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How can I listen to and MANAGE my mp3 music collection/playlists over the internet?

gummo — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:12:24 -0800

How can I listen to and MANAGE my mp3 music collection/playlists over the internet? I have a large music collection (all mp3) at home that is pretty well organized into folders and properly tagged (finally). Nothing is really in playlists, and that is the next task I've set for myself. I need to organize my music into playlists so I can just click a playlist during a party, or while I'm kicking around the house. Shuffle just doesn't work on my collection. Too many whole albums with plenty of weird stuff popping up.

Organizing this music into playlists is proving very time consuming. Listening to thousands of songs and occasionally adding one to one playlist or another just isn't something I have been able to make much time for. It occurred to me that since I listen to music at work all day long, I could be accomplishing it there.

Bringing the music to work, even in batches, isn't really that feasible. What I need to be able to do is stream it to myself at work, by folder or artist or album, and occasionally add a song to one of my playlists (preferrably not by jotting it down in notepad and adding it at home later).

How can I do this?

[Requirements/limitations]

For the server at home, I have a few windows boxes (vista, win7, and xp), and could, if absolutely necessary, run a linux box or something.

For the client at work, I have an XP box. Web interface would be best. Some sort of small, non-intrusive windows app would be ok too.

I have used and don't really like Itunes, and prefer to avoid it if possible.

I use Mediamonkey at home to manage my music collection and like it very much.

I prefer open source or freeware, but am not opposed to buying something if it will do exactly what I need.

I prefer to avoid any kind of cloud storage or uploading of my music. My machine at home should be the server. No online server being involved would be best. I'm not interested in sharing, or public social music nonsense, or scrobbling, or music recommendations, or auto-tagging, or anything like that. I just want a client/server app to manage my music library.

I'm leaning towards Orb, but haven't tried it. It seems like overkill, and the sharing etc... aspect of it has turned me off a bit. I'm curious if there are better alternatives. However, if anyone has any direct experience with Orb (specifically with playlists), please let me know.

Thanks.

One-potato, two-potato, delete!

planetthoughtful — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:32:12 -0800

Is there an 'independent' (i.e., using software on a Win-Vista PC) way to determine which music file is of better sound quality? Whenever I go on one of my music library purges, I often encounter a situation where I have a song in, say, 192kbps MP3 format and 128kbps AAC format. Or, the same song in 3 or more different formats. Usually I end up going back and forth between the different 'versions' of the song, to see if one 'sounds' better -- i.e., clearer and more rich in sound definition. I've always wondered if there was a more precise way of comparing two copies of the same song, in different formats, to determine which one should sound better? Even if the sound difference to me is negligible, it would help me make a choice that would feel more informed, rather than randomly picking one and deleting it. Any thoughts, hivemind?

Best way to listen to my music library through a web browser.

jeff_w_welch — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:12:39 -0800

What is the best way to listen to my music library in a web browser? I have a music server (Windows XP, iTunes) and a variety of potiental listeners (Vista, Linux, PS3, etc.), the lowest common denominator is a Web Broswser, how can I listen to (and maybe even manage) my music library across all these clients? Is there a good iTunes web interface out there? I'm not opposed to using a different music manager.

Should I renew my MP3Tunes membership, or is there something better now?

SlyBevel — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:54:47 -0800

Should I renew my MP3Tunes membership, or is there something better now? I've had an MP3Tunes locker since they were first offered.

I use the service mostly for offsite backup of my audio collection, but there are a couple of problems with that:

The MP3Tunes uploading utility, Oboe, has always been slow and crashy. And even if it were fast, 200GB of audio takes a long time to transfer.

I keep my collection in a well-groomed folder heirarchy that makes things easy to find. If I did need to restore my collection from MP3Tunes, I fear that I'd end up with 100k+ files in one folder.

The kludginess of Oboe has deterred me from uploading much of my collection. If I re-up for another year, I'll finish uploading it all, but I won't like it.

Is there a good option out there to replace my MP3Tunes account?

I want offsite backup of my audio files.

I want it to allow restoring the collection EXACTLY as it appears, with the folder tree intact.

I want a web interface that will allow me to play my files anywhere. (If "anywhere" includes Opera or IE on my PocketPC, so much the better.)

I want the upload utility to be fast and easy to use. If it's just an FTP login, I'd be tickled.

I want to pay a flat fee per year for, say, 250GB of space, or unlimited space (MP3Tunes claims to be unlimited). For something really fully-featured, I might be willing to pay $100/year.

I've already given hard drives with my data on them to an offsite friend, but I really like the web access utility of MP3Tunes. To be honest, I've been turned off of using Oboe for a while now, so if you're using MP3Tunes and you like it, by all means, re-convert me.

(Sorry for my shitty HTML.)

Make Winamp work for me

schroedinger — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 17:13:27 -0800

Winamp playlist help. I have a bunch of playlists in Winamp, but frequent re-organization of my music directory has broken all the links. Is there a way for Winamp to find the new locations of the files so I don't have to re-assign hundreds of songs, or, barring that, is there a smarter music library program that will do the work and can import Winamp playlists?

Classical music CD library from scratch?

contessa — Fri, 12 Dec 2003 16:02:43 -0800

What's the best way to build a classical music CD library from scratch? Where the heck do I start? [more] I've always enjoyed listening to classical music, whether it be orchestral or piano or quartet.
Problem is, I know what I like when I hear it, but I'm terrible at identifying composers.

To me, the idea of buying classical music is somewhat intimidating -- did I get the right composer? Is this the 3rd symphony the one I like, or is it the 5th? And knowing which orchestras/artists are top-notch and which ones are merely passable is even further outside my scope of knowledge. I feel I ought to be wary of "compilation"-type recordings.

I found a starter list here -- does anybody have a good suggestion where to begin? I'm pretty much open to anything, even 'modern' classical composers.