Good PC Playlist/Jukebox Software?

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

What software is there that allows you to quickly pick out songs with the mouse, and then will play them in sequence?
…

  • I bought a Diamond RIO 500 RAM MP3 player a few years back and it came with software that did this, and it was by far easier to use than any other program I could find. It would scan the PC drives for all MP3’s, and then you selected them from a total list, into one or more playlists–but the easy part was, you could drag & drop songs off of and onto the playlists with your mouse, from the master list. So it was very quick and easy to throw together a list in just a few seconds.
  • The problem with this software now is that it scans for all media types, and I have a CD full of sound effects copied to my computer–over 1,500 files–and those files dominate the selection list, they have to be removed one at a time from it, and the next time you run the scan it will put them back anyway. So what I want ideally is a similar program that doesn’t compose a “master list” itself, but that just lets you look around in a file dialogue window…

I know about how to make and play playlist files, but that’s not what I want to do. I want to be able to quickly drag & drop media files to a playlist and them play it.
Is there any such thing out there?
~

#2

Try either Winamp 2.xx (NOT 3, it sucks), or the new iTunes for PC available from Apple.

#3

iTunes for Windows will do this. When it starts up, you have an option for it to scan your drive for media, but you can just tell it not to and choose to import your music yourself.

One thing you might want to do if you use iTunes is to let it manage your music collection – that is, let it create a directory tree where it will store all your stuff. That way, you don’t have to spend time organizing new music you rip in the future; just stick in the CD, then let iTunes rip the tracks, create directories for the album, and name and file away the files. I used to organize my music by hand, but now I prefer the convenience of having iTunes do it.

#4

I reccomend one of the Winamp 2.xx players. Very easy to use, and very fast - didn’t bloat and slow down my computer like iTunes or Winamp 3.xx

#5

Winamp is a good MP3 player, but it’s not a very good jukebox. I find it really cumbersome to maintain playlists.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try Media Jukebox, and I like it a LOT more. I have several thousand MP3’s (I burned my entire CD collection). Because they were my own CD’s, and I used the FreeDB service when I ripped them, I had good ID3 tags on all my MP3 files. So all I had to do was install Media Jukebox, point it at my main MP3 directory and tell it to search, and voila, it organized all my music by artist, album, and genre. And for custom playlists, it’s a snap. Highly recommended.

Now, if you got all your MP3’s off the internet, expect to find a lot of messed up ID3 tags, and that will confuse Media Jukebox. But even then, you can easily edit the tags, even in bulk. So it’s great.