Question about audio playback software

ajf

ajf

ajf

Soldato
Joined
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Location
Worcestershire, UK
I have quite a few albums I have purchased in MP3 format and currently use iTunes which I find to be quite acceptable.

However I have heard both Media Monkey and Foobar mentioned as being very good.
What are the main advantages of these?
I assume they all sound the same when playing the file?
What about converting audio CD to digital files or vice versa?
Is one better than another at this?

Andrew
 
I do have an iPod - an original Touch - but I generally listen to music more via the PC through speakers or headphones, so I am interested in the differences from that point of view rather than syncing the ipod.
 
My main objection to itunes is that it wants to take over your machine. The likes of Mediamonkey tend to be less intrusive. I use Sharepod in conjunction with Mediamonkey.

Yes, music will sound the same regardless of player.
 
I've been a Foobar user for years. I like how it's extremely customisable with a large community behind it so you can make it as basic or advanced as you like.

Me, I just stick with a very simple set up with ColumnsUI to display album art and an iPod manager to synchronise my 5th gen iPod video. With 10,000+ songs in my library I never find any lapses in performance, it just suits me fine.
 
I have never liked the way itunes changes an mp3 collection based on id3 tags. How many times i have seen peoples mp3 collections destroyed by itunes... asking me to fix it back to how it was. problem with itunes doing that is that id3 tags are not always correct so it ends up putting all the mp3 files into the wrong places and messes up albums etc. terrible.

Personally i would recommend installing FLAC which is the best audio codec at the moment. Then i would install foobar and use the default UI and sort your music out by folder.

So my folder structure is as follows

genres->
albums or artists or live-> (inside albums folder)->
Artists name-> (inside artists name) ->
Album names.

inside the artists folder after genres i just have the artists name and then tracks.

so example

c:\music\metal\albums\system of a down\toxicity\01 track.flac
c:\music\drum and bass\artists\noisia\noisia - bombtrack.mp3
c:\music\drum and bass\albums\BSE\album1\01 track.flac

what itunes does to music collections is make them completely useless unless you have itunes or the columnsUI from foobar supports the itunes layout.

What i used to do was use winamp and then total commander and have my music sorted out as it is now. then just use total commander to browse my music by the folder structure and the drag and drop onto winamp playlist. i did that for about 10 years. now i use foobar and the media library based on file structure, which gives me album art.
 
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iTunes doesn't do anything file/folder structure unless you tell it to, you have to actively select this option during or after installation. And it does nothing to tags unless you edit them yourself.
 
Many thanks for the replies. I am going to install couple of the others and see what they are like.
I have heard of the FLAC codec. Does it give any benefit if the originals were already purchased MP3s, or just if I am converting an audio CD?
 
I hand organsised my entire music collection starting in September last year and was an ongoing project. I took each file, retagged them from scratch with proper details, added nice album artwork and renamed the file to be [trackno] - [trackname].mp3

and filed them into my folder structure as Artist -> Album -> Track

This works perfectly and I now have a super organsied music collection. Nothong gets added until its been retagged and artwork added.

I then disabled all the "controlling and organisation" features from iTunes and imported my new clean collection. iTunes is now more of a music browser and player rather than an organiser. I get to have my music organsied how I like it but iTunes plays it, the filtering stuff in iTunes is awesome by the way and it also syncs perfeclty to my iPhone.

Much better. iTunes is fine when you disbaled the organisation parts and do it yourself.

Regards,
Neil
 
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