Windows Lots of iTunes question from a dissolusioned Winamp user

Firstly I have a music collection of some 21,000 MP3's, 800 FLAC's, and 50 24 bit WAV's (DVD audio rips at 5000kps each) And I'm not talking limewire crap, MP3's must be V0 or V2, FLAC's must come with .log and .cue, and the file tags must be PERFECT (seriously my tagging takes obsession, to a new level I even inisit on catalouge numbers )

Anyway I'm halfway through my summer sort out, find low bit rate stuff, files using very dated encoders, and delete old crap....and I'm pondering a change in scenery for my player. I've used Winamp, I always have but since AOL got hold of it, it's gone...downhill.

This is shaping up to be another generic "what media player thread" but don't link me off somewhere else just yet, I'm after more specifics.

WMP - I WILL not use it...in my fledgling music gathering days have a library of about 3,000 tracks (some 6 or 7 years back) it took it upon itself to replace my perfectly capitalised orgasmically wonderful tags and replace them with ones it downloaded which had been apparently written by an 11 year old -.-

foobar - I got my hands on the OiNK.cd (god rest it's soul) pre setup version and liked it, but since deleting it and download the one on the site I'm not sure where to start with it.

and....Itunes. Used it after WMP trashed my library and liked it enough and seriously considering using it again, because I'm struggling to know what music to *acquire* and my *acquiring* queue every night is looking a bit small, and Itunes gives me suggestions of albums I might like. I am seriously thinking of using not to wonderful software just for its "what shall I listen to now list"...

- How much resources would iTunes use for a library of my size
- Are there any good FLAC plugins
- Is its album suggestion mechanism *really* as good as what they say (is there a website that does similar)?
- Does it still force upon you Bonjour, Quick Time and Apple Updater
- Does Itunes support 24bit playback
- If I endure the foobar learning curve will it be worth it?
- Or should I just sit tight where I am with Winamp?

 

Personally I can recommend quite heavily against iTunes. I'm a mod on a large music website and christ almighty does it cause problems. Foobar can be worth it if you're willing to put in the effort, personally I wasn't but you can grab pre-setup versions like the OiNK one, try a Google and see what turns up.

I use J-River Media Center, which will definitely cope fine with a library your size. It's quite customisable in behaviour, with an iTunes-like interface.

Media Monkey and Songbird are probably worth looking into as well, I guess.

Oh, and why not encode those 24-bit wavs to FLAC, by the way?

 

Wow, a complete left field suggestion, never heard of that...*runs for google*

My WAV's are 5.1 (DVDA) and I believe FLAC is stereo...there sort of like my trophy songs lmao. 48 KHz, 5.1, 24 bit, Lossless, the works, I'm far too scared to touch em :S

 

As someone who's used all of the media players you've listed, foobar is still the best out of all of them IMO.

Take the time to set it up, it doesn't really take that long, and it's time well invested if you're going to be using it for hours on end.

All media players sound the same so it's all about the user experience, customisation and features, and that's what foobar has in spades.

I started off using WMP and suffered a similar fate to you with it taking liberties on my tags, album art and organisation. So I ported everything to iTunes including [gasp] converting some WMA files to MP3 [/gasp] and while I liked the fact I now had some OCD-like control over my metadata, everything else about the user experience was crap (I still hate using it just for podcasts). So I made the change to Winamp, simply because it seemed to be what everyone else was using. It was good enough I suppose - there was some features I really liked but I never got on with the UI and always found it a bit fiddly.

I then came across foobar when I wanted to do some ABX testing, but have been using it as my media player ever since because I became that endeared with it. In terms of sheer usability it's streets ahead of the others.

 

Since I last used foobar they now have a quick UI set-up option at least Fiddling with it now, why did I have to start at 1 am, damn you, damn you all!

Okay seens as iTunes seems to be dead in the water can aonyone recommend music recommending sites? That was my main drive for it, it could tell me what to get next.

 

Not really sure TBH. AFAIK there's nothing that will give you the convenience of recommendations based on the music you have on your hard drive.

Pandora was about the only decent one I knew of, but that's no longer available outside the US. The only other one that I've found to give half decent recommendations is Last.fm, but I don't really use that much either. I generally find most of the music I listen to by accident now that I think about it.

 

Here is one I really like.. it's not used a lot, as it's only known by preatty much Zune users.
It's lighter then iTunes, it responses way faster, you don't need 6 super computer to run it, it doesn't screw up tags or file organization, it has this media center navigation style, but optimized for the mouse. It's 100% free.

The software, which will for sure not be suggested a lot, here, as the Zune is not sold anywhere outside North America for the moment (That will change with teh seirous competitor of teh iPod touch, Zune HD), called Zune software version 3.0.
http://www.zune.net/en-US/software/default.htm

However, I don't know if it can play FLAC (I don't think so).

You better have a Core i7 to run iTunes... it's soooo choppy and slooooww...

Last I check iTunes can't play FLAC nor supports plug-ins.

To make it work you need a iTunes account (meaning Apple wants your credit card), when i tried it, I find it alright... feels like any other software, really. The up side is that you don't have user suggestions so you get the real albums in front of you.

You bet! And if you enable Apple updater (on by default), it will install Saffari web browser and based on my experience set a sdefault web browser too, all without you knowing anything.

About every big music player today supports 24-bit. It either selectes Windows configuration or have an option.

That is your decision.
The only reason why I keep Winamp is because of internet radio. It eats up too much battery for a laptop usage, I don't like anymore the music organization system, doesn't support Vista nor Win7 and I dont think they ever will, and well, like you said it's downhill since AOL took over

 

Is that not what iTunes Genius Sidebar is all about? I'm not totally sure though, i'll go and look into it.

/edit

I use iTunes and the worst thing about it for me is that if you have an album of music, named Track01 and so on that was not ripped with iTunes it won't find the track names (though i've not looked into a solution for this which there may well be).

Can't stand Media Player because the one time I used it it sorted all my music for me and cocked up all the names and i've never really tried Winamp properly.

 

Yeah it is, and it does work pretty well, but we've already ruled out the use of iTunes due to its general suckiness (well, at least on Windows anyway).

 

actually

I have to say iTunes is probably the BEST choice for big music libraries. NOT!! I have a 200gb library that I had in iTunes (for my iPhone) in windows. I have a Mac that I got for software development and decide to move the library to the Mac. Where would iTunes work better if not on a Mac, right?

It took 8 hours to import (catalog) the tunes. This took 45 minutes in Vista!! I'm talking about cataloging, not importing.

iTunes is truly on of the most sluggish pieces of software I've dealt with and it even runs worse on a slackintosh!!

 

Wow, a Mac user who actually realizes Apple makes flawed software. Props to you for identifying a sh*t piece of code when you see one - this is actually the first negative recommendation I've ever seen for iTunes on OS X.

I'll throw another voice into the foobar crowd - it does everything I need it to do with a nice (customizable) UI while being fast at the same time. Plugins can fill any feature gaps you may have, such as audioscrobbling and iPod support which I think is better than Apple's own. My library is about 60GB of assorted mp3s, FLAC, and vinyl rips in 24-bit/96KHz and I have no trouble finding anything I need whenever I need it.

 

FLAC can do multi-channel

Actually... Foobar supports WASAPI and ASIO, and J River supports WASAPI, so technically they give a more accurate sound than other media players (Ok, WMP probably uses WASAPI too).

J River has a plugin that uses Last.FM to do this. It's not that great tbh, but I'd be very surprised if similar things didn't exist for other music players - Foobar has a much better plugin community than J River.

 

foobar2000 Last.fm plugin

 

aimp2 - seems good.

 

Wow, I woke up this morning to a ton of help! Thanks a lot people

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Zune made by MS? And after my foray with WMP I'd be more than dubious about using it...

My oh my what a group of happy content iTunes users I've found lol, you've convinced me that no matter how good it's recommendation system may be I shouldn't use it.

 

I keep using Winamp because I'm familiar with the skin I use. Been using Winamp since the 0.8x days (it was bundled on a PC Gamer cover CD) found a skin I liked a couple of days later (Sephiroth, 'nough said...) and stuck with it since. I agree that Winamp has slipped since AOL bought Nullsoft... but Winamp works fine for me on Vista x86 and x64 and Windows 7 x64? I'll admit it doesn't like burning CDs in Windows 7, but that isn't a dealbreaker as I rarely burn audio CDs.

 

I may be dumb for jumping into this highbrow audiophile thread, but does foobar support/and or sync your ipod? I ask since this has been the umpteenth thread I've seen lately of ppl recommending foobar over everything else.

Like seriously, how big is this(GB size wise)? Being legit, where do you store all those + 2000 cds/vinyls?

 

not a heavy music listener, but i can tell you that iTunes interface is not very responsive even on my computer. i think it's because of Apple ported their interface API to Windows, in the end, it has to go through an extra layer of emulation.

only reason i stuck with iTunes' slow interface is due to the need to sync my iphone.

 

Assuming V0 MP3s (~130kbps), 750kbps FLAC files, and an average song length of 4 minutes, it comes out to 160 gigabytes.

It's certainly not necessary to own all the CDs for the collection to be legit, it could be net purchased. Storing 2000 CDs wouldn't be too hard anyway (lots of CD racks and a penchant for alphabetically arranging things will see you through). Storing vinyl is a bitch... my dad has ~ 4000 and it's a mess.

 

Has anyone of you tried Helium Music Manager? I'm pretty happy with it, although I don't use the current version.