mp3 music management

October 5, 2005 6:20 AM

How flexible is my new mp3 library?

I've bought a Sony 20Gb NW-HD5 and transferred all my CD's via PC onto it. This has created a 'Library' on my pc. Now I want to buy my wife an mp3 player.
Will it be easy enough to utilise that library or is it exclusive to the mp3 player I have or only Sony mp3 players?

Also, we are moving abroad soon, so I want to download the library to a portable hard-disk to transport. Is this a good idea, or can I just re-install SonicStage at my destination and d/load all the tracks from the player?

posted by Frasermoo to computers & internet (5 comments total)

How are the songs encoded, are they mp3s or that Atrac sony proprietary format? Assuming the 'library' is just a directory on your hard-drive, and has mp3s in it, there is nothing preventing you from sharing them with your wife or copying them to a HD.
posted by signal at 6:50 AM on October 5, 2005

Well, if these are just MP3's, then they are simply files stored somewhere on your PC. I would ignore the music library application, and just organise the music into folders yourself. This way you can move them where you want, just like picture files or documents.

Of course it's more difficult and time consuming. There may be a way to do what you want within the confines of the music library application. Which application is it?
posted by parallax7d at 6:52 AM on October 5, 2005

I started converting a few to ATRAC but quickly thought that could be limiting, so all are stored as mp3's.

The software I am using is SonicStage. It does the job but I wouldn't rave about it.
posted by Frasermoo at 7:13 AM on October 5, 2005

If you have a PC, and you're not trying to sync to an iPod or some other non-UMS device, your options are pretty open. My bias is to do what parallax7d suggests, and take care to make sure that the files are arranged in hierarchical folders in a way that makes sense to you -- e.g., artist > album, then all the individual song files.

Hopefully you've set up your ripping software to name the song files such that the files will fall into album track order when you do an alphabetic sort (e.g., "Divinyls - Essential - 06 - Boys In Town.mp3") -- I think a lot of the smaller flash devices still don't give you a lot of play sequence options. (But if your ripper creates playlist files, that's probably moot.)
posted by lodurr at 10:49 AM on October 5, 2005

There's a bunch of software that will help you organize your music collection. My personal fave is Tag&Rename.
posted by signal at 10:58 AM on October 5, 2005