Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with sonos

How do I nicely organize my library of 80 gigs of MP3s?

Nelson — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:07:05 -0800

How do I nicely organize my library of 80 gigs of MP3s? My goal is to get my new Sonos system working nicely and presenting a tidy library of music. Ideally with cover art. It'd also be nice if iTunes would work reasonably well with my music collection, but iTunes is so awful I'm willing to write it off.

I've got 80 gigs of MP3s I've accumulated over the last ten years. They're all organized neatly in directories like "Genre / Artist / Album Name / 01 TrackName.mp3". The m3u tags, though, are a mess, with lots of variations and mistakes. And I have no cover art.

For years I've played my music in WinAmp or via a Squeezebox by just walking my nicely organized directory hierarchy. But newer music software seems to prefer to use m3u tags and categorize things by Artist, Genre, etc. And since my m3u tags are a mess, the resulting catalog is a mess. I can still play stuff via Sonos by walking a directory hierarchy, but it doesn't work very well and I feel like I'm missing out.

I've seen various software products that try to scan your mp3 files and try to correct m3u tags, remove duplicates, download cover art, etc. Do any of the Windows apps work well? Alternately, I still have most of the CDs in a box somewhere. Should I just send them all to a ripping service?

Help me get Sonos working

shothotbot — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:54:24 -0800

Sonos is seriously bugging Mrs. HotBot and, by the transitive property of bugging, me. Help me out. I have three sonos boxes. I chose Sonos because I wanted to:

* share music from iTunes
* listen to internet radio
* share a line-in source throughout the house
* do different things in different rooms or the same thing in all rooms

It generally works ok for me but it more or less never works for my wife when I am not home. I don't know whose fault this is, but it doesn't really matter. My co-workers. How they tease. A perfect answer would tell me how to to make sure Sonos just works.

Partial answers might be:
1) would it help if I plugged a computer which would be specially dedicated to holding music directly into the router the main sonos box is plugged into?

2) could the cordless phone be messing with the wireless net that sonos makes?

3) if I was willing to sacrifice everything (and some cash) for marital bliss, is there another setup which would help me meet all my above goals, again with the primary consideration being ease of use.

MusicCasting a net

reflexed — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 06:52:29 -0800

Where can I sell a Yamaha MusicCast MCX-1000, a digital jukebox / music streaming device that came out two years too early to be useful? A couple years ago some friends of mine purchased a Yamaha MusicCast MCX-1000 digital music server. It makes MP3s of your CDs within the device and lets you put terminals around your house which connect to the main thing wirelessly so you can listen in different zones. It sounds great in theory, but it has some serious limitations: it connects to the network to download CDDB information, but it can't share songs over the network from a computer / import songs from a computer / export the mp3s it rips to a computer/iPod/other device (they're in some proprietary 'not actually mp3' format).

My friends weren't quite aware of these limitations and now want to get a Sonos system that does everything they want and connects to their PC. The question is, what to do with the MusicCast? The thing was ridiculously expensive, so they'd like to recoup something from it. Given its limitations, most savvy consumers (who might buy something from a listing in an audio/hifi forum) wouldn't want it. eBay's probably not the best place because I don't think the clueless audiophiles who have the money to spend on a MusicCast would shop there (and I haven't seen many MusicCast-related items in completed listings searches).

They do have two MCX-A10 receivers that work with the newer MCX-2000, Yamaha's current offering which is slightly more useful than than the MCX-1000 (it can stream music from a computer, but anything you rip into it still can't be used by anything else), so they might do better to sell them seperately from the main system. But where can we target the sort of people who want an all-in-one, no computer necessary system like this? We're in the UK and would rather not have to ship it internationally. Any ideas?