What Music Library Software do you use?
 

For the longest time, I never used any music software to organize my music collection...I didn't even use playlists or anything - I just organized things in folders. About a year ago I decided to try iTunes for organizing my music, and I really enjoyed it. It was really perfect for my needs.....Until my music collection breached the 10,000 songs mark, at which point iTunes became so slow and laggy, and took up so much CPU, I decided to find something else.

I tried Songbird, which is very similar to iTunes, but the story was the same...Too laggy, and generally slow.

So I moved to Windows Media Player, which was very excellent - speedy, nice features - almost perfect - except for compatibility issues. Since I'd been using iTunes for so long, a lot of my music is in M4A format, which WMP doesn't support. The same goes for FLAC, and APE, which are also common in my collection. I can convert these lossless files into MP3s or M4As without losing any significant quality, but I don't want to convert an already lossy 8 MB M4A file into a 24 MB MP3 just so that I can keep the quality - it's a huge waste of space. So I abandoned WMP.

Right now, I'm using Foobar2000 since it accepts all music formats and is very speedy. It's still not perfect, as it's library functionality is no where near as good as the other three I tried before it, but I'm still tweaking it to see what I can improve.

So I want to know what members of the TFP use for their collections. I'll accept any advice, and especially welcome solutions for a 15,000+ songs, 80 GB music collection.

iTunes. It's simple. No frills.


That and I have to use it cause of the whole iPod thing.

I really did like iTunes, but it was unbearable - at times it was taking 90-100 % of my CPU, and my PC isn't exactly crap either. I still have to use it for my iPod too. I usually listen to music while doing homework/studying, or just browsing the net - all of which are horrendously slow thanks to iTunes.

Have you tried WinAmp lately? They've been doing a good job keeping up with the times. Their library features are pretty comprehensive if I remember. I was a pleasantly surprised to see that it can read from an iPod, which was good considering I had some music "stranded" on it. Meh.

Not sure of WinAmp's performance, though.

VLC maybe?

I use iTunes. Is anyone surprised?

Isn't that lacking library-management features?

No. But I'm sure iTunes runs like a dream on a Mac compared to the PC version. I've heard they are quite different programs. Have you seen the difference?

I prefer to use my operating system's filesystem. Keepin' it real, if you will. I'm not a fan of iTunes (even for my iPod) simply because of the lack of handy management features. If i want to permanently delete one track from my iPod, i have to search the master library list for it, then delete it. I'd rather be able to go to my particular playlist (I sort my music in playlists titled wither by artist/album or genre...i'm too lazy to keep up with ID3 tags), right-click on the track and select "delete".

I've been using WinAmp every so often to get music on to my iPod and I'm liking its library interface much more. Plus, they seem to be more in-tune with what techie people desire in music management. Under Linux (my main OS), i'm using GTKPod to copy music, and will start to use it for library management shortly.

I've not had the opportunity to use iTunes on Windows as much as on Mac, but when I did use it on Windows I didn't have any problems.

I meant to ask, but how large are your music collections? I didn't have a problem with iTunes until I breached 10,000.

I'll look into WinAmp. I've used it before and I did enjoy it, but I never imported my entire library into it. I'll definitely give it a run.

VLC's library isn't all that great, and that's really the main feature I'm looking for.

neflyte, that stupid feature in iTunes pissed me off to no end - I would delete songs in the playlist, then forget which ones I deleted, so I would have abunch of music which would stay in my iPod.

Have you checked the new FB2K with the feature to manipulate the GUI? Also, I have set a lot of custom media sorting profiles in it... I've never had any troubles or drawbacks using it.

When I would collect music in my college dorm, I had over 20,000 songs (100GB)... listened to a lot and decided "Why? Most this is crap." Now my collection is about 1000 songs of my CDs.

Been using Foobar 2000 for quite some time. With all the GUI changes I've made to it, it manages everything for me perfectly.

I use my filesystem as well... and I never import to anything other than MP3. Sure, you might lose a little in quality, but I know I'll always be able to use the files in any player, hardware or software, probably for as long as we have computers.

Can you define what you mean by "your filesystem?"

Tried this, didn't like it because it reminded me of iTunes. Regardless of how it made me feel, it still has features comparable to FB2K.

Since I can't stand seeing people using iTunes, I tell them about Media Monkey and they usually like it more than iTunes.

How anyone can use a media player that doesn't have a legitimate "now playing" list is beyond me.

Meaning I organise my MP3s on my hard drive using a directory hierarchy: first by genre, then by artist, then by album. Then the MP3 files are stored within each album.

AH! I see now. I was thinking you somehow used your windows search feature or some nonsense.

Yeah, I have a specific folder hierarchy as well for my music.

Windows XP's search feature is about as efficient as looking for a friend's phone number in a telephone directory which has been organised in phone number order.

There is an easy way around the following problem:
If you use the keyboard instead, you can permanently delete a track in iTunes from a playlist. On the Mac, it is option-delete. On Windows, I think it is control-delete. iTunes will give you a warning message before you do it anyway.

i use iTunes on my PC. i just wish that Cover-Flow wasn't such a memory whore. i literally can't run anything else if i use Cover-Flow, and that's on a Dual-Core laptop

I use mediamonkey. It doesn't bog down my system the way that Itunes used to. (Though lately it has been doing something strange with the volume of my songs- frequent ups and downs like someone is messing with the dial).

530 GB spread over 2 hard drives, running iTunes -- on a Mac.

iTunes. Started with it on my iMac. Works great on my XP laptop.

Why mess with perfection?

I'm using iTunes on XP on several computers.

i just learned about Floola which was very handy in helping me transfer and liberate some of my library across PCs. I'm digging it enough to put it on my USB drive, since there is no need to install anything. It also is cross platform for Linux, Windows, Mac.

I couldn't find half of my stuff without cuesheet processing. foobar it is. I actually did need to use Windows search before I started using foobar.