[kylezo]

Hello all!

I am getting ready to flash-debrand my w580i with XS++ and I am looking for recommendations for a music library organization program, since I will be using the 580 as my primary music player - car, on the go, etc. What do you use? Any good free utilities out there? Should I just use (shudder) Windows Media Player?

I would like to be able to convert lossless files to high quality formats internally as well. But mainly I just need to get my music sorted out and create playlists to use on the go with my w580i.

As an aside, I use ALSong as my computers music player, and I love it! If you haven't seen the ALTools collection, you should check it out - I use several of them on my computer. ALSong, ALShow for vids and movies, and ALSee as a photo-browser and editor-on-the-fly. They are free, sleek, and easy to use. And no I am not associated with them in any way!

I have tried MediaMonkey - I still have it but I don't like the interface too much. I also have FooBar2000 but it is just way too much work to find all the plugins and install them.

Thanks in advance!

 

[rhcp_kz]

media monkey

 

[rhcp_kz]

oops, my bad

 

[micaela]

J River Media Center -- not free but worth the price IMO

 

[kylezo]

micaela -

I have heard that exact same thing before, a few times actually. I don't think I have ever payed for software - I always use freeware. I'll definitely look into it though. Thanks!

 

[monolith]

Is it a problem to organise the files themselves? I'm the best music file organiser I've ever seen.

 

[kylezo]

Mostly it's the batch tag editing, sorting, and creating playlists that I'm concerned about

MediaMonkey has a nice auto-tag feature that checks online for matching files and completes tags. But the thing is, my digital music library is in sad sorry condition, and I want to get it all on my portable device in a very organized and easy to navigate state. So that's what I really need help with.

 

[Dublo7]

Tag&Rename is the best meta tag editor I've ever used.

 

[averydonovan]

I've paid for MediaMonkey Gold and think it was a great investment. MediaMonkey does very well on mass tagging, portable player handling, file conversion for portable players, and handling large music libraries. It starts up quick and is generally pretty fast and offers tons of options. I have used it with multiple Sony Ericsson phones, mass storage device players, and a Creative Zen Vision:M all with great results. I found foobar2000 with a carefully constructed file rename mask is the best thing for actual file organization, as well as some mass tagging duties, and in combination with MediaMonkey I can handle nearly any music organizing duty. Version 3 is already reasonably usable, although still has some bugs, and addresses one of the biggest issues of MediaMonkey 2.x: lack of AAC file support. I just can't wait until they figure out how to support the iPod touch in it so I can go back to using MediaMonkey for (nearly) everything.

 

[sandys]

I suggest using Mp3Tag for tagging mp3s, flac, etc.
In case you want to get cover art , here's an album art downloader

Both are amazing at what they do and very small and light.

And for playing and media library functions, I like the latest Winamp 5.5 - nice interface skin, album art support, ipod support (I think even the latest ones)

I think that is the best way to organize your files.

 

[kylezo]

I have found a solution at www.donationcoder.com 's forums.

This is something that I think everyone should check out. It is amazing!

MusicIP Mixer can auto tag all of your audio files by acoustically identifying thier fingerprint (PUID?) on the MusicBrainz Database. You can run it to automatically scan and analyze your entire library and fill the tags accordingly. I used it on every one of my music files and it had information I had no way of knowing (dates and venues of live performances???). About 98% of the auto tags were correct (all are implemented and executed by the user and can be undone).

MusicBrainz has tons of other tools like th PicardTagger that are similar and although I didn't look through there much yet, it seems there is a lot of powerful functionality available there.

MusicIP Mixer is free, and has expanded features if you purchase a registration (which I didn't).

Unfortunately I did have to go through another program, J. Rivers Media Center, to fix all the filenames to match the tags, because I couldn't find a way to do this in MediaMonkey. In fact, I couldn't even get the new tags to show up in MediaMonkey, but my library is perfectly sorted and named and tagged now. It's amazing!

Acoustic fingerprinting. I should have guessed!

Anyways thank you all. MediaMonkey definitely deals best with finding album art, and it's much easier now that my files are identified, tagged, and named properly. My library was a fragmented mess before MusicIP mixer.

 

[stevenjchang]

thanks for the info, will check it out after class.

any insight into how long in takes? and how much cpu it uses?

 

[kylezo]

In the preference you can set it to how much CPU it will use.

It can take a prett long time to anayze a huge library. I did 200 songs in about 30 minutes on low priority.

By the way, I did find out that you can arrange to have the program rename all your files also, but the programming dialect was too much for me

something like <%aartist>-%artist%sname or something like that. You can tell it however you want it to name your files based on the tag info. I just set J. River to name all files based on tags as <Artist> - <Song name>.

For a huge library of thousands of songs I could see the analyzation process taking a few hours. I would suggest checking out the forums I mentioned above as well as the MusicBrainz forums. Awesome programs available at both places.

 

[vDrag0n]

although you don't like media monkey, it's probably the best solution for windows...

 

[monolith]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kylezo /img/forum/go_quote.gif Mostly it's the batch tag editing, sorting, and creating playlists that I'm concerned about

Well, unless you often listen to things other than albums in their entirety (which I never do and don't know why anyone would

), organising the files themselves covers all that and more when you use something like Tag & Rename (which I do).

I've tried many library organisation programs (iTunes, MediaMonkey, Winamp Library, WMP, etc), and all of them have driven me screaming back to just organising the files. Nothing's beat my

Code:

[left]c:\music\<artist>\(year) <album>\##. <title>[/left]

system yet.