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Managing a Huge Music Collection? 273

Posted by Cliff from the tracking-your-tunes dept.
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?"
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Managing a Huge Music Collection? More

Managing a Huge Music Collection?

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  • Great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by aywwts4 ( 610966 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:08PM (#15274835)
    Now we can be treated to a few hundred geeks arguing over who's music collectionis bigger.

    • Mine's the biggest!

      Now, what were we talking about?

    • not sure how winamp is harder than itunes to find music...I tend to find the winamp libraty (accessable through alt-L) to be far more powerful than itunes. Just click "Audio" and its easy.

      Works great with large collections.

  • Maybe archaic but... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Doytch ( 950946 )
    I use folders to organise my music... It sound simple and archaic, but it really works.

    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 .m3u playlists for Winamp in Windows, none of w
    • i used to do the same thing until i started having parties and people looking for music had a very difficult time finding it. also during late night coding sessions, i don't want to have to search through folders to add songs when i can just type in a few letters and click "enqueue". if this doesn't bother you, by all means go for it. but i don't think thats what the original poster had in mind and i stand by winamp's media library or amaroK
      • I organize my music several ways by having separate directory trees with hard links. I can have several directory trees arranged by artist, album, date, genre, all pointing out to one copy of the file.
    • I have to use Itunes because I haven't found anything better to copy stuff to my ipod, but it really is the 5th horse of the apocalypse.

      Whenever it's doing
      anything       ... loading up, copying, or playing, my system flat out stops all other processing. Like the Pakleds in Star Trek, my computer simply "will not go."

      That is made of Fail and More Fail.

      • Re:Maybe archaic but... (Score:4, Informative)

        by L7_ ( 645377 ) on Saturday May 06, 2006 @02:21AM (#15275674)
        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.
    • my collection has some 20000 songs, still i use directories.

      root music directory, then subdirs like rock, soundtracks, synth, relaxing, fun, strange shit and unsorted.
      then each of these subdirs has subdirs itself - artist names. each artist has subdirs - album names.

      very easy actually. i browse the subdirs with total/midnight/norton commander anyway.

  • one word (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xhorder ( 232326 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:12PM (#15274859)
    amaroK
    • amaroK and MySQL
    • rm -rf *

      Well, you won't have any more problems with the music collection, and you can also be 100% sure that you don't have anything unlicensed!
    • amaroK is not bad, and it's the nicest thing I've seen on linux by far, but it still has some problems. The biggest one is that it is just not reliable for me. Sometimes it just up and quits with no explanation. Sometimes it gets wedged in some way such that it just stops playing, and won't start up again until you restart it.

      I rarely can get through a whole day without having one of these happening, so I usually just go back to mpg123.

      There's also some annoyances with the UI; for example, you can't brow

  • my method (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thesupermikey ( 220055 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:13PM (#15274862) Homepage Journal
    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! (Score:5, Informative)

    by axiem ( 119959 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:13PM (#15274863)
    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... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by scum-e-bag ( 211846 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:14PM (#15274866) Homepage Journal
    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...

  • Winamp (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dknj ( 441802 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:17PM (#15274872) Journal
    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 [kde.org] 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
    • So amaroK is *nix only... so use *nix. KDE rules my desktop.

      amaroK will be ported to Windows once the KDE libraries have been ported to Win32.

      amaroK isn't perfect, however. It does crash/hang a lot. Barring that, it is the best music player out there. I have roughly 10,000 songs in my collection, and that does make amaroK a bit of a memory hog. Using MySQL for a database is roughly equivalent for memory usage, and I didn't notice a difference in speed for it, either.
      • That's quite a collection. I imagine with all the money you spent on it, you'd still have all the discs they came on, or if you bought them through iTunes, you'd already would have done that.

      • i use kde myself, i respect all of the hardwork put in by the kde devs, but lets seriously face it.. it's bloated, there is no such thing as QA testing (well thats an argument for 99% of open source software), and its not as intuitive as windows or mac os x. during the short period of time i tried to switch my laptop to unix only (i try about 4 times a year to check for improvements), i experienced kde's dcop manager crashing (making kde practically useless), lack of similar applications that i used in win

  • I've come to use... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ImaLamer ( 260199 ) <john.lamar@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:19PM (#15274879) Homepage Journal
    MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/ [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!
    • From the looks, MediaMonkey looks more like "basically iTunes with a litle bit more functions" than "basically WinAmp with more database functions".

      I'm not just talking about brushed metal theme. If you look at their features page (I've not downloaded it and the proper version - Gold - costs money, and iTunes comes free with my iPod, I mean free for everyone), you'll see these items:

      - Party Mode & Auto-DJ
      - Auto Renamer / File Organizer
      - Find Duplicate Tracks and Missing Tags
      - Advanced Searches and AutoP

  • Smart playlists (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 4D6963 ( 933028 )
    Well, you're far from the only one to have thousands of files, so if you care to know (since you're asking you probably do), here's how I do to manage my music collection.

    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

  • iTunes... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gavinroy ( 94729 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:22PM (#15274893) Homepage
    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 [ehpg.net] (Source at http://ehpg.net/~gmr/library.phps [ehpg.net]) This will take a bit to load and is a very large page.
    • memory is cheap, cpu cycles are not. with my library, searching for a song in iTunes takes up to 15 seconds before it updates the list. contrast to winamp that does it in 5. i used to use media player which took ~20 seconds, but people who came over to listen to music always complained (what self-respecting geek wants *anyone* complaining about their computing setup) so i switched it up. plus winamp provides rating support, a decent playlist manager, and AVS. iTunes does not compare (unless you buy mus
      • I've not noticed any lag issues on my setup.. I dont know if it's due to windows vrs osx versions or not.
      • I have about 5500 songs in iTunes and when I do a search, it instantly gives me results, not even a 5 second wait. Although I do have a pretty speedy machine, I still didnt have any problems when I was using an athlon 1800+. Thats actually the reason why I stopped using winamp. I could have my entire library at the tip of my fingers and searching was instant.
      • iTunes takes up to 15 seconds before it updates the list. contrast to winamp that does it in 5.

        Contrast to foobar2000, which seems to have no seek time at all on a playlist of 4000 items. It also has easy tag editing, and judging from other posts here, it scales up as well.

    • Re:iTunes... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Quaoar ( 614366 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:33PM (#15274943)
      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.

    • Re:iTunes... (Score:3, Informative)

      by abdulla ( 523920 )
      iTunes is currently using 35 meg here, and I have a pretty large collection. Winamp must use something insanely small for people to be complaining so much about iTunes memory usage. CPU usage seems to be fairly low too, at 4.5%, I'm not complaining. Also nice frontends to iTunes make searching and playback even easier. Have a crack at CoverFlow [steelskies.com].
    • Thanks for reminding me that I've been meaning to get some Acid Horse. In fact, I'm going to get the entire WaxTrax BlackBox collection thanks to your page. The KLF, 1000 Homo DJ's, ClockDVA, KMFDM, Ministry.... oh and of course Divine.

  • Slim Devices Squeezebox and Slimserver (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:24PM (#15274904)
    I have about 17,000 MP3's (all legitimately purchased, ripped from my CD collection or bought online) and manage them with Slimserver [slimdevices.com] 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.
    • Same here. One Linux media server running MythTV (3 tuners) and SlimServer, 4 Squeezeboxes v3 & 4 TV sets.

      Nothing else needed. I don't have a CD or DVD player left in the house (apart from the ones in my PC's).

      Outside of the house we use an iRiver H40 and an H10.

      X.
    • I also have a SqueezeBox and slimserver.

      While I love the SqueezeBox, I find the slimserver's (web-based) UI to be slow, clumsy, and frustrating. It takes forever to make a decent sized playlist. Maybe I just haven't learned how to use it properly.

      slimserver has also, until recently, been plagued by all sorts of weird bugs. They just released 6.2.2 which seems to have most of the problems fixed that I was running into; just in time too, I was getting ready to chuck the whole thing and go back to Winam

  • The dinosaur consensus (Score:5, Funny)

    by unitron ( 5733 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:28PM (#15274915) Homepage Journal
    "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.

  • We are talking vinyl too, right?
  • I personally can't stand media management software such as Winamp Library (or whatever it's called), Amarok, or iTunes most especially. Just garbage IMO.

    What I do is basically I am completely nazi-ish about how my music is named, and tagged. Every single piece of music that goes into my collection is first passed through musicbrainz, and then sorted into the correct folder. The root directory is called Audio. From there, it goes into category, such as Classic Rock, Metal, etc. After that, it's sorte
  • ..but if anyone's interested in what I do on my linux running laptop, I'll explain it. I use KDE which comes with JuK and I put on Kid3. I keep the folders organized by genre then artist then album. Kid3 keeps all the tags neat and clean. I then pull all the folders in JuK and it's great. Simple and fast searching. I find amaroK to be too much and I prefer the interface of JuK. Of course, the key is keeping the tags straight with Kid3.

  • One word. (Score:2, Redundant)

    by kinema ( 630983 )
    amaroK [kde.org]

  • musikCube (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Saxophonist ( 937341 )

    I've come to like musikCube [sourceforge.net] 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 FLA

  • Foobar2000 with all of my mp3s in one playlist.

    E:\mp3s\artist - album - year\tracknum. title.mp3 preferably, but anything that would fly on a scene site is good enough.

    Make sure its all tagged properly and get a good format string and you're good to go.

  • How I do it... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tuxedo Jack ( 648130 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @10:59PM (#15275059) Homepage
    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 [tuxedojack.com]

    Simple and clean, and it's worked for me since 1997.

  • Thanks for the ideas, guys (Score:5, Informative)

    by TTK Ciar ( 698795 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @11:09PM (#15275100) Homepage Journal

    At The Internet Archive we have about 120,000 audio [archive.org] and live music [archive.org] 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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Matt Perry ( 793115 ) <perry.matt54@ya[ ].com ['hoo' in gap]> on Friday May 05, 2006 @11:27PM (#15275160)
    I use foobar2000 [foobar2000.org]. 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.

    • Don't forget to mention foobar2000's Columns UI (Score:5, Informative)

      by MojoStan ( 776183 ) on Saturday May 06, 2006 @04:20AM (#15275931)
      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 [foobar2000.org] (including me) will like the less-sparse but still simple Columns UI [morbo.org] (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:

  • yPlay [spacejock.com]

    yPlay is a freeware MP3, Ogg*, WMA, WAV, FLAC* and Midi player with multiple playlists and a light, clean interface. But why did I write it when there are other free mp3 and ogg music playing software programs out there already?

    First, I find too many music players have tiny, ambiguous controls and overly complicated menu structures. I want computer programs to look like computer programs so I can quickly work out how to use them. If I want something that looks like a piece of hardware, I'll buy
  • Things get stupid as soon as you bring genre into it. I shudder when I see people including genre in their classifying methods. Both Musicbrainz and CD/FreeDB are way off for a lot of albums.

    I wrote this over on last.fm, and it has more to do with with CDs than digital stuff, but it's just some thoughts on how to sort my own collection. Might as well paste it in here. :) Plus, it's pretty metal-specific, so nobody'll know what the hell I'm talking about anyway. (BTW, I use amaroK, with Music/[artist]

  • Only solution: Amarok (Score:5, Informative)

    by B5_geek ( 638928 ) on Saturday May 06, 2006 @12:06AM (#15275313)
    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/ [kde.org]
    You won't ever need anything else.
  • Well, I doubt you'll run off and do what I did, but I'll share my solution to this problem: I use a subscription service, Rhapsody to be precise.

    I pay $10/mo. and I have access to my music anywhere I have a net connection. There are many pros/cons to doing this, but here's why *I* do it:

    1. I use 3 different computers a day. My desktop, my laptop, and my work computer. In the olden days, I used to have a multi-gig collection of music, but this became difficult to sync up. If I got something new on the d
  • Well, I have around 130gb of music. (Most of it legal, if that matters. When my wife and I got married, we had over a thousand CDs between us, and that was years ago.)

    I use iTunes, on an old MDD G4 with 768mb ram. Runs just fine, and feeds our various iPods just fine. I try to manage organizational matters as I add new stuff, because otherwise it's just too big a chore.

    Yes, I know it's a lot of music. Hey, some people smoke, I buy music.

    M-

  • LWN Review and the Free Media Revolution. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by twitter ( 104583 ) on Saturday May 06, 2006 @12:41AM (#15275437) Homepage Journal
    LWN reviewed players back in November of 2005. [lwn.net] 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 [archive.org], 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.

  • There is only one way (Score:3, Funny)

    by lelitsch ( 31136 ) on Saturday May 06, 2006 @01:00AM (#15275482)
    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."

  • http://www.rhythmbox.org/ [rhythmbox.org]

    Seems decent enough to catalogue everything from ID2/ID3 in MP3.

    Searchable.
  • WinAmp uses less but makes finding the song I want is even harder.
    Winamp's player has a jump to file dialog I can type in and find the subset of files containing the text I've entered (either in the filename or in the ID3 tags). Its media library has the same thing. What exactly do you mean by 'even harder'? Harder than what, having WinAmp read your mind?
  • My collection is large >60GB. I pretty much have a whole process to organize mine. I put any new mp3s into a folder and then import them into Windows Media Player Library. I use WMP's "Find Album Info" to go through and organize the tags and mp3s. It puts them into folders by artists and then by albums and names them properly. After the tag changes take effect, I copy the folders into my main music drive.

    To Actually play the music, I use Winamp. I have Winamp Media Library scan my music drive eve

  • ...I'd suggest JuK and amaroK, they work just fine. Better yet in tandem ;) I don't know why, but for me JuK is much better for tagging and physical organizastion of collection, while amaroK is better for selecting music and it's playback from well organized collection.

    Robert
  • For Windows, I would highly recommend J.River Media Center [jrmediacenter.com]. It is probably the most advanced and full-featured program of that kind, yet faster and less memory-hungry than iTunes.

    For Linux/BSD, there are quite a few choices. AmaroK or JuK are the obvious one for KDE, and usually included in most distros. If you prefer Gtk applications, the best one out there is probably Quod Libet [sacredchao.net] (I would not recommend Rhythmbox as it used to be rather slow and unstable). In the console, there's cmus [dynserv.net] for an iTunes-like n

  • I use Tag&Rename to organize my collection. It has excellent features for tagging, and you can use the rename feature to implement a directory structure like artist/album/NN - Track.mp3. It also support MusePack.

    WinAMP has a good music library that makes finding what you want quite easy. The only problem is that it does not support Unicode, so no Japanese track names.

    iTunes has good features for managing your files - it can automatically do the directory structure but lacks support for anything other th
  • I use iTunes on Windows. It's usable although I wish it was a bit faster.

    When I add large collections of new music (like from www.legaltorrents.com) I prepend the artist's name with a three-digit identifier. In the case of Legaltorrents, there are archives from record labels like 'Monotonik' and 'Kikapu'. The 'Monotonik' bands get 'mtk:' before their names, the 'Kikapu' artists get 'kpu:' and so on. That way they are nicely grouped UI-wise. And when they appear in the Party Shuffle I know directly where the
  • Here are my measures: 11k MP3 files, 87 G, almost all legit from CD, etree, archive, etc. When it is not legit it is probably something I forgot to download after I listened to it and decided I didn't liked it so I wouldn't buy it.

    There are different things to make it happen.

    First - you need to properly fill all MP3 tags. The less an MP3 is tagged, the less it is searchable...

    Secondly - I don't want to have to play music via my PC and soundcard when I'm at home. More - at home, my PC is not the center of at
  • I've used Madman [sourceforge.net] for over a year now on my home Linux PC. Its AutoDJ feature alone blows anything else I've tried out of the water; typically when I'm at home I don't much care what I'm listening to as long as something's playing in the background. So I click AutoDJ and forget about it, though I may skip past the odd song I'm not in the mood for, or that I don't like at all - and since play count is one of AutoDJ's rules it'll take that into account as it continues. Add a built-in webserver and I can str
  • I manage a collection of... ahem... some size.

    Everything's in \Music. \Music has no files, only directories. Most of these are band names (e.g. \Music\Built to Spill) or compilation titles (e.g. \Music\Wedding Crashers). I have some genre titles and decades for assorted songs/singles (e.g. \Music\80s, \Music\Techno, \Music\Jazz) but I haven't fully come to a decision on what to do about those, yet, in this broader framework.

    In the individual directories under \Music I have all albums named in the format Art
  • Anything based on the Musik platform works beautifully, with (I think) and SQLite database and searches just as fast as iTunes. They're a bit more fickle, but if you want to save memory they're what you want. The two biggest are musikCube [musikcube.com] and wxMusik [berlios.de].

    However, after using both for a period, I switched back to iTunes because it just works all-around better, and with the Multi-Plugin [osx-e.com] you can set it up with a foobar passthrough and through some mysterious setting drastically reduce the memory usage when it'

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