2. pc-audio
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Feel let down by your audio software choice?

4 years ago when I started ripping my CD collection to a bunch of WAV files onto my hard drives, I researched the options carefully. I chose MusicMatch, which at the time was consistently one of the best-rated jukebox software. Indeed, I find it continues to organize my collection well, and I love the Audio DJ feature.

Unfortunately, MusicMatch is no longer supported. Supposedly it's going to be integrated with Yahoo's product (which I find much inferior). The alternative, iTunes, I use on my Mac but it, too, lacks some of the features that I would want in a music management software.

And, of course, now I have WAV files that MusicMatch organizes well, but iTunes has a limited ability to read the metadata (tags) in those files, which make them difficult to port over to iTunes. To complicate matters, Slim Devices Squeezebox does not support MusicMatch.

What I really want is a product that allows for easy management of large amount of (potentially uncompressed) music data, that can have pieces of that full collection selectively (and automatically) exported to different "libraries" in a compressed format for synchronization with one or more portable players. Is it that hard for the industry to see that there's a niche for that kind of product?

I just feel let down by the leading software in music management.

Michael
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edesilva
768 posts
 
Herman, Michael's right--there are some fields in wav files that can be used for tag data. But, it is completely nonstandard and won't translate.

Michael, not sure whether you are on a Mac or PC platform. I'm guessing Mac, since you mentioned Aperture.

If you are on a Mac, you may be able to import some data into iTunes. Google "doug's applescripts"... You should be able to find one that will at least create iT tags for Artist/Album/Song from the directory structure (you do have them organized in an Artist/Album/Song structure, I hope).

If you are on the PC side, look into Foobar. Its ugly out of the box, but there is a pretty good tutorial on www.lifehacker.com on how to customize it and make it pretty. One of Foobar's features is masstagger, which will allow you to write a little script to do the same kind of thing I mentioned that Applescripting can do.
herman
2,238 posts
 
Well you learn something new everyday. Everything I've ever read says you can't tag a wav file. Since it is the standard format for consumer audio files you would think there would be a standard for the tags.
jamscience
95 posts
 

Michael,

Try using Max to translate your WAV files to an iTunes compatible format. (make sure you have "Use iTunes compatibility mode" selected in Max's preferences) I do not know if it will pick up the meta-data but it's worth a try (it's free).

Web site seems to be down at the moment. Give it a couple of hours. Or try VersionTracker or MacUpdate.

If you need help, just email me.

Chris
bigamp
219 posts
 
Can't tag WAV files with Masstagger in Foobar. But I believe there is a plugin that somehow allows WAV file tagging. I haven't tried the plugin.
sufentanil's avatar
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sufentanil OP
782 posts
 
Thanks Ed, I've been looking into a couple of those programs. Media Monkey actually appears to do a lot of what I need, because it can read MusicMatch's tagged WAV files (consistently), and offers reasonable help with viewing by file and exporting to FLAC (which I believe is the optimal format right now for lossless data storage).

My original point is that we have the technology to inexpensively store the equivalent of thousands of CD's and DVD's and digital photographs. What we need is better software for truly managing and easily retrieving the information, as well as extracting pieces of it to send to one or more portable players, and to allow creating archives of the data as a backup. (Aperture does this very cleanly on the digital photography side with vaults.)

I run all major operating systems in my house (Linux, Mac OS 10.4, and Win XP), so I am open to software running in any of those OS's.

Michael
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