 files in my collection totaling 90GB and the Winamp Media Library handles it admirably. If you can break things down using the smart bookmarks you'll be even happier with the performance - here's how I have mine setup: (this picture isn't from the computer with my whole collection, but you get the idea)

http://mr2.phpwerx.net/Photos/Sully/stuff/full/w inamp.png

I can go to "Audio" which shows me all of my tracks, or I can go to "Classic Rock" or "Rock" which contain smaller amounts of music, and load a bit faster. Also plays nice with my iPod, including album art.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Get rid of the 700GB of MP3's that are obviously shite (Donny Osmond, Dido etc) and then use iTunes!

Do you like all that music?

[teridon]

Honest question here, because I am puzzled. Do you actually like all that music? I have about 40GB of music, but I only listen to about 12 GB of that with any regularity. All the other music I have just isn't that good, and I haven't gotten around to deleting it from my hard drive.

I very rarely find new music that I actually like -- so I'm puzzled when I hear that someone has a 750GB music collection!

Am I just too picky? :)

Re:Do you like all that music?

[Anonymous Coward]

How could anyone possibly be different from you?! People who work in radio must get bored and overwhelmed by all that music, eh? eh? A failure of imagination (and in understanding 'imagination') is the main reason behind humanities' continuing belief in archaic religions, too.

Re:Do you like all that music?

[freedomlinux]

It is not a matter of YOU liking that music...
...the point is having your customers like that music.
I can only assume that several of the people posting in this topic do DJ work, where having every audio file a customer could possibly want is a huge plus. My friend, an amateur DJ, and I worked an 80-person party this weekend, and it was still pretty decent working out of a 50GB library. It goes a long way to keeping the music interesting and the guests satisfied.
...I wish I had 750GB of music... (only 12GB now)

Re:Do you like all that music?

[DrIdiot]

What if you converted all your music to FLAC?

Windows Media Player

[GWBasic]

I find that Windows Media Player is pretty snappy with my 6546 song collection. Assuming you're running an Intel Mac, it'll run great under Paralels.

DigitalDJ

[runswithd6s]

Since I didn't see it amongst the posts yet,

Package: digitaldj
Priority: optional
Section: sound
Installed-Size: 268
Maintainer: Tim Dijkstra (tdykstra) <tim@famdijkstra.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 0.7.3-1
Depends: maplay3 | mpg123 | amp | vorbis-tools, libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), libgdk-pixbuf2 (>= 0.17.0-2), libghttp1 (>= 1.0.9-9), libglib1.2 (>= 1.2.0), libgtk1.2 (>= 1.2.10-4), liblircclient0, libmysqlclient10, xlibs (>> 4.1.0)
Recommends: grip
Suggests: mysql-server
Filename: pool/main/d/digitaldj/digitaldj_0.7.3-1_i386.deb
Size: 71060
MD5sum: f4660984f6081bef5a49a3dab953b49f
SHA1: 3ca0d750213e9203a1cf298178481ca2f28a6c67
SHA256: cb0e7a0a08dcb49e5899fc20dcbdb10c3777080095d644c211 19408368209bb7
Description: An SQL based mp3 player front-end
DigitalDJ is an SQL-based mp3/ogg-player front-end designed
for people who want to create an mp3 version of their CD collection. It
is designed to work with the Grip ripping/encoding application (but can
be used separately). When Grip encodes mp3 or ogg files, it will place all
of the song information into an SQL database. DigitalDJ can then use this
information to create playlists based on a number of criteria.
.
You will need a MySQL server, which can either be on the local or a
remote host.
.
Homepage: http://nostatic.org/ddj/index.shtml

SuperSync

[Anonymous Coward]

I would check out SuperSync http://supersync.com/ a new application for Mac and PC.. I have 500GB of music and it works fine. Its a network jukebox that supports upload and download and play.. so you can merge libraries from a usb disk, ipod, or tcp (WAN/LAN) network. The user interface needs work. Doesn't support playlists.. but other than that, it's good.

Which size matters?

[dborod]

A lot of people in this thread are just comparing the disk space consumed by their music libraries without regard for the number of tracks in the library. The issue isn't the size that the music library consumes on disk, its the amount of metadata that comes with the number of tracks in the library, and the efficiency with which a jukebox program can juggle the metadata.

Re: organize music

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs, anyone? :)

So you've used Mediamonkey??

[pbhj]

>>> "mediamonkey claims to handle 50K+ files without slowing down. It's amazing what you can find in seconds with google =) The search was mp3 media manager."

I'm not the questioner but this is a bugbear of mine.

I haven't used this software. However, when I ask a question about software I'm looking for answers from people who are knowledgeable about the subject. I can google, but just because manufacturers claim it works for 50k files doesn't mean it does ... if you use it and have 40k+ files on it, I'd want to know. I'd even suffer a "no-one has suggested this which I'm planning on buying due to the mad props it's getting at www.generic-media-managers-web-forum.com.

On google you found a potential solution. But I think it takes a little longer to find a real answer for a real life situation ... mediamonkey does look promising however:

[quote: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/in dex.php/t42649.html%5D
djiezes
Mar 27 2006, 06:27
Well, on my lousy system (amd duron, 256mb ram, ...), MediaMonkey is pretty slow and crashes when doing some operation on too many files. And compared to foobar it is slow.
It is however easier and more straightforward to use than foobar, which would be an advantage for less tech-savvy people.
Big_Berny
Mar 27 2006, 06:40
Interesting because I only have an Thunderbird 1.2GHz and 256 MB Ram too! biggrin.gif And here it doesn't crash, at least the newest version. But you're right Foobar is faster. (Although MediaMonkey is also way faster than winamp...)

Big_Berny
[end quote]

Further searching suggests that some people have stability problems and that Mediamonkey have good astroturfers (and some happy and not-so happy users) and bad mp3 codec usage. Generally handles large libraries (reports are generally for about 2-4k files) well.

Depends on how you want to interface

[mgburr]

If your looking at being able to stream across the network or the internet. Something that works for my 40G library is Jinzora. (http://www.jinzora.org/) I've got it setup as a php web page and can stream from my web server. I'm able to stream a dedicated playlist to my treo so I can listen to music anywhere. Jinzora has different account settings that allow for creating multiple user logins. It can stream my MP3 or M4A files equally well.