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How Do You Manage Your Music?


Question

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

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Media Monkey is good as a free product, but I use J River Media Center, and although it is a paid program, it's awesome for not only organizing your music collection but also renaming files, making playlists (as well as random ones).  And it's extremely fast!  Avoid iTunes on Windows; it's a bloated piece of junk that almost seems purposely designed to run slow on Windows PCs.

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Media Monkey is good as a free product, but I use J River Media Center, and although it is a paid program, it's awesome for not only organizing your music collection but also renaming files, making playlists (as well as random ones).  And it's extremely fast!  Avoid iTunes on Windows; it's a bloated piece of junk that almost seems purposely designed to run slow on Windows PCs.

 

J. River Media Center is the most complete and feature packed Music Manager/Library/Player out there. I've been using it for a few years now and I have never looked back. The library is lightning fast, even when you have thousands of files. It's library views are great and be customized to your heart's content. Support images and video but I only use it for music.

 

I also use it for playing music on other computers, tabltes or phones (it supports DLNA) and also a web interface. It has a full-screen interface like Windows Media Player but this feature needs a little bit more polishing because it can lag at times when browsing on your TV with a remote control.

 

It has awesome DSP options like 5.1 encoding, room correction, volume normalizing, etc. and can sync/transfer content to iPod/iPhone and Android or Windows Phone devices too.

 

It's worth every penny if you ask me.

 

For a free alternative, you can use MediaMonkey which has plenty of features. Another good one is MusicBee but I haven't use it in a while.

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J. River Media Center is the most complete and feature packed Music Manager/Library/Player out there. I've been using it for a few years now and I have never looked back. The library is lightning fast, even when you have thousands of files. It's library views are great and be customized to your heart's content. Support images and video but I only use it for music.

 

I also use it for playing music on other computers, tabltes or phones (it supports DLNA) and also a web interface. It has a full-screen interface like Windows Media Player but this feature needs a little bit more polishing because it can lag at times when browsing on your TV with a remote control.

 

It has awesome DSP options like 5.1 encoding, room correction, volume normalizing, etc. and can sync/transfer content to iPod/iPhone and Android or Windows Phone devices too.

 

It's worth every penny if you ask me.

 

For a free alternative, you can use MediaMonkey which has plenty of features. Another good one is MusicBee but I haven't use it in a while.

 

Amen to that, brother!

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Media Monkey is good as a free product, but I use J River Media Center, and although it is a paid program, it's awesome for not only organizing your music collection but also renaming files, making playlists (as well as random ones).  And it's extremely fast!  Avoid iTunes on Windows; it's a bloated piece of junk that almost seems purposely designed to run slow on Windows PCs.

 

+1 to Jriver!

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J. River Media Center is the most complete and feature packed Music Manager/Library/Player out there. I've been using it for a few years now and I have never looked back. The library is lightning fast, even when you have thousands of files. It's library views are great and be customized to your heart's content. Support images and video but I only use it for music.

 

I also use it for playing music on other computers, tabltes or phones (it supports DLNA) and also a web interface. It has a full-screen interface like Windows Media Player but this feature needs a little bit more polishing because it can lag at times when browsing on your TV with a remote control.

 

It has awesome DSP options like 5.1 encoding, room correction, volume normalizing, etc. and can sync/transfer content to iPod/iPhone and Android or Windows Phone devices too.

 

It's worth every penny if you ask me.

 

For a free alternative, you can use MediaMonkey which has plenty of features. Another good one is MusicBee but I haven't use it in a while.

 

Jriver has a free version called Jukebox http://www.jriver.com/mj/

 

Get the metroX skin to blend the look into windows 8 

http://maverick07x.deviantart.com/art/MetroX-327728200

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I use Ryhthmbox.  It looks kind of like a Linux port of iTunes, it works with just about any music device you can plug in from Zunes to iPods, lets you edit tag properties on songs, and lets you sort and browse by album, artist, name, genre, etc.  It's not set up as an all in one "Media Player" though, so you won't by default see all your movies and stuff too, although I think it will play video files.  It doesn't touch your files either, you can configure it to watch multiple folders in different locations for new files, and that's where they stay.  The screen is pretty dominated by your music library.  It also lets you add internet radio stations, and is extensible with plugins, so in Ubuntu by default it lets you browse and buy music from the Ubuntu music store.

 

I know it's a bit much, but I've used it for years, and those minimalist players like XMMS just never quite did it for me.

post-125978-0-84604100-1380428281.png

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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.

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I have been trying different ones lately including all the ones mentioned on this thread and I decided to stay with MusicBee it has every option I can think of with a nice simple interface and lots of skins to choose from, give it a try.

post-2344-0-87584800-1380496783.png

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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 but in total file and folder wise it's.... I've thought about going back to using Foobar but idk, meh

 

38.1gb

7,838 files

433 folders that's not all my music either, I haven't put the rest of my CD's on here... LOL

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I stopped buying music a year ago.  I just use Spotify Premium now. Archived all my music on Amazon Glacier and deleted it from my hard drives. :)

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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.

 

The ONLY way to do it, although I don't keep any music on my computers anymore. I'm usually listening to my stereo, which I can guarantee plays music MUCH better than any computer, and have XM radio going 99.9% of the time.

 

Agree about iTunes being nothing but a bloated POS on Windows, especially if  you leave all of it's services in automatic mode.

 

Otherwise,

My cd collection of over 6,000 discs, not to mention a few flash drives and external hard drives, is arranged alphabetically on a nice hand made wall rack inside a walk in closet in my office.

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