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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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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
edesilva
768 posts
 
I've actually switched over to Apple Lossless myself, but I gather that is pretty similar structurally to FLAC anyway. My fear with FLAC is the lack of external support--good user community, but the majors haven't thrown any weight behind it, so it leaves me feeling like I could be stranded in a few years.

I hear you w.r.t. managing information. There are so many things I want in a player that I don't get--even things as simple as being able to create genres that span multiple tags--classify Los Lobos as "Rock" and "Hispanic," for example.

Remember also that you are still, FBOW, on the leading edge. The WAV file was created largely as a simple PC file package for storing straight PCM data. People really weren't thinking about how those would be used 5 or 10 years later. They figured it out at the MP3 stage, but it was too late for WAV users.

@bigamp, I haven't messed with foobar recently (or masstagger). I may have misspoke anyway--I probably meant to say that masstagger will create metadata entries for its own database from the file structure. Strictly speaking, its not a tag, since it isn't part of the file, but foobar has a database and lets you store metadata about WAVs, right?
bigamp
219 posts
 
Edesilva-Not sure. I use WAV files and would like to tag them (or tags into a DB) in Foobar with masstagger. But I've not been able to do so, and have been told it's not possible. Basically, masstagger outputs an error that WAV is an improper file type. If it is possible, even by storing the tags in a database, I'd like to know how to do this as well.
edesilva
768 posts
 
I swear foobar built a database. Like I said, its been a long time. I figured it was built like iTunes, which reads the information out of the tags into an XML database, then supplements the database with non-tag items like album art, last played, etc.

I just poked around with google... Have you tried this:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t35661.html
bigamp
219 posts
 
Hmm...That's what I tried and it didn't work. I'll try again this weekend and post a reply.

In this thread, I'm av newbee (appropriate):

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=54193
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