My Music Server! - Page 6

David, have you ever considered the possibility of setting up your media server in VLC or a similar program as streaming media server?

That way you or anyone you wanted could listen to the library at anytime/anywhere. (but not save the files)

Would be an interesting project with awesome results.

MY GOODNESS. Not only is this body of work fantastique...it's a living, breathing entity. Further, while the sheer number of discs is astounding, it wouldn't matter to me if he had 12, his layout would still shine as presented! I'm inspired and may move to revamp my stuff in December.

What's the name of the software ?

is that Windows Media Center or something different ?

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidMahler 

i did it iTunes and Front Row (unfortunately, front row has been discontinued)

Thanks David,

I am interested to give that software a try but since you said that it is discontinued, then I'll have to rely on the Good ol' Windows Media Player.

This was my inspiration me to do better with mine. By no means this detailed but better than what it should to be

Thanks for inspiring me again 

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidMahler 

i did it iTunes and Front Row (unfortunately, front row has been discontinued)

check out JRIVER.  i have about 15,000 albums currently, i've been working on the collection for a long, long, long time and finally jriver looks like it will offer what i need in one package.  it has a steep learning curve for the very complicated stuff but in the 2 weeks i've been using it it's already surpassed every other software i've tried, and i've just scratched the programming surface.

VERY impressive COLLECTION, in every sense of the word!  as a fellow serious (obsessive?) collector i really appreciate and understand how much work that was!

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidMahler 

im thinking about starting over with JRiver Media Center :(

JRiver now has native ALAC support for both playing and tagging.  That will make the transfer easier and also allow you to still play the files on the Macs.  Getting the custom tagging transferred out of iTunes may be the challenging part.  I don't know how iTunes on the Mac stores custom tags (are they tagged in the files or do they just exist in the iTunes database?).  Theater view in JRiver can do similar functions and similar browsing.

I'm still in awe of this music server setup.   So organized and so much good music.  And the time to rip and organize so many CDs.  I don't know how you did it.  Amazing.  I'm more in awe of this server setup than your huge amazing headphone review.  What is inspiring is that this sort of library organization is something that I could actually do with my own (much smaller) library.  Just need to commit the motivation and time to do it.  I need to.  I'll make it my New Years resolution to do it using JRiver.  Now that I've publicly committed I'll have to follow through.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidMahler 

Thanks!!! I wish it wasn't a big waste of time cause Front row is dead as a door nail:(

Losing Front Row does suck, especially after the work you put in to making Front Row do what you made it do.  It really sucks.

I'm optimistic that you should be able to extract your organizational data from iTunes and get it imported into the tags for each file/album.  Playlists can be exported.  Scripts can be written to loop through each playlist and write tags to each file that is in the playlist.  AppleScript scripts can interact with iTunes, so it ought to be possible to write some scripts to export any other info that may be trapped inside iTunes and write that info to tags in each file.  It will probably require hiring someone with AppleScript skills and other Mac development skills to do it all, but it should be possible.  I really hope it's possible, cause why wouldn't it be possible?  I wouldn't consider any of the work done to organize your library to be wasted or lost, it's just temporarily trapped or stuck waiting to be set free.

Once all of the info is in tags, rather than playlists and the iTunes database, you can import the library into JRiver, customize the views to make use of those custom tags, and have your library organization system working in JRiver.