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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
sufentanil

Showing 3 responses by edesilva

edesilva
768 posts
 
Herman, Michael's right--there are some fields in wav files that can be used for tag data. But, it is completely nonstandard and won't translate.

Michael, not sure whether you are on a Mac or PC platform. I'm guessing Mac, since you mentioned Aperture.

If you are on a Mac, you may be able to import some data into iTunes. Google "doug's applescripts"... You should be able to find one that will at least create iT tags for Artist/Album/Song from the directory structure (you do have them organized in an Artist/Album/Song structure, I hope).

If you are on the PC side, look into Foobar. Its ugly out of the box, but there is a pretty good tutorial on www.lifehacker.com on how to customize it and make it pretty. One of Foobar's features is masstagger, which will allow you to write a little script to do the same kind of thing I mentioned that Applescripting can do.
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?
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
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