Easy way to manage your MP3 libary

Caged said:
Do my eyes deceive me, or in 2007 do people still advocate managing their music into folders and then playing it back by browsing to it and loading it into Winamp?

How is this in any way preferable to letting something like iTunes manage the whole lot with a database based on the tags (which you set correctly in the first place). How am I supposed to do any sort of basic searching (all songs from 3 artists in a certain range of years) using Windows Explorer and folders? Not to mention smart playlists. Honestly I think the people who cling onto manually sorting music into folders must have blindly clicked "Yes" to everything iTunes asked and ended up with their music library rearranged, or have something against tagging.
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I simply have something against installing a frankly grotesque piece of software onto my machines.
 
Caged said:
Do my eyes deceive me, or in 2007 do people still advocate managing their music into folders and then playing it back by browsing to it and loading it into Winamp?

How is this in any way preferable to letting something like iTunes manage the whole lot with a database based on the tags (which you set correctly in the first place). How am I supposed to do any sort of basic searching (all songs from 3 artists in a certain range of years) using Windows Explorer and folders? Not to mention smart playlists. Honestly I think the people who cling onto manually sorting music into folders must have blindly clicked "Yes" to everything iTunes asked and ended up with their music library rearranged, or have something against tagging.
Click to expand...

Because sometimes its impossible to get the tags to show exactly what you want.

Two examples

I (like a lot of people) have singles and albums, maybe unlike others I like to keep these seperate and have tried numerous ways of keeping the singles all bunched into one huge "artist" so on an ipod or anything similar all the singles are in one place on the main "music" listing - rather than filling up the first menu with thousands of single entries with one track on each- not to mention the regular album artist entries. Seemingly to have a "Single" artist (for storage /listing purposes only) but STILL have the correct artist and single title displayed correctly seems impossible , even with ID3tagit

I also find the same with Various albums like Soundtracks to films ( which I also prefer to be listed under a seperate album heading of OST for eg) while requiring an extra layer is still infuriating. IE Theoretically it should be easy to file it as OST>>>Top Gun > 1.Kenny Loggins .xxxx
2. Cheap Trick - yyyyy
3 Berlin -zzzzzzzzz

but anyway the tags are configured it seems, I always have Berlin and Kenny etc in the same level of the menu as OST -= unless I use the "simple" directory structure
 
Caged said:
Do my eyes deceive me, or in 2007 do people still advocate managing their music into folders and then playing it back by browsing to it and loading it into Winamp?

How is this in any way preferable to letting something like iTunes manage the whole lot with a database based on the tags (which you set correctly in the first place). How am I supposed to do any sort of basic searching (all songs from 3 artists in a certain range of years) using Windows Explorer and folders? Not to mention smart playlists. Honestly I think the people who cling onto manually sorting music into folders must have blindly clicked "Yes" to everything iTunes asked and ended up with their music library rearranged, or have something against tagging.
Click to expand...

Who said that people who arrange music into folders do not have sufficient ID3 tags to be able perform the searches you say we are incapable of. I assure you that I can organise my music into relevant folders to my liking far better than any 3rd party application. If I ever want to delete an album because I don't listen to it, I can back that folder up onto a DVDRam (In case I change my mind) and then delete the folder. Job done.

Also, can you select an album you want to play BEFORE you load your Mp3 player (Especially if all your Mp3's are scattered into one massive unorganised mess).

Oh, and you will find that if you label the mp3 files correctly themselves you don't even need iTunes to do the search. Vista does it remarkably well. Anyone who takes the time to organise their music into folders is going to spend the time to ensure their mp3 tags are correct as well as their mp3 filenames. No unknown artist, unknown album files for me.
 
Caged said:
Do my eyes deceive me, or in 2007 do people still advocate managing their music into folders and then playing it back by browsing to it and loading it into Winamp?

How is this in any way preferable to letting something like iTunes manage the whole lot with a database based on the tags (which you set correctly in the first place). How am I supposed to do any sort of basic searching (all songs from 3 artists in a certain range of years) using Windows Explorer and folders? Not to mention smart playlists. Honestly I think the people who cling onto manually sorting music into folders must have blindly clicked "Yes" to everything iTunes asked and ended up with their music library rearranged, or have something against tagging.
Click to expand...

I arrange my music in folders, all tags are correct.
Winamp is just playback software, looks through the directory creating a database.

I can manage my music without opening up software, and it's pretty quick to so do. It's not like there are thosands of albums in a directory, it's all neat.

Also if tags are damaged somehow (say I accidentally delete artist tag from all files) The files are in the correct directory/name so all I have to do is edit the tags with that artist folder as one. If you have 10,000 tracks in a single directory and something goes wrong you're screwed, unless filename gives some description of the song.
 
there's a few bugs to be ironed out yet though

i've not tried the newest release yet, but with the last one i'd get skips if my cpu was say, opening a large program
 
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