I’m currently using WinAmp v.5.03. I realize it does have the “media library” feature but I’ve never played with it…I’ve always just used a giant playlist file with all my songs in it.
However, I’ve recently expanded my trance music collection to an epic size and this is just no longer practical. Especially in this case, since with trance the songs all blend together so having an album of songs scattered throughout a playlist doesn’t work very well.
So I need some sort of mp3 player that allows me to organize my files in various different ways - in particular, by album.
The latest version of WinAmp (5.08) seems to have a pretty in-depth media library, but I’d still like to hear some other suggestions.
(I know a lot of people who use that MusicMatch Jukebox thing, but that program looks like massive bloatware so I’m apprensive about using it).
Just to add, one reason why I’ve been so reluctant to abandon the playlist style is because of one particular feature I’m not sure I could do without - the jump feature in winamp. I just hit “j” and it pops up a little window where I can just type a bit of an album name, an song name…any text string and it will immediately list all songs that match it. Its super fast and super useful for pulling up songs.
In the 5.03 media library, this feature did not carry over. As such, the media library was very cumbersome to navigate whereas with the playlist I can pull up a song almost instantly.
iTunes has a search field that, when you enter a character string, instantly reveals the songs/albums/groups/composers/etc. that match your search term. You don’t need a key to invoke it; you just mouse up to the search field, click and start typing.
If you go with iTunes (highly recommended), I’d say to turn on the “Let iTunes organize your library” function. You’d have to make sure your MP3s are properly tagged with artist/album info for this to work, but once it does, it’s a real dream. You focus on finding and playing your music, and let the computer deal with the drudgery of filing the stuff.
Manually maintaining directories of artists/albums/whatever is so 2001.
