Music - encoding, album art, IDTags, players, etc.

[Slayer]

Well I had a wonderful HDD logic board failure on [RAID2] which was a RAID-0. I think I can recover my data(Music, Personal Docs, and other essential files.). I'm waiting on an Advanced RMA from Western Digital. But if that falls through then I will be needing to completely redo all of my Music.

I would like to know how you guys organize and play your music. What codec do you like your music to be? What player do you use? How do you manage IDTags? Where do you get your Album Art? If you have an Ipod or portable music device, Whats your method of sending music to it?

My Current Methods:
Codec: FLAC and MP3. Apple Lossless for the Ipod if I'm converting from FLAC.
IDTags: EasyTAG 2.1. Allows tagging from filename, foldername, and online DB. It will also generate an m3u playlist for each album.
Player: WMP11 or MPC-HC when on my PC.
Portable Music: Ipod 60gb with Itunes for adding music to it.
Album Art: Google Image Search. Hit and miss most of the time.

My goal would be to have all or most of my favs in FLAC and the rest in MP3. So can anyone help me out? I just want to cut down on the time and overall management needed to do all of this.

[shadowfox]

Codec: MP3 or Apple Lossless
IDTags: MusicMatch Jukebox 10
Player: iTunes
Portable: 16GB iPod Touch
Album Art: MusicMatch Jukebox 10 w/ Google Image Search

I have never found an easier ID3 tagger/ Album Art Manager than MMJB10. It's shitty software, buggy, crashes a lot and HATES vista, but its tagger and art manager are so intuitive that I find it irreplaceable.

With MMJB10 you can quick-tag by groups, so example, an entire list of songs by artist can be tagged from filename for artist/song, and then cntrl+click select for all the songs and tag/art them by album.

Good luck finding the old MMJB v10, and finding a key for the Pro version though. You need Pro for group tagging and it's useless without.

[Crayon]

Tag&Rename is the best tagger out there. I have tried a bunch, but I think I am going to stick with Tag&Rename. It does tags from amazon (.com, .de .jp, etc), tracktype, and freedb. Also, if you get the ID info from amazon it will download the album art to the directory as folder.jpg. It will also do directory renaming based off of ID information on the mp3s in the directory. This is really nice if you are OCD about music organization like me. You can also use most Windows Explorer functions inside the program, so if you need to delete directories, move files, etc. you don't have to open another window. This has been really nice for me because I am currently deleting all of my .mp3s with anything less than 192kb bitrate and I can just sort by bitrate, then delete like crazy.

For album art you can use Album Art Aggregator.

[Slayer]

Thanks for both of those suggestions Apoc. I will just have to find the reg info. EasyTag seems to be a good free alternative but its missing the album art tagging. EasyTag does a better job for the playlists because it does autonaming from the artist and album title rather than having to type them into the playlists like in Tag&Rename.

I havent had to use the db and tagging from amazon. For the most part the tracks i have in flac are well done its just the file and folder structure i have to edit.

My preferred structure is:

Artist\year - Album\01 - Artist - Title.flac

Whats yours? I like organized music. My past organization was just artist\album with almost no playlists or idtags. Most of it was obtained/ripped several years ago and just sounds like crap. I will probably be splitting Lossless and mp3 into two seperate directories.

If I end up recovering my music I'm sure i will have tons of work on my hands for the mp3's. I successfully Idump, dumped my ipod but that has its own naming challenges due to completely empty ID tags making the unknown artist folder abnormally large. And none of my album art is saved on the ipod. So if the recovery fails im in a world of hurt.

[phx]

THis is mayhap off topic a bit but why would you trust a raid-0 for storage purposes? Im using raid-0 to run my OS and apps and stuff for speed increase but storage no way.

Anyway...i use
codec - mp3 for its universality, 320kbps
player - winamp, wife uses itunes
tag manager - fixtunes, you can get it in standalone or there is a version that attaches itself to itunes
never bothered with the album art

also MP3 gain is great for adjusting default song volumes stored in mp3's. ever put a song on your mp3 player and find you can barely hear it?

[Slayer]

THis is mayhap off topic a bit but why would you trust a raid-0 for storage purposes? Im using raid-0 to run my OS and apps and stuff for speed increase but storage no way.

At the time I created the RAID-0 I was only interested in having as much space as possible. My only options at the time were JBOD, RAID-0 and RAID-1. I decided 1Tb was going to serve my needs better than 500GB. Here we are 3 years later and the drive failed. I underestimated Western Digital's build quality at that time. All my other drives are seagate and they are all running strong for now.

Thats why im upgrading the file server right now. Im adding an 8-port SATAII RAID-0,1,0+1,5,6 card with 6x1TB drives for a RAID-5 configuration. I wont risk my data anymore.

So keep an eye on the buy sell trade forum. I plan to get rid of a few drives.

I guess we should also note Ripping practices.

My Current Ripping Config:
dbpoweramp 13.2
-with DSP effects where needed. It can also do GAIN and other things.
-Multi Core support for encoding multiple tracks at a time.
-FLAC, MP3, WMA, Apple Lossless, M4A, Ogg, and every other codec for audio.

It has a great batch converter and ripper which will check for errors and verify written audio.

How have the recent versions of winamp been? Its been years since i checked it out.

[shadowfox]

I underestimated Western Digital's build quality at that time.

Off topic but that is weird to me. I have been using WD drives for as long as I can remember and have yet to see one fail. My old Win95 box (classic games, hell yeah) still has the original 1.2GB Caviar running strong.

[Crayon]

Off topic but that is weird to me. I have been using WD drives for as long as I can remember and have yet to see one fail. My old Win95 box (classic games, hell yeah) still has the original 1.2GB Caviar running strong.

I have a feeling Dan is moving a lot more data than you, but I could be wrong.

[phx]

How have the recent versions of winamp been? Its been years since i checked it out.

this tell ya enough? It doesn't utilize multi cores for ripping but I myself don't rip enough cd's to be concerned with that.

[Slayer]

@shadowfox
24/7 use non-stop for 3 years. Accessed intermittently during the day for downloads and for all of my music and personal docs. Those drives also ran a bit hotter than i would like. I also managed to keep them over 80% full at all times. Periodically moving the data to other storage as things filled up. Those drives were under constant stress and probably got just a bit more wear and tear than your Win95 box with 1.2GB.

The New config:
6x1TB WD Caviar Black in RAID-5 on Areca ARC-1220
2x1.5TB Seagate in RAID-1 on Areca ARC-1220
4x500GB Seagate in RAID-5 on NVIDIA Onboard
CyberPower 1300VA 800w Battery Backup

Total: 8TB of Redundant storage. 14 HDD's total in the server at this time. Room for about 6 more If i get another raid card. For the next LAN you'll only have 2 shares to worry about, RAID and Audio.

@phx
Well it looks like the encoding options are new and a few new formats have been added and the UI looks much the same. But I was really looking for your opinion of winamp as a player and library manager.

EDIT:
Well Im doing away with apple lossless for 320kbps MP3. I simply cant fit enough on my ipod in lossless.

[Crayon]

EasyTag does a better job for the playlists because it does autonaming from the artist and album title rather than having to type them into the playlists like in Tag&Rename.

Highlight songs or click subfolder, then ctrl+alt+s, instant playlist.

Or if you just want the files you are currently working with, then ctrl+alt+q.

Or they are the Lightning Bolt icons.

[Slayer]

Thats right. I found that today while I was working on some more FLAC songs. I also found the toolbar customize which lets you add icons to the toolbar and set custom keyboard shortcuts. Tag&Rename is my only renamer now. EasyTag just seems more redundant now that ive had a change to run Tag&Rename for a while. The Album Art Aggregator is also working great.

Im just about to start up Itunes and completely wipe my ipod. That way I can start fresh with clean playlists and 320kbps MP3.

[Slayer]

I just found foobar2000, after playing with the theme that came with it I did a google and found DarkOne. The theme requires some configuration but It does a shitload more than any other player Ive used. I have it sending my track info to LastFM and it will also get my recommendations.

Crayon which player do you use? I seem to remember something that looked different, but that could have been your windows theme.

[Crayon]

I've been using Foobar2000 for a little over a year.

Good stuff.

To expand on that; foobar isn't just a music player. It is a platform, basically anything any other player can do foobar will eventually get since it has a very dedicated base building components for it. It is also 100% customizable. I stick with the default theme because I like it to look like my Windows style, but you can make it look really weird with themes.

[Slayer]

Do you have a specific layout that you like on the Default UI? I played with it for a while and couldn't come up with anything decent.

I like having a large mode with lots of information for when I'm looking for something to listen to. But after that i want a compact view for when I'm browsing or working.