How do you deal with music?

My music collection is probably not as extensive as yours, but I've got something around 17,000 mp3's. I'm probably more meticulous than most, but I actually spend the time to sort out music first into folders by artist, and then into sub folders by album title. I search Google for the proper album art & download it manually. Once that's done, I make sure to run mp3gain to level the gains across album so the volume doesn't fluctuate wildly between tracks. I've found this to be the best way to get the music to look and sound right during media center playback. Media center does not do a great job of finding the correct album art and metadata on it's own. This is the kind of thing you do during long east-coast winters.

All my music is available from a shared folder on my server, with only me having write permissions. There is a sub folder called "playlists" for the wife & son to assemble their own custom playlists. All playlists are playable from just about anywhere on my network. I have Winamp installed on most of my PC's, but the media center PC's are exclusively windows media center. I own and regularly use an iPod nano, but I refuse to install iTunes, establish an apple account (or any other ridiculous apple BS). I use Winamp to manage the transfer and synching of all music to the iPod.

I never seem to figure media monkey out

Tag&Rename. It's $30.00, but it's the best Tagger/Renamer for music there is. I tried all the popular free ones and none come close to combining ease of use, accuracy, and functionality like Tag&Rename does.

http://www.softpointer.com/index.htm

Have you tried media monkey ?

Yes. It tries to be too much, sometimes a single purpose tool is best.

I just use WinAmp for all of it. But I'm not OCD with Music.folder->Genre.subfolder->Artist.subfolder->Album.subfolder->Subfolder.subfolder->...->...->. 19,000+ songs and I can sort or filter them any I want in less than 1/10 second.

I use magicmp3tagger, it renames and tags. Then I just dump everything into a music folder on the media center and point my library for music to that folder.

If your MP3's are properly tagged they will sort out by year, genre, artist, album etc.. in media center and windows media player.

Unless you are manually opening file explorer and searching for songs to play I dont get why the folder structure is so important?


99% of the time I am playing a playlist or a year. If I want a particular song or album I just do a search in media center or media player.

I use Media Monkey to manage my 20,000+ song library. It is really good software and it does a lot. I also use Music Brainz Picard if the track is not tagged at all

This, plus music browser for WMC.

I'm going to take a look at media monkey, but I am hard to please with this type of software so I might end up trying to roll my own, or extend something.

WinAmp has Auto-Tag Powered by GraceNote. That will listen to a song and fill in the tag. Not always 100% right on - It picks 'Best of' albums instead of the original once in a while.

I'm not sure HOW it works exactly, sounds pretty similar to GraceNote. I just drag some songs into it, hit scan, and then it tells me what song it thinks it is. The results are even color coded, green means that it's pretty confident, yellow and red means it is less confident. But I really hate how when it assigns an album it usually assigns a compilation instead of the original album.

But I still have about 500 GB of music to tag and organize, maybe I'll try Winamp with GraceNote.

I don't think so, but most any re-naming program can.

I just use Zune for my collection of 48,000 songs. It works just fine. What do you guys mean when you say you have to "tag and organize" your music files?

I have a good bit of duplicates(about 5000 total), and I never see them.

Musicbrainz picard is good in that there is a good level of uniformity in how things are done.

There are many ways to use the software... you can let it scan the tracks and find a best match and then you clean up the bits it got wrong, or you do the search for the correct album match on the musicbrainz website and add the album (when you install I think it associates the web links with the software) and that way you can then just drag the folder on top of the album that has just been added and it will sort itself out.

For example, lets say you have Album ABC by artist XYZ and there are 10 tracks named Track 01 through to Track 10 without any metadata at all. You start up the musicbrainz picard program, browse to the musicbrainz website and search for XYZ after which it will list matching results, you pick the right artist and then it lists that artists releases. You can view each release to see which one is a match to the one you have (e.g. sometimes there are standard releases with say 10 tracks, an international release with a bonus track or a deluxe edition release with a bonus disc). Once you've identified the correct release you can just select it and it will show up in musicbrainz picard, you then drag that folder over and it will match up. If there are mistakes, you can drag songs individually.

The way I use the program is that I keep the ripped/acquired music in a separate folder to the folder that is shared (the shared folder contains music that is tagged correctly). I set musicbrainz picard up to move the files as they are tagged, as well as renaming the files. The move is done in such a way that it creates a new folder in my shared folder location with the format "Artist \ (year) Album [Format]"

Once it is in my shared folder, I manage the songs through foobar. As picard does not do automated replaygain tag updates on a per album basis, I have to do that additional step later. Once replaygained I will use a plugin in foobar to add albumart from sources like iTunes/Amazon/etc. The addition of cover art concludes the process and is a way for me to determine which has been tagged, checked and replaygained.

The reason for using foobar though is because picard can sometimes assign genre's that I am not happy with (I like to keep stuff in more generic genres) and sometimes the artist information is not to my liking so having the extra foobar step is just the compulsive obsessive in me.

Not to hijack the forum, but have any of you audiophiles experimented with audio enhancers? I was looking at DFX audio enhancer (http://www.fxsound.com/dfx/index.php) for a while. I really liked the improvement in the sound, but I found that it caused all kinds of problems when bringing my HTPC out of S3.. I'd get no audio most of the time and have to reboot the system. Is there anything equivalent to this that is designed for media center?

Try SRS Audio Essentials. It functions as a virtual sound card. Designate it as the default audio device in the Control panel Sound applet and it will process sound for any application. I've not had any problems with SRS AE.

http://www.dts.com/audioessentials/

What's easiest way download missing album art ?

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1451474/how-do-you-deal-with-music#post_22825428

Not the answer I was hoping for.

You mentioned above sometimes a single tool works best. I am wondering what the best single tool for downloading album art is ?

Google.