I am generally computer literate and just started using my computer for playing music, but I’m a little lost. So, if you can, tell me genarally about how you manage your music collection on your computer(burning software, file format, ect).
I do pretty much everything in Musicmatch Jukebox. I rip in mp3 (@ 320 kbps, but I’ll admit they don’t sound any different than 128) and from there, copy them onto my notPod (iRiver equivalent of the iPod)
I loves me my iTunes – I just throw all my music into it (making sure the MP3 tags are correct, natch), and it does all the rest.
Right now mine are pretty much in one huge folder. I had several computers, and I would use my mp3 player to move the files from one place to another. That leaves me with a lot of files that have messed up tags. So now I’ve started to correct them slowly, whenever I start up my music player, I’ll go through and find some that say have the right album, but not the correct artist…I’ll go through all those and fix the artist…slowly I’m getting them straightened out…then I can start eliminating all the duplicates.
Anal-retentive Mac iTunes user here who is currently managing a library of 5600 songs. I’m certain most programs can do what iTunes can, but since I’m only familar with iTunes, I can only speak to that one program…
Ripping
You should take a favorite song, something representative of your collection as a whole, or something that has a a wide dynamic range (deep bass & high cymbals) and use that as a test. Rip it at the various rates and file formats and see what sound quality you need and listen to it via the headphones and computer speakers you intend on using. Sometimes the difference in CD-quality and a lossier format are negligible unless you have speakers that can offer the fidelity neccessary to tell the difference. It will be a trade-off between compact file size and high sound quality. (I use a fairly high quality rip because (a) I pipe my music to my home stereo via AirTunes and (b) I’ve got the HD gigabytes to spare. Also, consider what you’re playing it on. iPods don’t support Window’s proprietary WMA format, and several other MP3 players don’t support the AAC format (which is not an Apple-proprietary format - it’s a subsidiary of Dolby Labs). In any case, MP3 is probably the safest format as it’s supported by most everyone.
Managing files in the application
(In iTunes,) the more information you have about the song, the better your listening experience will be. iTunes can create automated playlists based on the criteria you specify. For instance, it can group all of your favorite blues songs from the 60’s together. But for it to do so, you have to enter the pertinent metadata. Metadata is entered in the ID3 tags (make sure you update the tag to the most current version available — I think it’s 2.4). It saves information like artist, album, year, track number, disc number, genre, composer, grouping, and misc notes as well as album artwork(!) In addition to that, (in iTunes,) you can also set a playstart point, playend point and 1-5 star rating. There are also sort columns in the song listing for each of these metadata fields so you can sort by Composer or Year just as easily as by song name or artist. I’ve been creating playlists for things like and artist’s greatest hits, by genre, by year, by mood, or just for creating mixes for friends. ID3 Metadata is your friend.
Managing files on your hard drive
Everyone organizes their files differently, so I don’t know if there is a right and wrong answer here. I used to separate the stuff I ripped from my own CDs from the stuff I got from online sources and the stuff I got from friends. I don’t do that anymore. I’ve allowed iTunes to organize my library so that it groups first by Artist and Album. My filenames are simply the name of the song. Other people will swear by having both Artist name and track name in the filename. If you don’t mind REALLY long filenames, go for it. Some files I got from friends were ripped with filenames like “Track 1” etc. I was able to get the filename to match the song title ID3 tag with the help of a script from this page (sorry, it’s Apple-only).
By the way, if you do want to fill in a good deal of Metadata and are looking for the most thorough information possible, go visit the All Music Guide
I don’t have one of those portable music players. I only play my music on my home computer (and recently, over my TV (at the other end of my apt.) via my TiVo). All my music is in MP3 format, and I generally play it with WinAmp.
I have my music in a central MP3s folder, with subfolders by artist, and if I have entire albums, by album as well. MP3s where I only have one or two songs by an artist are consolodated into an “Assorted Singles” folder to avoid having a bazillion folders with one song each in them. New songs are downloaded into an “Inbound” folder, and then when moved to their “final destination” folder, they’re also added to any corresponding playlists they might be appropriate for.
I use WinAmp to play my music files*, which are almost all in .mp3 or .m4a format (WinAmp doesn’t seem to like .wma format). I don’t have much organization; my songs are titled in Artist - SongName format, and my Christmas music is in a separate folder, but that’s it. However, all of my songs were individually downloaded rather than ripped from CDs, so I don’t know if that’ll work for you.
- All 2000-or-so of them. I don’t know what boggles me more, that I have that many songs, or that they aren’t enough.
I have a hard drive specifically devoted to video and music files; all my music is sorted by genre, and then either with a folder for artists I have more than 2-3 songs by within the genre sorting, or just in the main directory if not. For example, in my “General” folder, where I have just recent pop stuff and typical rock music – radio fare – I have a folder for the Beatles, but my stuff by Pink and Garbage are just in the main folder because I only have a couple songs for them each. I have an 80s folder full of nothing but new wave and pop singles. Stuff I liked on the radio as a kid.
I use WinAmp to listen to them, or we burn mp3 discs for the car because the boyfriend’s stereo will play them. I’ve never been able to afford a portable mp3 player, though I’d like one some day. Mostly I listen to music here just while I’m working though.
I have four hard drives in my computer (uber paranoid after losing stuff in multiple hard drive crashes), so the media drive, which is smaller, gets backed up on one of my two monster-sized backup drives along with other stuff. I periodically burn everything to DVD, depending on how much new stuff has been added. I haven’t bothered to go through and rip all my CDs (I only have about 75 to begin with), so right now everything I have fits on one DVD. I don’t even care about the music so much, but I’ve lost a lot of art files and personal stuff I can never get back, so I figure since I got all the backup, may as well cover the music too. 
Thanks for the link. I’d been using cduniverse.com to get cover art/ other info, and the allmusic site is much better.
I have an iTunes library at work which is my paradigm for my home computer.
My home library is, tonight, 7535 songs, in Linux. I keep it mirrored for safety on my Linux mp3 server in the closet and on my old G4 upstairs. They each live on devoted 120 GB hard drives (with some video of my daughter in iMovie on the Mac). The library is split into 3: downloaded music, ripped CDs, and downloads from emusic.com. I use xmms to play them. There are a number of known inconsistencies in this library. The biggest is that I didn’t initially rip the first 150 or so CDs with ID3 tags, so I wrote a perl script to grab the album, artist, and track name from the nested directory names and track name (and change the underscores into spaces). This lost capitalization and date and other ID3 data.
I am greatly unsatisfied with this organization and inconsistencies, after completely organizing 5600+ of these songs in iTunes at work (I listen to a lot of music at work). Artwork, dates, genres, complete and correct ID3 tags have been added. One thing I’m not too sure of ATM is that I have split soundtracks and various artists CDs up by artist, not by album. But I’m pretty sure that I like it this way.
I have a 15 GB iPod and a 40+ GB music library so I don’t obviously have all of these songs on the iPod. I use the work computer to organize the iPod. I only do MP3 (192 kbit variable bit rate LAME encoding – I have an iTunes-LAME plugin at work but mostly I rip at home).
I’m looking for an iTunes-equivalent music player for Linux. ID3 organization and GUI editing is a must; things like artwork and playlists are secondary. Any suggestions?
My problem with allmusic is that it is sooo slow. I get most of the metadata from amazon.
iTunes all the way, baby. As soon as you import your tracks (regardless of whence they came), just enter in whatever additional ID3 info you need, and let iTunes do the walking. The only reason I access my music HD at all is to add tracks I imported into my library into my girlfriend’s iTunes library. (The one thing iTunes still doesn’t do very smoothly is enable more than one user account to use the same music folder.) I run into quite a few folks on /. who profess to hate the iTunes organizes their tracks, claiming they’d much rather do it themselves—yet they never really give a reason, and I’m damned if I can figure out what it might be.
13,000+ songs, dedicated hard drive, wired into my stereo. I’ve ripped them in either high bitrate mp3 or high bitrate ogg vorbis (preferred format–it’s more compact and sounds better) and play them back in winamp.
I organise them in subfolders, initially by “mood”–I discovered, generally, I get in the mood to listen to songs in predicatable patterns, so I have folders like “country fried”, “metal!”, “rock”, “opera”, “reggae and ska”, “swing and big band”, “shitting bats” and so on. Within each folder, I have subfolders for each band, each with albums separated into sub-sub-folders.
Then I simply right-click and choose “play folder” and “enqueue in winamp” for each additional folder I want to add to my playlist. It works for me. Sometimes I just shuffle the whole enchilada to get some truly odd musical contrasts.
Occasionally, winamp’s random number generator will get flaky and spend too much time lingering over certain tracks and overplay them, so I’ll banish an album to my “Banished Music” folder in a separate part of the hard drive.
That’s about it for organization.
Another vote for iTunes. I’ve never been able to understand why anyone would want to manually organise music by folders, rather than using a dedicated GUI front end with playlists that allows you to ignore how folders are organised on your HD (and still manages to keep them better organised than one could manually)… I’m sure there are plenty of equally viable software alternatives on Windows.
OB
Anyone have any recommendations for software to help organize/name files/insert metadata? Right now, I’m doing it all by opening up my media library in Winamp and editing the file info, one by one. I’ve a couple hundred files and can’t imagine that y’all with several thousand are doing it through the same tedious process I am.
I’m on a PC, so Mac solutions aren’t for me.
Format: .mp3 (most portable/universal), usually VBR (gives quality akin to 360 bitrate at 1/4 the size)
Burning format: who burns? I keep all mine on a 60 gig hard disk.
Organization: in folders according to random choices of what belongs together, with one level of playlists more or less keyed to the folder contents and another set of playlists organizing along different lines, always in flux as new stuff gets added or I change my mind about something.
Software: Audion, all the way, for ripping and for creating playlists.
I use iTunes on Windows (although I’m switching back to Mac as soon as the budget allows), and it works very well. When ripping a CD, it looks up and fills in most of the metadata automatically.
I use the “comments” field fairly extensively for helping with building automatic playlists. For example, when I’m working on something that requires concentration, I don’t want any vocals. They distract me. So I put the word “instrumental” in the comments field and iTunes automatically maintains a playlist of only instrumental songs.
I have a lot less music than most of the posters here (1,125 songs at the moment), so I keep a backup of the whole iTunes directory on the “back side” of my iPod’s hard drive. By using the unused portion of the iPod as a hard disk, I can easily transfer music between my two computers, and even between a PC and a Mac, which gives me 3 copies of the song library. Since my computers are 18 miles apart, that should keep it safe from just about any catastrophe.
iTunes works the same way for Windows and it’s free. For instance, you can select all songs from a single album, Control click and update the tag to v 2.4. Then you can press Control “I” and add the album name or art, genre, year or whatever to the fields and it automatically adds them to all the selected songs.
Easy CD-DA Extractor is for ripping my CDs.
I keep all of my music in my secondary harddrive as:
G:/Music/(Artist)/(Album)
and use Windows Explorer to move things about.
I’ve also got my iPod set-up so it doesn’t have to synch up with the library (which I never understood why I’d wanna store all of the songs on my iPod as well as my computer).