What's the best software for managing collection?

[mjp_]

I was just wondering between SonicStage, Itunes & Windows Media Player which might be best for managing your digital music collection?

I know SonicStage is necessary for transferring stuff to & from MD/Hi-MD but aside from that, are Itunes or Windows MP more versatile?

[MDane]

I was just wondering between SonicStage, Itunes & Windows Media Player which might be best for managing your digital music collection?

I know SonicStage is necessary for transferring stuff to & from MD/Hi-MD but aside from that, are Itunes or Windows MP more versatile?

I look at it as SS being all I need. In other words, I can put anything I ever plan to listen to on my Atrac equipment in SS. Everything else can simply be kept in regular folders.

If I need to play something Atrac or MP3 to play portably, I simply transfer it to my portable (Sony) device. If I want to play something, say a MP3 podcast, I simply copy it to my $10 8GB flash drive and plug it into the USB slot on the face of my Sony CDX-GT610UI in the car...which will also control my E107 (Psyc), and possibly my M200 (not tried that yet). But maybe your situation is different.

[bobt]

I was just wondering between SonicStage, Itunes & Windows Media Player which might be best for managing your digital music collection?

I know SonicStage is necessary for transferring stuff to & from MD/Hi-MD but aside from that, are Itunes or Windows MP more versatile?

Wouldn't touch itunes with a 1/2 mile pole, WMP is too restrictive, for MD SS is great, for everythng else winamp can't be beat, if you have an ipod mediamonkey works well, although I think winamp will work as well.

Bob

[MDane]

Wouldn't touch itunes with a 1/2 mile pole, WMP is too restrictive, for MD SS is great, for everythng else winamp can't be beat, if you have an ipod mediamonkey works well, although I think winamp will work as well.

Bob

I agree. To add, SS works even better with Sony's flash players...but that is likely just a factor of files being simply transferred rather than written to disc.

I also use WinAmp. I made a point to get an older, more preferred version rather than just get whatever is the newest version. BTW, if I am not mistaken, RP 9.X+ will play OMA files., but those annoying pop-ups are hell, and the interface sure seems to eat up a lot of system resources.

[KJ_Palmer]

For MD/Hi-MD purposes I use SS4.3, and WMP11 for my MP3 collection. Both only really in an organisational capacity for holding the two 'Libraries' and for transferring to the various media, and they both do an adequate job at that. For editing, tagging (for the MP3's) etc first I use other applications such as Audacity and MP3Tag.

[theblueraja]

Sonic Stage is not a good choice! I state this with experience, but only because my library is SO LARGE. I own some 4,000 CDs, and only had a fraction of them in Sonic Stage when it would start to mix up some tracks, lose data, and swap album art with the wrong albums. This is not a limitation of my hard drive, as I had plenty of space. I wiped it clean, started over, and eventually suffered the same result (using 4.3)... so I now only use Sonic Stage as a TEMPORARY space to transfer music to my minidiscs, but NOT as a storage for my library.

If your library is relaltively small, then its not a problem.

[1kyle]

I agree. To add, SS works even better with Sony's flash players...but that is likely just a factor of files being simply transferred rather than written to disc.

I also use WinAmp. I made a point to get an older, more preferred version rather than just get whatever is the newest version. BTW, if I am not mistaken, RP 9.X+ will play OMA files., but those annoying pop-ups are hell, and the interface sure seems to eat up a lot of system resources.

SS has four hideous drawbacks

1) The Library can't Span volumes -- so unless you can organise all your music on to a single disc (also not always a good idea since if the disc gets erased, broken or stolen then you've lost your entire library).

2) the database is a proprietary format -- I don't mean the ATRAC music (or content itself) but the actual data base - so if it gets corrupted you can't really undo it.

3) You have to use the built in Backup / restore program for backing it up and restoring -- annoying thing also on restore you have to connect to the internet where the program will check for any DRM content.

4) you can't "Share" the database accross systems so its no good as a "Music Server" - won't work for example with XBOX, Squuezebox or other media streaming devices.

I save all my music as FLAC tracks in my own "Albums" spread across multiple volumes and store the "addresses" in a MySQL database. When I want a track or Album the MySQL database just points my web browser at the address and then I can play it, retrieve it or do whatever I want with it. This way I can span as many volumes as I like including Network shares.

I use SS only for uploading MD recordings in WAV which I then convert to FLAC and store in my own database.

If I want to copy music to MD I burn the tracks I want to an ISO image (Nero will burn FLAC directly to an audio CD, then I mount this ISO as a Virtual CD using Virtual Clone drive or similar software for the mount process.

I then transfer to MD using Simple Burner. I sometimes use SS for editing the tracks on the MD but that's all. SB downlaods at 256 kbs in Hi-SP which is fine for portable listening.

If I want SP recordings I burn my Virtual CD to a CD-RW and then use a deck to copy it to SP at 2 or 4X (real time). If your deck doesn't read CD-RW's then CD-R's only cost cents per piece -- do it like that or using your audio streamer use the optical out into the optical in on the MD recorder in real time -- no big deal as I don't tend to make a huge amount of MD's any more -- just a new compilation every now and then which I can easily do in Real Time -- SP is still the best format IMO although HI-SP is pretty good,

SP maintains compatability with my MD decks.

I never keep any music in the SS library.

These days of cheap large disks it might be worthwhile keeping everything as WAV rather than FLAC but for me "The Jury's still out on that issue.

This to me seems the most flexible system - maintaining MD's usefulness side by side with the more modern technology such as Audio Streaming etc etc.

To build up the MySQL database just devise a few tables with some foreign key fileds linking them together. Although you can store music (and Video) files in the data base itself as BLOB's (Binary Large OBjectS) it's better to store the file name and directory where the music track exists in the data base as a reference to the music itself.

The Sql is simple -- you need such things as album, track title, artist, year etc etc. Anybody can do it --MySQL is Free and excellent documentation. Works on Linux AND Windows.

Just devise some simple Queries on what you want to retrieve and your web browser will do the rest. There's loads of good GUI's for MySQL and a load of "Canned Queries" that you can use as a template -- you don't need to be a pro IT developer for this sort of stuff.

You'll also need some functionality for updating the data base if you delete, change, move or add files -- fairly simple as the application is not complex and you won't normally have more than 1 concurrent user i.e YOU.

As a Bonus here you can even store all this stuff on a LINUX server. The data and database itself doesn't have to be on Windows -- the Windows machine is just the client.

Finally by having "Discrete Music tracks" you can just drag and drop these to other players etc without any further processing.

Getting stuff out of SS to copy to another player was always a hassle and loss of quality in transcoding a lossy format to another lossy one.

FLAC like WAVE is lossless.

Cheers

-K

Edited February 21, 2009 by 1kyle