Programs for File management - HELP

Kublakhan;
You truly understand my concern. Although for now, whatever program I choose will be fine, I am most concerned about the future. I guess I should stop worrying so much, and make some decisions. I will give media monkey a shot. I will let you know what my thoughts are after I get up and running. Let me know what your expert contact thinks as well. Warmest regards and have a great weekend! Gerry

G, here's the deal. There should be no reason for one player program to sound better than the next...they all access the same music file on your hard drive. You can change players any time and bring over your playlists and ID tags like genre, etc. The expert I know uses Media Monkey because it's the most convenient for him. I use it and also find it to be pretty simple.

Bottom line is that the only thing to concern yourself with is burning the cd properly. If you set up EAC correctly you're fine. So, like you said, just make a few decisions and start enjoying your music.

Good luck.

Interesting thread. It sounds like people here haven't discovered tagging software. There is never a need to rerip a disc as Kublakhan seems to be suggesting. I would suggest Tag & Rename, it supports id3, ape, flac and multiple other tagging formats. I believe it costs a few bucks, but you will likely find that you use this program frequently. It has a gentle learning curve and is frankly invaluable when it comes to maintaining a digital library.

Kublakhan is correct when he states that it really doesn't matter which playback software you use in terms of sound (asuming asio or directsound v2.5 or something similar is being used). However, not all players are created equal when it comes to leaving your tags alone. Windows Media Player and the newest version of foobar are currently the worst offenders in this category usurping itunes old spot (although itunes now has plenty of options to turn tag screwing options off). However, it's all really a matter of preference--feel free to use whatever floats your boat. Just make sure to write protect your audio files before chucking them into some player's library.

As far as ripping is concerned, EAC is your only option if you care about audio at all.

As far as a library for managing and browsing your collection is concerned. 1000 cd's isn't large enough to pose a problem for any library that I'm aware of. Eventually, as your collection grows, you'll want to find a library that doesn't search via tag (as most do) but rather cache's the database to a text file and then searches that instead. It is much much faster, but at this stage of the game, largely irrelavant. I'm currently at just over 6,000 albums in FLAC--I ended up having to write a separate program to meet my browsing needs.

Ultravoilet, I found that when I tagged a cd after I burned it the changes wouldn't show up in the actual file on my hard drive. This is why I thought you had to burn it over. FOr example, I put a Coltrane CD in my drive and brought up EAC. The track titles weren't listed and I burned it anyway. Then I opened Media Monkey, inserted the cd and tagged the cd using "tag from Amazon." The CD titles came up and everything looked good. Media Monkey shows the tracks listed each time I open up that cd, however, when I go to my hard drive and open up the cd the track titles still aren't listed.

Any advice?

Kublakhan, what format did you rip too? Some formats, like WAV, do not actually support tagging in any standardized way. In my mind, a "tag" is a data element that is actually part of the music file, hence portable as the file is copied from one place to another, and recognized as part of a the file's inherent format. There are programs that allow you to create information associated with a file, but quite often that information resides in a database file unique to the player or file manager. That is almost always the case for WAV.