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.

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.

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.

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.