Inspired by this thread, which I didn’t want to hijack.
The premise of that thread deals with a hatred for iTunes. My hatred of iTunes (and Apple products in general) is just as strong. But putting that aside…
I’ve never really understood the need for iTunes, or any other “media manager.” I have a very large music collection, with a physical hard drive dedicated to it. The device I use to manage my collection is called my brain. Each artist has a folder, and each album gets its own subfolder. Simple. I don’t need some program to “manage” it. So, are there advantages to having a media manager that I’m not thinking of?
Also, all this talk about “syncing” is something else I’m not clear on. Why is this necessary? Is it an Apple thing? When I want to put music on a device, I copy the album folders over. When I no longer want those particular albums on the device, I delete them. Why would anything need to be “synced?”
I also keep my files generally organized by folders for an artist. The media manager let’s me do things like build playlists to copy over to my device since I rarely listen to an album or artist exclusively. It lets me more quickly find some of the more obscure aspects of my collection (especially stuff from compilation albums where I may have only one or two songs by that artist among hundreds of artists in my collection.) If you have a device that shows album art good managers can let you add/maintain that if your ripper doesn’t. I can search across the whole collection for songs that fit certain criteria to help me choose songs to update onto my device.
Depending on how you consume your music the extra tools may not help. For how I consume my music they save me a lot of time versus just picking through a painful hierarchy of folders.
Serious question back at ya: how do you play them? Do you have to click each one, one at a time? Like playing a series of 45 rpm records? You have to start each one separately?
If so, then that’s why I have iTunes. I can set playlists, play random, play just certain genres. I can add a song in the middle of a random playlist. I can play an entire album and then have the machine go back to random when it is finished, without any input from me.
More generally, do you use your computer for anything more than storing your media before copying it to ther devices? Or do you actually play music (etc.) on your computer itself, or do other things like rip CDs? If so, you need some software to accomplish this task, though maybe not a full “media manager.”
I still buy music on CDs because I’m a little distrustful of the concept of “owning” an online download. So my music workflow has been:
Put CD in computer and have iTunes automatically rip it to its library, which automatically syncs with my iPhone.
Put CD in car and have the car automatically rip it to its hard drive.
So I’m in effect using two music managers, which magically move my CDs to the devices (car, phone, computer) where I actually listen to them. I find this far more convenient than using my “brain”, which would involve a lot more manual work on my part.
Breaking news! Everything I wrote isn’t true anymore. I’ve just switched to an Android phone, and my MacBook Pro’s HDD bit the dust. So I’m taking the opportunity to switch to a PC too. My recollection is that iTunes is a bad experience on PCs, so when it arrives it is unlikely I’ll install it.
I can still do the car thing but I’m going to need to find some other tools to perform the CD -> Phone magic. Luckily my existing music was easy: behind the scenes iTunes just stores everything as artist and album folders just like you do. I could copy the entire iTunes library directory structure to my Android phone and it all magically worked.
Also, you didn’t say where you sourced your music from. Do you purchase from sources that automatically put the files into your directory structure? Or do you manually rename everything? If you’re doing a lot of manual work for new music then I must confess I find your question odd: it seems perfectly obvious what a music manager is for, its for automating a bunch of manual processes. If you’re sourcing your music such that it already matches your structure then I’d argue that you’re probably already using a music manager (or at least the output from someone else’s).
See, this is why I asked. I almost never actually listen to music from my computer, so what you all are saying never occurred to me. For the rare occasions that I do, I just use VLC Player. I also am not a person who ever puts my music on random; I listen to full albums. So I just select whatever album and add it to a playlist.
As far as ripping, when I ripped my 1500 CD collection a few years ago, I had to use a specialty program; Media Player wouldn’t have cut it. In a nutshell: I listen to a lot of prog rock, where tracks tend to flow together, so I prefer to rip such multi-track pieces of music as a single track. I stopped buying CDs at that time, so it hasn’t been an issue since.
I’m still not clear on why these things need to be “synced.” It sounds like you’re doing the work of putting the CD on your computer, then again in your car.
I use MP3Tag to format track file names and tags to my liking with a few keystrokes. That is, I select all the tracks of an album, open MP3Tag, and run a couple of shortcuts to format the file name and tags to a preset system I’ve come up with. It only takes a few seconds. Then I rename the album folder appropriately so it fits chronologically in the artist folder, and I’m done.
Syncing just means that the library in one place (in this case, my iPhone) is automatically updated to match the library in another place (in this case, iTunes on my computer). Its just one more manual step I don’t have to do. Putting a CD in my computer means the track is permanently available on both my computer and my phone.
If I could magically sync between my car’s HDD and my iTunes library I would. But my car isn’t that smart. It is smart enough to automatically store music on its HDD when you insert the CD (and doing the appropriate lookup of artist / album / track names), and that is good enough for me.
(I could of course just plug my iPhone into the car’s USB port and play music from there. But I like having it in the car itself for when the car is driven without me and my phone, and now that I have an Android phone the USB connection annoyingly doesn’t work as well).
There are a handful of weekly podcasts I listen to. Could I download them manually, plug my phone into my computer, then copy them over every week, and delete the ones I’ve listened to? Sure.
Or I can just add the podcast to iTunes, and it will automatically download them and sync them to my phone wirelessly when I plug it in to charge at night, and delete the ones I’ve listened to. Or, at least, I could if iTunes didn’t suck as much as it does.
Or, let’s say that I want to put on some mellow background music for a dinner party. Could I go through the albums I have and pick out songs? Sure. Or I can spend 30 seconds and tell iTunes to play a random mix of Jazz music with a BPM between 85 and 110.
There are all sorts of ways of listening to and organizing music that are really easy and simple with a smarter software interface than moving around a big pile of folders for each studio album.
Depends on what I want to listen to. If I just want to hear one song, I double-click on it. If I want to hear an entire album or folder then I drag and drop it to the VLC icon on my desktop. If I want to make a playlist then I drag and drop whatever songs/folders I want to VLC.
I don’t use iTunes, but a similar program, Musicbee. I have just over 500 albums, over 5700 tracks, all albums and tracks individually rated out of 5 stars. Nearly every album and track is tagged with metadata such as genre, subgenre, occasion, mood, etc. It can sort tracks based on: play count, date last played, date added to library, etc.
I can easily create playlists based on any number of criteria: 4 star shoe gaze or dream pop tracks added to my library in the last 6 months, with less than 5 plays total.
I can easily see what albums I enjoyed and what I didn’t, which is more useful than trying to remember them. Hell, that’s why I started rating them in the first place! Being able to see it visually is nice.
This are all things that would be a nightmare to do without a dedicated music manager.
