Music Management Utilities?

[Jeff V]

For the past month or so, I've been making a concerted effort to rip my CDs to MP3s and store them on my hard drive. Already, though, it really hasn't helped prevent a problem I had before with redundant purchases.

Can anyone recommend good cataloging software so I can more easily manage this mess? A good one should have the ability to seach what I have on my hard drive and populate itself without manual input. Additional bonus if it can repair some incomplete tags affixed by MusicMatch.

Thanks!

[Kelric]

J. River Media Center (30-day free trial available) is what I use. Assuming you have all your music in one central folder (and then in sub folders, though it doesn't matter then but I do) you can just tell it to import everything in that one central folder and all your music is added in automatically (though it takes a while). If they're not in a big central folder than it's just more manual work for you, but it still gets the job done.

Once things are added in you can find a lot of tag information by going to the Tools menu, Library Tools, and then Lookup Track Info From YADB. They have information for most of the music I listen to though I do run into stuff they don't know about at times. Then of course you can submit the track info to them yourself once you enter it in.

You can make all sorts of playlists yourself and it also has a bunch of default lists that it creates like your most recently played, your most listened to (sub categories of 100 most heard, haven't heard in a year, or listened to today), all of your highly rated songs, it'll make random lists for you, etc.

Plus it also gives you a bunch of options for sorting through your library on it's default screen and lets you arrange how it's sorted. Right now mine shows me the name of the song, the artist, the album, what track # it is on the album, the duration, the rating, when it was last played, how many times it's ever been played and it's bitrate. Within those I have it sort songs by artist first so all of an artist's work is together. Then it sorts them by album so each album is in alphabetically order within that artist's discography and then it sorts by track number in each album. If there are no track numbers it'll just sort by name, same as if there was no album info. All of it is pretty customizable.

I do know there is a hack out there that allows you to use the Media Center for free once the trial expires, but I don't know where it is or how it works or any of that.

Edit to add - I haven't upgraded to their latest version yet, so I can't comment on how or if that is different at all from the one I use. They're on version 10 right now and I think I use version 9.

[Lee]

I used to use Media Center until iTunes came along. iTunes is perfect for sorting music, and it will even organize your music folder if you want it to.