OT: MP3 server menuing software

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

Okay, finally dedicated a PC with a bunch of hard drives to the media room for playback of MP3s. Ripping etc is obviosuly easy. The question arises though, how does one access or even know what he has? must be a killer menuing software out there that allows seaching, jukeboxing, and various style/types of playback. Anybody got favorites to recommend?

 

Thanks,

 

Bill

[Fumblyfingers]

I'm on a Mac as you know...so don't know this stuff...

 

http://www.mediamonkey.com/

 

I can do that on iTunes but I seem to remember you have an aversion to iTunes.

[Fumblyfingers]

Here's some stuff at Versiontracker.

 

http://www.versiontracker.com/php/qs.php?mode=basic&action=search&str=mp3+organizing+software&srchArea=windows&submit=Go

[A String]

There are programs out there, but Windows Media Player will search your hard drives and create a library of songs. From there, you can play out of the library or create "song lists".

[EmptinesOf Youth]

yea i got tired of screwing around with different media players, once the laters windows media player was released there became no need to. it flat out rocks.

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

Interesting. So, can you tell it to randomly play individual songs until you tell it to stop? How hard is it to find things? I have about 2000 CDs and I'd like to get most of them out of the room. How do you keep track of stuff? (I mean, now I just go to the alphabetically arranged shelves...)

 

Bill

[A String]

Well, you can have it rip the CDs to the library and it will keep all of the info (artist, album, song, year etc.). Then, you can organize the info "on the fly", so if you feel like listening to Eric Clapton for example, you can organize by artist or if you feel like listening to tunes from 1977, you can organize them that way.

 

If they are already on the computer, you can run a scan and it will scan your hard drives for music and then add them to the library.

[EmptinesOf Youth]

yea like A said; you can arrange just bout any way you want. song name, genre, year, album, band name, rating (you have to rate it first), recently added, length, filename, language....etc..whatever you want

 

theres a search bar at the top to quickly find something your looking for or whatver

 

you can also watch dvds or anything else on your computer pretty much

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/default.aspx

 

thats the official page for it

 

also you can make your own playlist if you want, then there is a option to have music played "shuffled" so its all random

[stamplicker]

I arrange them by "Artist/Band" and then inside of that I have the "Album/CD" and inside that folder is the music if it's a couble CD/Album then I have Disc 1/ Disc 2 inside the album folder.

 

Example of location on drive

"X:\MP3's\Deep Purple\The Book Of Taliesyn"

"X:\MP3's\Deep Purple\Machine Head"

 

Discographys, unless they release somthign new and mess you all up...

"X:\MP3's\Pink Floyd\Pink Floyd - Dicsography 1967 - 2001\Pink Floyd - 1979 - The Wall\The Wall - Cd 1"

"X:\MP3's\Pink Floyd\Pink Floyd - Dicsography 1967 - 2001\Pink Floyd - 1979 - The Wall\The Wall - Cd 2"

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

I can do that on iTunes but I seem to remember you have an aversion to iTunes.

 

Nah. I had an account a few years ago... NARAS distributed the grammy nominated songs that way. Made great sense to me.

 

No, I don't use itunes, but it is quicktime that I loathe.

 

However in this situation, I just want to rip my CDs to hard drive (well, several of them...) and put the disks away just to reclaim some space. iTunes doesn't really figure in that scenario, unless I wanted a proprietary and copy-protected system under which I would have to pay for the albums all again.

 

A friend of mine has been an itunes nut since the beginning, and she is switching to the Zune... she says that the 80 gig Zunbe is the thing to have. I bought one for Debbie, but she wants me to return it. (shrug...)

Bill

[rw2003]

I remember you started on this music-downsizing quest a while back... You original solution was to just get rid of CDs that you didn't listen to anymore... Glad to hear you want to rip 'em first!!!

 

Not that I'm pushing iTunes but why assume that using it would mean having to pay for the albums all again?

 

My wife uses iTunes to manage her music library. Music goes from CD to iTunes on our PC and then either to her iPod or played back directly from the PC. We've yet to purchase any music from the online iTunes store. (We have a much smaller music collection - I can't vouch for how well iTunes will manage 2,000+ CDs)

 

My only complaint w/ Apple or iTunes so far is that her original iPod Mini only lasted about a year and had to go back for a battery fix. I eventually replaced it with the Nano which seems to be much better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[EmptinesOf Youth]

I will add that until windows media player 11 i might have said itunes was the best around, but i think wmp11 destroys it.

[Soulrock]

However in this situation, I just want to rip my CDs to hard drive (well, several of them...) and put the disks away just to reclaim some space. iTunes doesn't really figure in that scenario, unless I wanted a proprietary and copy-protected system under which I would have to pay for the albums all again.

 

Bill, you can rip any CD you want into iTunes, in multiple formats, including WAV, MP3, AIFF, AAC or Apple Lossless. You definately would not need to repurchase albums you already own.

[Fumblyfingers]

I just want to rip my CDs to hard drive..... iTunes doesn't really figure in that scenario, unless I wanted a proprietary and copy-protected system under which I would have to pay for the albums all again.

 

Bill you set in your prefs how you want to import.. wav, .aiff. mp3 etc like Soul said and you will have no problems. Also you could import as mp3 for some albums that perhaps you were not that concerned about the absolute audio quality. .AIFF files for a song might be 40mb or so, so yeah the larger the better on a player. But if the computer has a nice fat drive you don't need to import everything into a mp3 player.

 

Don't forget to back up as you go, if you do it from the git go it will be so much easier. Perhaps backup to an external Firewire drive and also burn a DVD as well so you have two backups.

 

I like iTunes...it is simple, the mp3 encoder is solid and the burning is good. I tend to use Toast though....I really like it. I have v8 now.

[Kramer Ferrington III.]

There are programs out there, but Windows Media Player will search your hard drives and create a library of songs. From there, you can play out of the library or create "song lists".

 

Yeah, I really like the WMP too.

[A String]

There are programs out there, but Windows Media Player will search your hard drives and create a library of songs. From there, you can play out of the library or create "song lists".

 

Yeah, I really like the WMP too.

 

Yeah, the earlier versions were terrible and I used to use other players, but they've really cleaned it up and made it very functional. I'm quite impressed with how well it works, how easy it is to use and how powerful a tool it has become.

[soggybomb]

i despise windows media player, to break with the rest of the thread. until i got my microsoft zune i was using creative mediasource 5, but now that i have a zune, i use its software. i recommend mediasource highly because it is simple and feature filled. for example: you can view a music library or explorer. it has a good shuffler. in addition it has crossfade and this neat little tool called super-rip which is useful if you have a surround-sound system because it rips your CDs as uncompressed 5.1 surround sound files.

[Kramer Ferrington III.]

Yeah, the earlier versions were terrible and I used to use other players, but they've really cleaned it up and made it very functional. I'm quite impressed with how well it works, how easy it is to use and how powerful a tool it has become.

 

Plus the fact that it's already bundled in as part of Windows so you don't need to install or change a thing.

[BillWelcome Home Studios]

Thanks for the replies, guys.

 

To the iTunes crowd... sorry, I didn't know that about iTunes. In my mind I was sorta melding the store with the application.

 

But the other guys are right, if I already have Windows, why piggy-back another app on top of it? I'll play with that first.

 

Bill

[PBBPaul]

Make sure that you have plenty of RAM. I use WinAmp and have roughly half of what you have on there. I find that it can get pretty poochy after being open a while. I only have 512MB on that PC and I think that's the problem.

[A String]

Make sure that you have plenty of RAM. I use WinAmp and have roughly half of what you have on there. I find that it can get pretty poochy after being open a while. I only have 512MB on that PC and I think that's the problem.

 

I only have 512MBs of ram and it runs ok on mine. You may have other software issues.

[Kramer Ferrington III.]

Make sure that you have plenty of RAM. I use WinAmp and have roughly half of what you have on there. I find that it can get pretty poochy after being open a while. I only have 512MB on that PC and I think that's the problem.

 

I only have 512MBs of ram and it runs ok on mine. You may have other software issues.

 

Yeah, it's strange that the problem should develop gradually. You'd think that it'd consistently use the same amount of memory and that the peaks and troughs of RAM use would be fairly consistent too.

[PBBPaul]

Make sure that you have plenty of RAM. I use WinAmp and have roughly half of what you have on there. I find that it can get pretty poochy after being open a while. I only have 512MB on that PC and I think that's the problem.

 

I only have 512MBs of ram and it runs ok on mine. You may have other software issues.

 

I think it's WinAmp that's the problem. I tried using WMP10 but it crashed hard. I should look into 11. 9 worked pretty well.

[fantasticsound]

WMP has been very good for me, but I prefer to use FreeRip to rip my CD's as WMP has very limited output choices. If you want to rip to WMA it would be fine, however.

 

The beauty of the organization of these programs, if you haven't already figured this out Bill, is you can instantly reorganize or filter your library to suit your immediate needs. You want Rolling Stones? Click the artist tab and your library is now sorted alphabetically, in either A-Z or Z-A (switchable by clicking the heading again) for easy location the Stones.

 

At any time you can simply click the appropriate heading to reorganize by album, song name, etc.

 

The only issue is when you add songs you've recorded. You have to be sure to add ID3 tags with song, artist and other information or they'll end up in a long list of blank or unknown songs with no way to easily organize them. You can add some information within the programs, after the fact, but it's tedious to do so on a large scale.

[Zuben]

Craig is right about Windows Media Player. It is acually a great program.

 

The biggest problem with it is the lack of documentation. Over the years I have found many un documented functions and third party add ons that make the program a great performer.

 

I have two main media programs I use and Media Player is one of them

 

Peace