What's the best way to manage a music collection?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I recently bought a Zune 8GB and I love it as a piece of hardware. Great little toy, seriously. But, I also own a iPod Shuffle that I don’t intend to abandon either. This puts me into a tricky situation because the two players require two different proprietary music players in order to manage and sync music. These two player don’t always play nice together and even if they did, they basically suck when it comes to managing your catalog.

I’m sure I’m not the only one using disparate programs to try and work my MP3 players and I’m curious what everyone else has been doing in order to consolidate and manage their music collections. iTunes and Zune both attempt to download catalog art and track information with varying degrees of success and that’s something I’d like to maintain.

My system right now is pretty clunky. I use the Zune 8 for the bulk of my listening. It handles my Podcasts and Videos. However the Zune software basically restricts me from really editing ID3 tags and adding cover art. Also it doesn’t seem to be able to automatically add song to my library when I play them. The iPod predates that Zune so iTunes was how I initially managed my catalog. Currently iTunes still does manage it and I use it to populate and organize my My Music folder. My Zune polls this folder for it’s catalog list. This sucks because I essentially need to open a new MP3 file in iTunes, let it play while it copies it to my library and attempts to download album art. If it fails I have to manually fix it. Then I open Zune and wait for it to query my watch folders.

Obviously this is less than ideal. What I’d love to do is turn my Music catalog management over to one piece of software. Something that will put everything into the proper folders and rename the files so they are structured consistently. Something that can download the art and the track/album info on it’s own. Then I’d like to point my Zune and iTunes software at this folder and let them do their magic. I like this because I can dump either bloated piece of software when need be and I’m not invested in either software should I decide to use whatever the next best thing is.

Anyone addressed this yet? I can;t imagine all these type-A dopers would turn their catalog management over to Apple or Microsoft, two entities that have shown a complete incompetence in the task at hand. They seem more interested in trapping you into their product line by taking control the music out of your hands and hiding it behind the big curtain.

A little help?

2

I use Winamp with my iPod and am quite happy with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it works with Zunes as well.

3

I use Foobar 2000 to manage my music library and sync to my iPod. It’s highly configurable with a light footprint but it takes a LOT of tweaking and installing 3rd party components to fully unlock its power. Highly recommended if you have geekish tendencies and aren’t afraid to mess around with the occasional script.

A more user-friendly program is MediaMonkey. It’s a fully featured music player/library management program with a large number of plugins. Also highly recommended.

4

I use a program called Tag&Rename to automatically name the files based on the metadata.

5

Another vote for MediaMonkey, and it should handle transferring music to your IPod and Zune.

I have a folder on a server shared over UPNP (for the xbox360, Windows Media Player and Pinnacle Sound Bridge) and DAAP (for ITunes and Amarok), as well as using a Web interface (Jinzora). I managed the folder using MediaMonkey, and it is pretty awesome. The only thing I don’t like is that ITunes will not copy songs off the DAAP server onto an Ipod, and I don’t like letting ITunes loose on my music folder - it tries to own the whole thing, and I don’t trust it.

Si

6

Does MediaMonkey handle Podcasts at all? If I were to install that as my primary media manager and player would I still need to maintain iTunes and Zune to automatically download and sync Podcasts?

Also, any idea if it allows me to wirelessly sync my Zune? Seems unlikely.