Blogs Big Media Collection, Big Headache

You probably have a crap PC then as iTunes runs fine on my current PC and has run fine on all other PCs I have owned.

 

It can be a bit slow to start (inefficient processor usage?) but it uses less RAM than Chrome does with 7 tabs open (checked 2 seconds ago).

Not to mention, iTunes is quite intuitive to use.

 

But you shouldn't have to have a good PC to run a basic media program.

 

QFT. I do find that iTunes is quite slow to start, and I don't have much more than 3000 track in my library atm. That being said, I don't think Winamp or Songbird or Zune are much better in that department. You should not need a modern pc to run a media player app.

 

musicbrainz doesnt work. maybe if your collection only consisted of top 10 albums, it mind stand a chance of tagging some of them correctly. Its useless for anyone with a more discerning taste.

foobar does almost everything i need it to. its incredibly powerful batch file naming is probably one of its best features. mp3tag is a part of my arsenal, for when foobar cant get decent tags. album art downloader xui is the best for getting decent album art.

itunes doesnt play flac (or vorbis), is infected with ads for its store, also requires quicktime to install, cannot auto-convert on the fly to the ipod, its playlist view is filled with redundant information, cant assign keyboard shortcuts, cant switch output to non-default device, still botches the album artist tag (which wasnt even included until itunes 7), it takes up an incredible amount of resources for what the program offers, you cant customize folder structure, its a nazi when it comes to getting tracks back off your ipod....

a couple of years ago i had a list that went on and on and on, but ill stop there, i cant remember everything off the top of my head.

 

+1 to Ross and Foobar2000

 

+- 120GB of Music here
I know the frustrations. All of them.
I hated using Media Monkey, didn't particularly like MP3Tag either.
iTunes has the nasty habbit of not replacing duplicates, which makes it INCREDIBLY hard to figure out what's what when an entire discography is mislabelled due to my own attempts at labelling software, and pointing it at wrong folders. :/

 

You might want to give it another look, as it has worked very well for me - even finding tags for some weird foreign stuff I listen to. It's not perfect by any means, but it certainly helps. And, of course, you can submit information about your albums to the MusicBrainz database, thus making it better for all.

 

My music collection consists of about 500 albums. How do I keep it organised? Simple: I rip them from the CDs using complete metadata correlated from 3 separate cddb services automatically using dbpoweramp. I obtain the album artwork manually using google images. The albums are ripped into artist/album/xx - trackname.ext simultaneously into two separate top level directories for two separate formats - MP3, and FLAC. Acquired music (legally, illegally or otherwise) goes into a separate folder using a similar naming scheme, using mp3tagit to rename and retag files as necessary. It sounds complicated but the setup took about 10 minutes and from then on ripping a disc is pretty much a case of inserting the disc, running the app and pressing go. I then use an iTunes library linked to 'MP3' and 'Acquired' for my iPhone, and a SqueezeBox Server pointed at 'FLAC' and 'Acquired' for streaming around the home. TBH almost all my music comes off CD these days, as second hand discs are so cheap it's almost always better to buy, rip and store. I don't illegally download music any more, and any music in my 'acquired' folder that wasn't legally obtained is on a list of music to buy that I am slowly working my way through.

done.

iTunes is actually functionally very good; it's just a shame it's a bit of a resource hog and insists on doing things 'the Apple way' a lot of the time. It's also a crying shame that it doesn't support ripping to (or even reading) FLAC - I would almost definitely switch to it for ripping then - the artwork it grabs is almost always higher quality than what you can usually find on google (extremely lucky to get 600x600 artwork, which is often just upscaled from poor quality scans anyway). Yes, I know about Apple Lossless. No, I couldn't use it even if I wanted to.

 

I started trying to sort mine out a few years ago and haven't really done too much recently. My tagging approach was to use MP3Tag to read the tags, export them to a CSV and update that in Access and Excel before reapplying them to the files. That is probably 99% doen but I now need to fix a few and then write a quick routine to move the files around that are in the wrong folders.

To complicate thing in my case the bulk of the collection I reipped to ,ogg, though I have some wma, mp3 and aac and lately I have been initially ripping to flac. I then want to have the colection replicated as needed for different devices. At hope I use a Squeezebox, which can play any format, but my personal player is a Cowon which while it can do all formats, I would rather covert to ogg as its only 30gb. Then in the car I can use an iPod or a USB disk so I need to convert everything to MP3 except the WMA!

there's plenty of server space (WHS) so I will create a master store split by codec and then write a bit of code to create separate collection best for the player, the squeezebox and the car. (I'm a developer so a bit of code to shuffle the files is fine, but I'd need to be a network admin to creat an AD structure of virtual directories so I didn't need to duplicate!)

EDIT, actually to save a little space I'll create a master collection of "best" versions (flac>ogg>mp3) which will do for the squeezebox and store the alternates elsewhere.

 

To the folk that believe that itunes is the best media player:
i've used it for years, never had a problem.
until i got my squeezebox that is. then you realise how a media player should be made! supports so many more tags, id3v4(incidentally to the chap warning about foobar it seems to use v4 which then causes some apps to have problems with the files although not squeezecentre) replay gain per track and album, musicIP plugin, proper albumartist support(incredibly annoying on the ipod), links into lastfm, internet radio etc. i find for playing music on my pc i mostly use softsqueeze so i can hook straight into the squeezecenter although i have also got itunes connected to my media share on my server. the only fly in the ointment is that i have an ipod so most of the hardwork done for organising things doesn't translate over to that
iPeng on the ipod touch is a great way to control the squeezebox though!

 

Another iTunes hater here, no FLAC or ogg support is one reason, but personally I just really dislike the look and feel of it. (and I've been using winamp since v1.7 or so).

Most of the tagging on my files has been done by hand originally, but I use Audiograbber to rip CDs (it's old, but it still kicks arse), and MP3BookHelper to do all my tagging (odd name, but works well, and seems to be more configurable than most of the other programs I've seen).

Anyway, my collection is currently organised into <album>\<>trackno-<artist>-<track>.ext and I've got something like 40-50 Gb (not checked for ages). Most of that is ripped from CDs, some is "acquired", mainly from friends rather than p2p.
Generally I have the files on my desktop, but I also have a backup on my FreeNAS server, which is shared with everyone (when it's not forgetting it's IP address, but that's another rant).

I am planning on re-organising it all into <artist>\<album>\file.ext, but I'm holding out for a tool that can do it automagically. If anyone knows of a program that can take a whole bunch of properly tagged mp3's, flacs and oggs and spit them out into a new directory structure then I'd love to know about it.

 

Hi Harry, this is an interesting post and describes the pain a lot of people are feeling when managing their digital music collections. (BTW I write a blog http://musiclibrarymanagement.blogspot.com/ dedicated soley to these problems).

I write a piece of software called 'bliss' which is aimed precisely at organising large digital music collections.

When people talk about managing large collections of music they always/often talk about how complete the tagging is. E.g. the fact that they don't have tagged music, they don't have album art, they're missing compilation tags, and so on. That's important, but I also think consistency within the collection is important. For example: (and you gave this example Harry) having all your art stored in a consistent way, having all the genres in your library being constrained to your desired level of granularity (for instance: there's no point having one album classified as 'rock' and another as 'post acid thrash metal revival' - how does that help?).

So this is what bliss is - a way of not only completing your tags but also getting consistency between them inside your collection. It does it by inverting how you work with your music - instead of editing music files you define your rules declaratively (how you want your music organised) and bliss does it for you, asking you for confirmation where it isn't sure. If you want it to it can run non-stop (for instance on a home server) and applies the rules when you add new music. And here's where I disagree a little with one thing you said:

"The problem is though that due to complexities of what data you want to keep, or don’t want to keep, having a application go through your collection can be dangerous. A mis-tag here, a missing track there and suddenly I’ve got five hundred mis-labeled tracks to sort."

This would indeed be a problem, but I think a lot of it comes down to being sensible. There are a lot of tools out there that are way too optimistic, I agree. But with 1000s of albums in a collection I think you have to have some level of automation. The key is that the software must 'be sensible' about what data to update automatically, and also provide easy ways to back out changes that have been made (one thing I think would be useful is history of your music collection).

The website is http://www.blisshq.com

 

I love mp3Tag, everything I rip gets a run through to embed the album art - especially useful for my iPod Touch. I spent a good week on and off sorting out my entire collection with it when I first downloaded. The scripting is easy and very useful; overall it's a cracking piece of software.

 

@Hardflipman: Squeezebox looks awesome, but it's waaaay out of my price-range. It would have to be under £100 for me to be able to justify it.

@da_gravell: Looks like a nice product you have there. However, with so many top-notch open-source software available I very rarely part with my hard-earned. Other than Windows and games, I run only free/open-source software. On the bright side, I hardly think I'm representative of the average computer user

 

That weird foreign stuff is probably quite popular in its country of origin.

 

Lesson you learn at about 400gb of music: Tag properly as you acquire, or don't tag at all.

Trying to retag later is a nightmare, no matter the tool.

 

Songbird has a handy organiser that sorts your collection how you want. For example I have mine in artist folders, then album folders with the album songs in them. It completely moves all the music into whichever new structure you choose. Its also very easy to change tags for individual songs, or for changing a whole album or artists songs. It also finds album art for you.

I still have a few mis-tagged and untagged songs but I correct them as and when I listen to them.

 

So an i7 920 is regarded as crap these days is it? Bummer.

iTunes is a dog when compared to the alternatives - and there are very good alternatives created because a lot of people come to the same conclusion as me, and that is that iTunes is not that great a music manager.. in the same way that quicktime is not that great a media player.

Yeah, iTunes runs "fine" on my decent specced PC and my decent specced Mac, but the alternatives run much much better!

 

Yes I think this is what I used, or it used to be named just musicbrainz I think. It Revolutionized my mp3-collection, but as Harry said, I did get lots of mistagged mp3's. The first time I used this program I didn't even know this was a problem, so I didn't fix manually. Lots of files with wrong names :/

Biggest changes I did was putting each band and album in separate folders. Making browsing much faster, not needing to load all files at once from the harddrive. Have around 50GB now, but mostly uses spotify for musicneeds.

What the future brings, I don't know. Guess I will stick with my mp3-collection for a long time, having backups on atleast 3 computers and two external harddrives. If I get rich someday I will try to purchase all my playlists on Spotify, But I don't believe in bying premium anyway. It's like paying for your car to drive around even when you're not in it. Same with having spotify Premium and not listening all the time, waste of money