Tending to a digital music library like it's your fucking baby (Windows edition)

[Onder]

Hi guys,

I used to be an Apple faggot until I grew up and had to make my own money and then my Macbook burned out its fourth charger and I decided fuck it I'm going to buy a new laptop and bought a fucking Lenovo and dropped like six social classes.

Good thing I made a backup of my old/new iTunes library on an external HD, I thought to myself. Then I dealt withthe usual problem with the HD Mac formatting that Windows don't support and copied the entire thing to my friend's mac and then to his external HD and then to my new Lenovo. Only lost several tracks of some Mahler recordings, I later found out. I can live with that etc.

Then I tried using iTunes on Windows because I'm used to it. Don't judge. I tried importing the library several times and spent a lot of time and lost a lot of nerves on that, but it just kept crashing even though I was importing it alphabetically letter after letter. Then I found out there were a shitton of duplicate files in the library folder and lost my patience. Deleted it all.

Now long story short, I need an iTunes alternative and I have OCD, I need all the classical music files tagged perfectly and all that jazz and jizz. What software do you Windows plebs use? Can you recommend something? Am I allowed in your club? Any ladies in here?

You can use this thread freely to talk about your way of dealing with this side of life and sing songs about it or something I don't give a shit. I downloaded some program called MediaBee and I will try it and report back.

Cheers.

 

[Onder]

Well this bee thing shows me a picture of Shostakovich smoking on a train while playing me his waltzes. So far so good.

 

[Satanstoenail]

I use iTunes and I cut myself st the same time.

 

[tagradh]

I use MusicBee. Seems like the best option these days. Would probably still be using Winamp but it started failing too often. Had tried Foobar a few times in the past and had problems with it on different systems/didn't really like it anyway.

I lose respect for people if I find out they use iTunes/WMP. Searching for shit on Youtube is better than using that shite.

 

[EternalMetal]

Foobar for me. All of my music is sorted in artist and album folders on my HDD, so I dont have to depend on the fickle nature of tags (such as in a compilation) to keep things organized in the exact way I want (I use sort by folder structure when viewing my music collection in Foobar). If you put some time into it you can almost infinitely customize the interface, but I prefer to keep the interface stripped down and optimized for usability (gotta have album art though).

As for tagging, I usually just use the built-in tagging in Foobar, but if you need to do an overhaul you should probably search for a mass tagger. I dont have any recs since I cleared up my tags a long time ago, and everything I rip from dbpoweramp gets tagged before I rip it to my collection.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Foobar. I don't worry much about tagging as long as I have the basics + sometimes the genre (more important with video game and Japanese music where it's harder/impossible to remember names). The auto-tagging stuff generally gets the job done anyways. I have a main library folder, and an 'Incoming' folder for things that need to be first transferred to a backup library folder on another drive, both of which are assigned to Foobar.

iTunes is indeed shit btw.

 

[arg]

windows media player dudes

 

[Dak]

I rip everything in MP3 to a SSD and then upload to Google music and my phone. I use google music player because it tracks plays and I don't worry about losing that data when changing computers etc. Was so pissed when I lost all my Zune play tracks when Microsoft ditched it.

 

[The Ozzman]

Winamp/Foobar
Amazon Music/Google music

 

[Baroque]

iTunes works fine on windows for me

 

[Master_Yoda77]

inb4 Ozzman says that ITunes "isn't that bad" and makes a super clever joke about "Vanilla Road" that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

 

[Dak]

Kind of wish Winamp would get bought up and make a comeback.

 

[Bloopy]

foobar2000 here as well. I also use a program called Tag&Rename to edit tags and filenames faster. Apart from that, the best way to get the tags perfect is to edit them manually. I wouldn't let iTunes or Windows Media Player near my files... those sorts of programs interfere too much and risk making the tags worse in my experience.

 

[The Ozzman]

inb4 Ozzman says that ITunes "isn't that bad" and makes a super clever joke about "Vanilla Road" that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

I haven't used iTunes since I had an iPod 10+ years ago. You lose. Manilla Road still sucks.

 

[EternalMetal]

Kind of wish Winamp would get bought up and make a comeback.

A friend of mine still uses the old builds. The problem I find with Winamp is that I then need to use file explorer to view and drag files in, where I can set up programs like Foobar to do all of that from a readable interface without having to go into folders. At least that is how he said he still uses it, though I think Winamp does the same thing as most other players now and allows you to browse your music within the player via id3 tagging. I think you can even get plugins for WASAPI playback if you have hi-fi gear. You can use what you like, but ive moved on and probably wont go back.

Not the most aesthetically pleasing setup, but I like it quite a bit.

 

[arg]

iTunes really does work fine tbh

 

[Satanstoenail]

I only use iTunes to put stuff on my phone and I find it problematic as fuck. When I sync, some songs/albums disappear or only half load or load with skipping/glitching. Drives me nuts. Can any of you digi savvy people suggest why the hell this happens?

 

[Dak]

Because Apple is a shit company with shit products.

 

[Satanstoenail]

Because Apple is a shit company with shit products.

 

[Onder]

iTunes really does work fine tbh

Not on Windows it doesn't.

I believe iTunes works fine on Mac, I never felt I needed anything else, but it's time to change. I'm pretty sure these Windoze programs do all the stuff and more.

Like yesterday I was listening to some Lisa Ekdahl and the program showed me the lyrics..? Fuck yeah. If it could load them up from some database where even underground metals garbage is, then that would be incredible.