Blogs Big Media Collection, Big Headache

I just rip/capture my music with Magix Audio Cleaning Lab and it finds the info of the commercial stuff for me. All my DJ mixes and the tunes not recognised I just enter manually on the track info editor.

Best purchase I ever made as I usually clean the recording up or adjust the sound to my liking while I'm at it.

 

That's what I do...just got two early nineties albums from Pearl Jam and the Doors. (been on the list for ages)

I use CDex for ripping, but I guess everyone uses something else

Pirated music is not a lost sale (think of it as "postponed Purchase")

 

Audiograbber for ripping and Winamp 5.35 for playing (didn't like the changes to the media library in the newer versions)

 

A long time ago, when my music collection was far smaller, I used to do this - I would tag/re-tag each of the files myself, if they weren't correct. I used to be against iTunes, and any kind of media library manager, purely because it would screw up my tagging.

Then I bought an iPod. I tried alternative ways of transferring songs to it, but found it all to be too much messing about, so I reluctantly started using iTunes. iTunes and I are simply inseparable. Even if I found a brilliant alternative that would allow me to easily sync my iPod, I still couldn't use it: it would never pass the GAF! (Girlfriend acceptance factor ). Since we moved in together, we now have one unified music library and we both have iPods. Changing now would be more effort that it's worth.

It *is* a resource hog, but frankly is that really a problem these days? It might take, say, 10 or 20mb more memory than other apps, but I've got 4gb to spare (not to mention the pagefile). Yes, it does also start up a little bit slowly, but it takes no more than 5-10 seconds on my PC (which is not exactly high-end) - it takes longer than that to load and log in to Steam. People might say that there are "better" media managers around, but I say: "different horses for different courses". I, personally, cannot now live without it.

 

All I use is MediaMonkey. No need for anything else.

 

How do you folks handle things like duplicate tracks between albums (especially those compilations)? Make a reference from a single source or just keep both tracks?

 

Sort my iTunes collection by album name. If I have duplicate tracks across different albums, that's fine - they're complete albums. A quick check tells me that I have 13 different copies of "Walk" by Pantera, and 18 copies of "Symphony of Destruction" by Megadeth. However they're all on different albums, or live albums, or B-Sides, etc... In fact, according to iTunes, I have 2618 "duplicate" items - but they're not duplicates to me.

No comments on my music taste please! Though you'd most certainly be wrong to take the piss....!

 

Tag as you rip [or download]. Saves a shedload of time sorting out later.
MP3Tag for me, quick and easy.