How Do You Manage Your Music?

[Sir Topham Hatt]

Is iTunes any good?

 

I am not a fan of Apple but it does seem to be the best way to manage a library of music, of which at the moment I do most of it manually using MP3Tag.

 

I don't really want a large bloating program on my PC but something to manage music (download and tag accordingly) and perhaps play random songs from selected folders.

 

I am not interested in purchasing any music through the program.

 

I didn't know if good old Windows Media player would be good enough, but isn't it just a player?  I'd also prefer the program not to sort my music into it's own sorting method (as the moment) as I have the bulk in one folder arranged by name.

 

Thanks

[remixedcat]

My media player setup: (Shows a little of the playlist structure I got going on as well. I mostly do my own compilations-professionally done like Future Trance,Dream Dance, Tunnel Trance Force, D.Trance, etc)

[Sir Topham Hatt]

Well, had a go with Media Jukebox (jRiver) but I'm not convinced to put my whole collection through it.

 

It found some new album art which is great but didn't change many genres (despite me putting them wrong) and only looks at one database for info.

 

Hmm.

[y2k2r2d2]

MediaMonkey will be my pick and is my pick.

• Replaces Itunes at first because it can sync with i products but you cant buy :laugh:  songs!!
• Folder wise managements and restructuring in the filesystem
• Awesome tagging features like tag based on filenames, and vice versa, Renames,Auto tag from online
• Plugins
• Skins.

 

If youre on linux try clementine.

[remixedcat]

Just use Mp3Tag for your corrections for tags. It uses amazon, discogs, etc... I use it for tag correction and works well. 

 

I never liked ANY media player's tagging. Specially WMP it's DB info is very often incorrect. Even more so than the database that JR uses. 

[Melfster]

I have convoluted setup that works for me.   I have a desktop computer that where have my music a lot of it in flac.  I also have old laptop that has foobar on it.  Music is streamed from my desktop to laptop and outputed to an old boom box. It is controlled via iphone. 

[remixedcat]

Well I'm such a music nerd that I HAVE TO HAVE ALL SONGS PROPERLY TAGGED BEFORE I LISTEN TO THEM. he he.

[Growled Member]

I have a folder on my Desktop called Music: 

It has 2 folders: 

Metal 

Other

All metal goes in metal.  All other (techno/hard) goes in other.

All bands have their own folders.. Inside that is a folder for each CD.  I then pick:  Artist->CD and click play all with WMP :D

Pretty easy and sorted.

 

Same here. Got about 5000 songs I manage them like this and it works well for me.

[Growled Member]

Well I'm such a music nerd that I HAVE TO HAVE ALL SONGS PROPERLY TAGGED BEFORE I LISTEN TO THEM. he he.

 

Shame on you. :P

[remixedcat]

01- Untitled Track - Untitled Artist - Untitled Album drives me nuts!!!! he he

[Lord Method Man]

Artist - Album - Track # - TrackName

 

Used to use MusicMatch Jukebox, now I use MediaMonkey to rip to FLAC.

[remixedcat]

One cool thing about J-River--->HTML playlist generation:

Demo <<Playlist I just made today

[tsupersonic]

I used to use Zune software under Windows 7. Now with the Zune "discontinued" and Windows 8, I use MediaMonkey. It's decent, but I know the experience isn't the same. I tried iTunes since I now have a iPod Touch 5G, but it's still the same bloated piece of garbage I remember from back in the day. Mediamonkey manages iPod, but with iOS7, it doesn't sync unless you have a beta version of MediaMonkey. 

[ajua]

Well, had a go with Media Jukebox (jRiver) but I'm not convinced to put my whole collection through it.

 

It found some new album art which is great but didn't change many genres (despite me putting them wrong) and only looks at one database for info.

 

Hmm.

I don't trust any program to do the tagging for me. A couple of years ago I went to through the hassle of editing all my music library with Tag&Rename (paid) and now everything is great. Now I use Mp3tag (free) for my tagging needs.

 

J. River Media Center or Jukebox tagging capabilities are great as I don't need it to look up for things. Just changing genres, renaming files, adding names or enything else is handled great.

[+Elі Subscriber²]

Musique on my desktop computer:

 

 

 

Google Music everywhere else.

 

 

I previously used Amarok, which has a really nice massive tagging plugin integrated with musicbrain.

 

That looks sexy, I'm trying it now, where did you get that Metro skin for it?

[ichi]

That looks sexy, I'm trying it now, where did you get that Metro skin for it?

 

I'm not sure about how theming works on Windows for this kind of apps. As far as I know it's coded on Qt for all platforms, in that screenshot I was using a dark GTK theme (Holo) and it gave Qt apps that appearance but tbh I have no idea about how you could change the theme on other platforms  :/

[Chemaz]

I use iTunes on windows, I would love to get away from it and use something else, but majority of my playlists are based on play counts, so if there is a media player out there that can copy the playcounts across that would be amazing (6 years if of playcounts :s ), plus iTunes has great auto-playlists pretty much customize them by any song attribute. But generally the program is a pos, slow and crashes

 

However i use MediaMonkey to tag my music and put them in the right file name format and correct folder structure

 

Then use iTSFV to validate the tracks once in itunes (embeds the artwork, ensure disc/track 1 of x is filled etc) it can also analyse a group of tracks and base the rating on number of times play/date of last played/amount of skips

 

then i use beatunes to add the genre and bpm

[Sir Topham Hatt]

I guess it's more with the genre side of things.

MediaMonkey gets the genre but messes up other bits (changes CD cover, names of tracks) and has no easy "bulk" feature that I have found.

Yet Mp3Tag doesn't pick up the genre from Amazon's library either, even though MediaMonkey does :S

[remixedcat]

Ehh most of those databases have the genre completely wrong most of the time..

 

It thought that some of my EDM comps was blues and some was rock or some crap like that. So I don't trust that. 

[REM2000]

i used to use WinAMP in the good old days, however in 2003/4 i switched to iTunes and ive never used another media player/library/organiser. For me it works incredibly well and allows me to easily setup playlists for my iOS devices. I also manage TV/Movies through it and it works like a champ. 

[+Elі Subscriber²]

I use Spotify mostly these days too, but I also have a huge collection of .mp3s and other files from before these types of services were available and I still like to listen to them from time time, lots of rare tracks there that I can't listen anywhere else.

[Mr.XXIV]

I use iTunes. I keep all of my media from iTunes organized on it's own partition within my 2nd HDD, in my Mac Mini. When I collect music from an Artist, I make sure it's the entire discography, and they have to be original iTunes albums. You'll know they're original if they're 320kbps and have "Explicit" labels (I'm actually having to bust a mission trying to get the originals for Drake). Naturally, I have over 125,000 songs. But I started from scratch not long ago, so it'll take me a long time til' I get back on track with all of my collections. Including my Blu Ray movies.

 

I'll be organizing shows like The Blacklist and The Legend of Korra too! I like to keep my entire Mac. You'll even notice my Dock. lol

[TCA]

I use iTunes. I keep all of my media from iTunes organized on it's own partition within my 2nd HDD, in my Mac Mini. When I collect music from an Artist, I make sure it's the entire discography, and they have to be original iTunes albums. You'll know they're original if they're 320kbps and have "Explicit" labels (I'm actually having to bust a mission trying to get the originals for Drake). Naturally, I have over 125,000 songs. But I started from scratch not long ago, so it'll take me a long time til' I get back on track with all of my collections. Including my Blu Ray movies.

 

I'll be organizing shows like The Blacklist and The Legend of Korra too! I like to keep my entire Mac. You'll even notice my Dock. lol

Just use Amazon for some of the ablum art if you need it..What I do lol

[TCA]

i used to use WinAMP in the good old days, however in 2003/4 i switched to iTunes and ive never used another media player/library/organiser. For me it works incredibly well and allows me to easily setup playlists for my iOS devices. I also manage TV/Movies through it and it works like a champ. 

I used ti use Winamp too but would never use it's library feature as it wouldn't even add most of my music. Now I just use WMP to listen or my phone.

[Bi4me]

I dump all my favorite music into a single folder. I edit their tags so if I want to find a song by genre, year or something else I just sort them out with right click. Awesome.

[+virtorio MVC]

I throw everything into iTunes and hope for the best.