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Playing/Organizing Your MP3 Collection: What Software Do You Use?

N

Nighthawk69

Golden Member
Hi there...

I have been fooling with the new Windows Media Player in WinXP as well as the new RealONE Player lately trying to see which one I like better after deciding to use one of these instead of WinAMP for their extra "features" such as showing the album cover, having radio channels, etc., all-in-one. It looks like I'll probably be using Windows Media Player because RealONE Player keeps crashing my MP3/fileserver after playing a few songs and I've never had that happen before, eventhough I think RealONE is a superior program.

This got me wondering, what software does everyone else use to organize and play their MP3 and media collections?
 
i use winamp to play mine cause i dont like win media in 2k. af for internet radio i use real one to find the sites and then i just stream them im Mp3 format and play themin winamp also. save it as a list and its easy to get to whenever i want it
 
Nighthawk, I have been wondering the same thing, I have about 40GB worth of MP3s (all legal my own rips) residing on my server and I like Winamp as a player but I cant organize or do anything else like that with it so I have tried most of the "big" players like WMP, Real Jukebox and Media Jukebox, and I am currently running Musicmatch Jukebox, it seeems to be the fastest at cataloging all these files and the sound is good to.
 
I use musicmatch jukebox too. Why do all "jukebox" type mp3 players (musicmatch, mediaplayer7) suck so much memory? Musicmatch seems a little better at memory than media player, but it is still slow. If I am only listening to a song here or there, I use winamp, MUCH less taxing on my system.
 
So far, so good with MusicMatch Jukebox 7.0! It seems to be playing nicely with the server but it takes forever to catalog my music from the server, hehe... 1,678 MP3's total! 🙂
 
i must not be as organized as others, but since i (legally) rip all my own MP3s, i save the CDDB track names and put each album in a named folder. then, when i load the entire root directory of MP3s, winamp automatically sorts them by file location which also happens to be artist->track name because of the way i ripped them. then, i just save the playlist in winamp so i can always go back to that state. pressing "J" in playlist window allows me to jump to any song, so i never found a need to use a jukebox.

also, i used that winxp tip that allows you to save the album cover as the folder picture. looks really nice!
 
Another vote for good filesystem organization.

I've got my main folders broken into genres like "rock", "jazz", "classical", "sountracks", etc. Then I have artist folders underneath those, and album or work folders underneath those.

You can make Playlists in Winamp to cross-link any files that aren't together in your file organization but you like to play together. For instance, I've got an "Island Music" playlist that plays songs from the soundtrack to South Pacific, Cal Tjader's Jazz Masters album, and some Les Baxter. These are not located together in my file hierarchy, but that's the magic of playlists!

Also, as long as you rip with something like Exact Audio Copy, you can have all of your mp3's named in a consistent manner. After MUCH changing and experimentation, I've decided that the best naming strategy for MY mp3 devices is

[Artist Name] - [Track #] [Track Name]

For instance,
Pink Floyd - 01 Hey You

There is no good explanation for why programs like RealJukebox and MusicMatch Jukebox are such resource hogs. They CERTAINLY don't do anything that should be so resource-intensive. Winamp is so lightweight that I could play MP3's just fine on my old P-133. Try doing THAT with MusicMatch or Realplayer!
 
After playing with MusicMatch a while longer, I have decided to go back to WinAMP for its simplicity and efficiency... the jukeboxes are beginning to annoy me now for some unexplainable reason 😉

I enjoy seeing what other people use though!!
 
I do the exact same thing as kylef. I have artists, classical, pop, alternative, rock, classic rock, oldies, etc.
all of my mps are named artist-song name.mp3 and each artists songs are in a subfolder of the appropriate type of music.

For those into linux and a semi have a clue people with a spare computer. A cool MP3 jukebox over your lan (I do this at work) is put in SME server 5.1.2 and click the blade mp3 jukebox...voila installed and you got a nice streaming mp3 jukebox.
e-smith.org The .iso to download is only like 250MB I believe.
 
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