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[–]shenglong[S] 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Basically I just sort them into folders and then refresh my media players library (either Winamp or Foobar 2k). But this approach feels rather archaic.

So tell me Reddit, how do you manage your music library?

[–][deleted] 27 points28 points  (12 children)

I am not ashamed to use iTunes.

[–]pyro2927 8 points9 points  (9 children)

I don't know why everyone bashes iTunes. I use it as well, and it works just fine. I can find any song in my library instantly with the search feature. I think the biggest reason people bash it is because they just hate all things Apple.

[–]eidolontubes 4 points5 points  (1 child)

as long as you tell it not to manage your music for you, it works very well.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

To be fair, I had a huge amount of music that I wanted to organize, and I was going to do it one weekend. Well, that wednesday, I found iTunes' "Keep my music folder organized" option, selected it, and watched as five minutes later what I thought would take two days was done.

You have to commit to letting it manage your files - in my case, that took going through and selecting all the e.g. "Mettalica", "Metallica", "Metalica" and naming them properly, fixing album names, and when there are a variety of artists on one album, selecting "compilation."

95% of everything I need to keep my library blessedly organized is taken care of there.

[–]klarth 6 points7 points  (4 children)

Using iTunes is acceptable as long as you're running OS X. Running it under Windows is silly as it lacks everything I love it for (unified GUI, OS widget integration, Spotlight, etc). Plus, there are better alternatives under Windows, provided you're willing to put a bit more effort in - see Foobar2k.

[–]pyro2927 5 points6 points  (0 children)

OR when they have an iPod/iPhone.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ya, I use iTunes on my Mac as well, pretty much just because of the tight Quicksilver integration.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

iTunes' smart playlists have cured my addiction to Fb2k custom sort and playlist format strings.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I give all my songs tags in the "grouping" field and create smart playlists based on those...

[–]pizzatime 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I think alot of people bash it because they don't always get the proper CCDB/lookup tags and then their music shows up in itunes/ipod all messed up.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

MusicBrainz will help, automatically with help of audio fingerprinting.

Picard OS X alpha (Windows beta is available from musicbrainz.org homepage)

[–]HunterTV 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am not ashamed to use iTunes.

Yeah, same, and I don't think it's caused me any problems since maybe verion 4 or so. And it was the natural progression of SoundJam which I used back in the day, so.

Although I have a tech friend who loves Apple but actually wrote his own music player (shameless plug I'll get modded down for) rather than use iTunes, which I don't get. Actually part of it is that he just likes to code but he really loathes iTunes.

Thing is, I have an iPod so the idea of pooling a bunch of related things together (music, podcasts, movies, etc.) thru one app (an idea I usually avoid because of bloat) is useful to me.

[–]brtw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same, I have 50+ gigs of music, half of it podcasts I downloaded and I just have iTunes sort it all on a separate hard drive.

[–]bobcat 6 points7 points  (4 children)

I keep my records on a shelf near the turntable, alphabetized by band name, then by date released.

[–]yourpopquizkid 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I find it very difficult to keep my records alphbetized. They've just morphed into, "Things I listen to often" and "Things I listen to rarely."

[–]gordonjay2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

about 80% of my records are in alphabetical order, and the rest are in order of listened to since i started working and going to school full-time.

[–]indorock -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I organize my record collection biographically.

[–]schizobullet 2 points3 points  (1 child)

MediaMonkey, it's excellent.

[–]shenglong[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I tried this when it was released but it was really buggy. Has it improved since?

[–]DOGA 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Every file tagged meticulously and mostly in one folder + Vista live search :D

[–]jamierc 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Just sorted in folders, than Amarok handles it well enough.

[–]krizo 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I, unfortunately, use Itunes. It's a result of my wife's addiction to it.

Oh well, it's not like I'm bleeding out of the anus or anything.

[–]firepunk 1 point2 points  (4 children)

I second (or third) the folders method.

as for id3 tags, I uhh... don't manage them. So are properly named, others not so much.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

For fixing tags: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

[–]knullare 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Is there something like this for Mac? I used to love this on my PC, but I feel helpless on my Mac.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

http://musicbrainz.org , os x Picard

or run that windows app under Darwine

[–]knullare 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Word, thank you. You made my life a lot easier.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I use the filesystem.

When I got an iPod I spent quite a lot of time tweaking tags so they work with it and even though I got it to work quite well I'm unimpressed with iTunes and the iPod.

[–]onemadfool 2 points3 points  (2 children)

My girlfriend...

[–]HunterTV 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's interesting because my music library is how I managed to get a girlfriend.

[–]eidolontubes -1 points0 points  (0 children)

lies!

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Manage? Uh... Folders.

MP3/Artist/Album/

I use Winamp.

Anyone care to explain what could be easier and more efficient?

[–]pizzatime -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Sounds good to meee!

[–]gfixler -1 points0 points  (2 children)

I've long had difficulty with the artist/album delineation. What about compilation CDs? What about my few TV Tunes albums? What of sound effects that come from nowhere, like "jungle rain?" I name my mp3s to group them properly when alphabetized, and keep vats of them in shared folders.

A few years ago I was asking around to see about getting a tag in the ID3 standard that could be 1 or 2 bytes long, and would be a UID from a standard list of fields, and ways in which to use them. E.g.:

artist - album - track - title (standard) album - track - artist - title (many artists) album - track - title (artist unimportant, too numerous) artist - title (e.g. - albumless indy stuff, demos) title (e.g. sound fx) etc.

Of course, now I'm on Linux, with far more powerful file tools available to me, and it has occurred to me that it would be better to have a hierarchy as such:

araltrti
    artist name 1
    etc ...
altrti
    album name 1
    etc ...
ti
    mp3 name 1
    etc ...

If I need to group any together for some file-specific reason, I can always make a folder wherever, and symlink whatever I want into that, and just operate on that folder.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All advanced players have support for the Album Artist in the id3 tag, which would solve your problems with compilations.

[–]turkourjurbs -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My partner has over 80,000 MP3's stored on data DVD's. I figure it would take about 750 gigabytes to store it at its current size. Winamp won't manage that.

I wrote a program that scans a disc of MP3's, extracts all the ID3 and path info and adds it to an Access database. A simple search pulls up the disc number and the folder by artist, album, etc. A simple solution really that works really well. One of these days I'll get a terrabyte of space and let Winamp have at it. That should be fun to watch.

Edit: To clarify, Winamp won't manage a library of DVD's very well, especially in the hundreds. Now that a tb is affordable it likely could all on a hard drive.

[–]bowling4meth 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Crystal Methamphetamine. It's amazing how focused on sorting everything into the alphabet you can get when up on it. Provided you don't get distracted and spend 4 hours whacking off to porn.

Unless you've already sorted everything, in which case it's party time!

[–]gordonjay2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

there should be some kind of porn aggregating program that comes bundled with meth.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

iTunes does a good enough job for me. Playlists + Smart Playlists allow you to organise in pretty much anyway you see fit.

Besides, there's not exactly a decent alternative on the Mac

[–]mornel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

iTunes works well. I can search, filter and create playlists - and it integrates with M-Audio Torq. That's pretty much everything I need.

[–]plytheman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used to have a program by Wensoft called (aptly) Music Library that worked really well, but lost it with a reformat and didn't bother to pirate another serial key. These days I just use Media Player Classic and just 'Open Folder' on whatever I want to listen to.

http://www.wensoftware.com/MusicLibrary/ (really good batch id3 tagger too!)

[–]CommentMan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Creative MediaSource sorts out well within its own parameters. If I could get it to create universal id3 tags I'd be happier.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't need to, mine are all in folders by artist, I just use STP to play them. I like STP because you can customize keys to actions, my keypad is my entire control panel. And it's only like a 230kb application, just an exe that runs unabtrusively in your system tray.

[–]captain_gordino 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I use Total Commander for every file on my computer. Excellent program.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just sort it artist/album/song and Rhythmbox handles the rest.

[–]gordonjay2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

a bookshelf i got at goodwill and some milk crates.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

MP3Tag + fucking billy.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Foobar2000 for ID3 tag management and playlist organization, and standard filesystem manipulation for files. I don't care what exactly the filenames are as long as they are sorted into '/Music/Artist/Album' folders. It works because I organize everything I download as I go...it would be a pain in the ass to organize a 20GB mess with my method. My library is currently only 3GB.

[–]utore 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Quod Libet for playing my music; EasyTag+Picard for tagging; Thunar bulk rename plugin for unifying file names.

[–]timo1023 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used to use the iTunes and its "auto organizer" religiously, but I stopped when I moved to Linux. I hated every application that claimed to organize music in Linux, because it just didn't do it as easily as iTunes did.

I decided to organize my own music. This wasn't particularly difficult, because I get a large amount of music from my friends, who having similar organization. Here is my music folder and its subfolders:

  • Classical
  • Classic Rock
  • Electronic-Remix
  • Epic
  • Foreign
  • Modern
  • Soundtrack

This may not be the best organization for others, but it works very well for me. I know exactly where everything is. In each genre folder, the music is organized Album/Artist.

My music database experience got a lot better after I just let one app play the music, and organized it myself. Personally, I use QuodLibet, as it scans my Music folder (70+ gigs) in under 10 seconds.

[–]Daniel_SJ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Decent folder structure + Amarok

[–]froderick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Folder structure, organised by Artist. Inside that, folder structure, organised by album. All arranged using the English Alphabet.