Do you use a media library?

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

Soldato
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This catalogues your music, and is usually built into playback software. Examples include iTunes, Windows Media Player, Real Jukebox and Winamp.

What are you views? For me, I prefer to use Explorer to manage my files. After all, Explorer is the successor to File Manager. Create new folder, query CDDB, rip CD contents to said folder. Then organise a hierarchy in your music files in such a way that makes sense to you. There was once upon a time in DOS and early Windows where storage was understood by drive letters and folders/directories. Why change it? The IT illiterate will struggle to find their library when they'll need to back it up.
 
I used Mediamonkey for a long time, and am now using Albumplayer as it has a nice, simple interface and is very fast.

I despise programs that randomly mess about with tags and album art when they are already setup to the users requirements ie WMP and Itunes.
 
Yep. I used Winamp for a long time, and now use iTunes purely because it integrates well with my iPhone (remote control, etc.) Also fond of Foobar, but can't be bothered at the moment with the effort required to customise it. And MediaMonkey is good with large libraries.

Monserrat said:
There was once upon a time in DOS and early Windows where storage was understood by drive letters and folders/directories. Why change it?
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Because it's quite a tedious way to manage music. I enjoy the feeling of having all my music 'at my fingertips' that I get from a media library. Being able to instantly sort my entire collection by song title, album, year of release, etc. makes a big difference for me. A hierarchical folder structure feels much more restrictive - I might forget which albums I have! I also enjoy flicking through album art - many don't see the point, but I have a big CD collection and don't want to totally lose the feeling of going through physical CDs.

The way I see it, you're going to open a separate application whenever you click on a song in Explorer. Why not just have such an app open all the time and manage your music from there? It makes it much easier to make playlists, etc.
 
i use the media library in foobar2000. browsing explorer for music is a bit backwards these days. although my collection is nicely organised, it's not very flexible.
 
Was all self-managed initially. Then I realised iTunes organised it exactly the same way without me having to spend any time on it it.

Seems a bit strange to go to all that effort when the computer can do it for you.
 
MarcLister said:
Media Monkey is my current media library organiser. It's a pretty good one as well. :)
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It's a brilliant one!

Just installed it now, absolutely brilliant. SO much better than Songbird! Which I have actually disliked for a while now (slow), but never got round to changing it.

I trust it doesn't do anything silly like move files around according to their tags? I keep my own directory tree, I just want it to display the files according to their tags, not mess around with them.
 
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Craig321 said:
It's a brilliant one!

Just installed it now, absolutely brilliant. SO much better than Songbird! Which I have actually disliked for a while now (slow), but never got round to changing it.

I trust it doesn't do anything silly like move files around according to their tags? I keep my own directory tree, I just want it to display the files according to their tags, not mess around with them.
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It has been a while since I tried Songbird, what you've just said will keep me away from it for a while.

It doesn't do anything automatic, unless there's an option to turn on/off for that. :p I just scan my MP3 folder once and it picks everything up and just leaves it where it is for me. :)
 
Everything in my music folder is organised into Artist/Album and all tracks are named "Artist - Album - Track Number - Title.mp3".

But then I use winamp and the media library, 14,000+ songs and it's the best thing I've found to sort and play them.
 
MarcLister said:
It has been a while since I tried Songbird, what you've just said will keep me away from it for a while.

It doesn't do anything automatic, unless there's an option to turn on/off for that. :p I just scan my MP3 folder once and it picks everything up and just leaves it where it is for me. :)
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Cool. Just finished scanning mine and all seems well. Nice little program :)

Songbird doesn't move anything around fortunately, but it starts up extremely slowly, feels clunky and I really went off it.

Did Songbird get bought by somebody? I thought it was a Mozilla project. Can't see their name on it anywhere, and can't see a mention on their site.

[Edit]
Is there any way to make it so Media Monkey shows Albums down the left hand side properly. My club albums are all VA, so for some reason it's making a separate 'folder' for every single artist in that particular album even though they have the same album name :confused:.
 
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Craig321 said:
Did Songbird get bought by somebody? I thought it was a Mozilla project. Can't see their name on it anywhere, and can't see a mention on their site.
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Still owned by the original developers. Wasn't Songbird hyped as the Mozilla of the media player market?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

Craig321 said:
Is there any way to make it so Media Monkey shows Albums down the left hand side properly. My club albums are all VA, so for some reason it's making a separate 'folder' for every single artist in that particular album even though they have the same album name :confused:.
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I find that a lot with Various Artists albums. There's an artist field for each track but it sounds like you need to change or modify the album artist field for your club albums to "Various Artists" or whatever you use to signify VA albums. :)
 
Songbird's built on the Mozilla platform, and it's quite like Firefox - highly customisable but not particularly fast.
 
Craig321 said:
[Edit]
Is there any way to make it so Media Monkey shows Albums down the left hand side properly. My club albums are all VA, so for some reason it's making a separate 'folder' for every single artist in that particular album even though they have the same album name :confused:.
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Yeah, you have to set the album artist to Various Artists on compilations.

Incidentally, you might be pleasantly surprised by the amount of addons for mediamonkey, such as the fabled MonkeyFlow.
 
Using Windows Explorer seems a bit backwards. You have no way of sorting or filtering it by metadata; anything you do has to be manually committed to the file system. I imagine it would also make queue and playlist management a bit of a nightmare.

foobar2000 is my personal choice. I don't think anything beats it for customization potential.
 
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MarcLister said:
Still owned by the original developers. Wasn't Songbird hyped as the Mozilla of the media player market?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

I find that a lot with Various Artists albums. There's an artist field for each track but it sounds like you need to change or modify the album artist field for your club albums to "Various Artists" or whatever you use to signify VA albums. :)
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Ohhh, I didn't even realise there was an "Album Artist" tag :rolleyes:. Time to do some updating, Picard has set all the Album Artists to the Artist.

Ratbag said:
Yeah, you have to set the album artist to Various Artists on compilations.

Incidentally, you might be pleasantly surprised by the amount of addons for mediamonkey, such as the fabled MonkeyFlow.
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Looks good, thanks.

Also, does anyone else find that W7 can't read tags that MusicBrainz Picard writes. For example when you change Explorer's view to Music it doesn't pick up the tags :confused:.
 
Craig321 said:
Ohhh, I didn't even realise there was an "Album Artist" tag :rolleyes:. Time to do some updating, Picard has set all the Album Artists to the Artist.
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Yeah I find EAC does the same for me as Picard does for you.

You should be able to select all the incorrectly songs and bulk change their Album Artist. I do agree that it is very annoying. If I rip a 20 track Various Artist CD and find that Media Monkey has planted those 20 tracks amongst all the other artists I do swear a teeny weeny bit as the thought of seeking those 20 tracks out of all the other artists is quite soul destroying. :(
 
MarcLister said:
Yeah I find EAC does the same for me as Picard does for you.

You should be able to select all the incorrectly songs and bulk change their Album Artist. I do agree that it is very annoying. If I rip a 20 track Various Artist CD and find that Media Monkey has planted those 20 tracks amongst all the other artists I do swear a teeny weeny bit as the thought of seeking those 20 tracks out of all the other artists is quite soul destroying. :(
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Can't you just navigate to the folder itself and alter the tags with MP3tag or something?

Granted, you'd have to update the Mediamonkey database after.
 
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