My Guide to Music Management for Windows

[Gamerhomie]

Thanks for the tip on MediaMonkey - I checked it out. It seems really good...interface is not that great, but seems like it'll assist me in getting myself organized with my music files.

Yeah, the interface takes some getting used to, but once you're familiar with it and you have everything setup, it'll be a breeze. I remember I downloaded it for the first time last year but immediately deleted it because I wasn't used to the interface, but I downloaded it a few weeks ago to giver it another try and I love it now.

[EnzoFX]

no problem! i love embedding the album art, that way i can transfer between my windows desktop, my ibook, or htpc media center, and they all display the album art immediately with no fuss. I'll also have the option of transferring them to an mp3 player so to show the album art, without it being incompatible or something.

[denary]

no problem! i love embedding the album art, that way i can transfer between my windows desktop, my ibook, or htpc media center, and they all display the album art immediately with no fuss. I'll also have the option of transferring them to an mp3 player so to show the album art, without it being incompatible or something.

So is embedding the best way to handle the Album Art?

Also - there seems to be a new version of MediaMonkey available now - Version 3.

[Gamerhomie]

Hmm, you're right, it just came out a few days ago. I'll have to check it out later...

[Eric Veteran]

^ That's quite unfortunate.

That's what I heard too. Oh well. It seems like Mac has more polished entertainment software.

Yeah, Front Row is much better than Media Center... :whistle:

I have all of my CDs on my PC (20GB) plus purchased music and have a whole 3 albums that WMP can't find artwork for, and they're independent bands.

MediaMonkey is pretty cool though. It's the easiest app I've found for removing album art from MP3 tags as well. ;)

[AnthonySterling]

Great post, many thanks for the guide.

-- edit --

+1 for 'Tag&Rename'

Love it, music doesn't go anywhere near my collection without a little visit to see Tag&Rename. ;)

Located: here

[EL]

Nice guide, thanks

[Steeley]

Great guide. 5 stars.

[Tomi]

I used to use iTunes, but it's rather slow with a large library. I switched to foobar as iTunes couldn't handle my library anymore. Foobar has no problem handling a currently 22k song library on my computer. Of course, with so many songs, you need to stay organized, otherwise you're screwed. All my music is stored under Z:\music\Artist\Album\00 Title.mp3. Tagging is made easy with MusicBrainz' Picard which moves the music into the proper folder for me from my temp folder. Tag'n'Rename is also helpful to mass tag.

Either way, nice guide.

[Rich-E]

Great guide! Another tagger program I use is Tigotago, but iTunes sorts my stuff out easier from the start - just bits I haven't reripped from years ago that I use the tagger on.

For me, I only use iTunes for playing music and that's it. Don't use the store, podcasts, videos, nada. So what I do is install iTunes, remove the extras installed in add/remove programs (mobile device support etc.), and turn on the parental locks in iTunes disabling the features I don't want. I also tell it not to search for speakers, not to check for updates automatically (I either look on here or click the option myself to be honest). There's a few other options, but I rarely sync my iPod, and use iTunes to play music whilst I'm online chatting really. A memory footprint of 50 odd meg whilst playing isn't something I'm looking to tweak down or something that will bother me enough to do something about it.