How do you listen to digital music?

[ariScotle]

Curious to see how everyone uses digital music.

 

I am a Mac user and the standard deal with that environment is to use iTunes to manage everything.

Lately I have been thinking about switching to some other sort of file/folder type of system and maybe

a different way to listen to the music.

 

iTunes is indeed a powerful tool, but its either do your whole life the iTunes way or nothing.

Especially now that I am DJ'ing and using the music for more than just personal listening, I need a good system.

Thinkin' its time to do something else sooo...

 

How do you manage/tag/add artwork/organize/access your digital music?

Love some suggestions from the psynews peeps - especially if you have found a happy alternative to the iTunes way of life on a Mac.

Windows users hit me with your system as well - I'll take all the info I can get

 

Peace everyone

b00m!

[d2kx]

Windows = foobar2000

Linux (KDE) = Amarok

 

There's nothing better really.

 

Oh and iTunes is a joke. It doesn't even play FLAC files.

[Twisted D*U*O]

I'm a Windows/PC guy.

 

I don't like that iTunes is part of the proprietary, "all-or-nothing" setup that is Apple. But I do enjoy the ability to create smart lists, and how it allows me to easily tag and file my music. I also enjoy that all my dj software programs read those lists.

 

As for FLAC. I like the quality. But don't like that I can't tag the files nor do I like that very few media players or software programs recognize it. So, I use 320kbps .mp3 files.

[ariScotle]

I'm a Windows/PC guy.

 

I don't like that iTunes is part of the proprietary, "all-or-nothing" setup that is Apple. But I do enjoy the ability to create smart lists, and how it allows me to easily tag and file my music. I also enjoy that all my dj software programs read those lists.

 

As for FLAC. I like the quality. But don't like that I can't tag the files nor do I like that very few media players or software programs recognize it. So, I use 320kbps .mp3 files.

 

What DJ software do you use? And what is the benefit?

I had heard that Traktor would go through your iTunes library and add the detected BPM for each song to the BPM field in the tags.

Do you know anything about this (or does anyone for that matter? Feel free to chime in) I could see that being a cool feature

and yeah like you say - iTunes is pretty powerful for tagging/renaming/sorting and so on and probably because it has millions of dollars in it that other software doesn't have, but man the "all or nothing" kills me

[ariScotle]

Windows = foobar2000

Linux (KDE) = Amarok

 

There's nothing better really.

 

Oh and iTunes is a joke. It doesn't even play FLAC files.

 

no FLAC is truly unbelievable - not really unbelievable when you think about how Apple does things, but mind-boggling nonetheless

and the fact that it won't do "watch folders" like COG, Songbird, Spotify or a few others is a real pain as well.

[(OM)Open_Mind]

I'm using Cog, because there is not alternative software that can play all lossless formats on Macs.

iTunes is pretty and powerful thingy, but it can play only Flac, WAV, AIFF, and Apple Lossless.

[ariScotle]

I'm using Cog, because there is not alternative software that can play all lossless formats on Macs.

iTunes is pretty and powerful thingy, but it can play only Flac, WAV, AIFF, and Apple Lossless.

 

Curious - what system do you use for organizing your music at the file level?

I'm looking to get all my stuff into folders that make sense and stop using the iTunes interface to tell me where/how everything is organized.

Cheers

[(OM)Open_Mind]

Curious - what system do you use for organizing your music at the file level?

I'm looking to get all my stuff into folders that make sense and stop using the iTunes interface to tell me where/how everything is organized.

Cheers

 

I use pretty standart folder/files structure.

Genre 1
   Artist1 - Album 1
   Artist1 - Album 2
   Artist2 - Album 1
   ...
 Genre 2
 ...

I have made structure for one huge ftp. It was like this:

Genre 1
    1995
     Artist1 - Album 1
     Artist1 - Album 2
     Artist2 - Album 1
     ...
    1996
     Artist1 - Album 1
     Artist1 - Album 2
     Artist2 - Album 1
     ...
     ...
    2005
     January [ <--- this is useful for DJs ]  
     ...
     February
     ...
   
 Genre 2
 ...

BTW, you can highlight albums in Finder with colors, which mean something to you.

 

If you are DJ and you need to listen fresh music every day, it is useful to have some extra folders like

[unlistened Music]

[For mixes]

 

It can't be all-purpose solution to fit everybody.

 

That's not a problem to make new original structure for your personal needs.

 

Just drink cup of coffee, sit with blank list of paper, pencil and eraser. Draw some schematics, think again, redraw.

Do it until it become perfect for you

[PRS]

I use windows media player to just listen (it has a nice search)

 

I use Winamp to listen to music with the intent on checking it out.

I have F1+F4 as hotkeys to delete an mp3 from playlist + harddrive + switch to next tune + skip first 2 mins. F9+F12 to move a file to another dir and more such hotkeys (see Winamp File Deleter). That way i can go trough endless lists of junk in no time (also from in my bed or something).

 

Also my way to create playlists for mixes:

copy all mp3s of a genre to a dir, throw it all in winamp, sort on BPM (and or key) and delete with impunity.

 

Mp3tag is unmissable for all sorts of tagging and scripting

Rapid Evolution for calculating keys

Mixmeister bpmanalyser for u know...

 

this is how my winamp looks:

 

this is my playlist script (advanced title formatting):

[$num($ifgreater(1001,$replace(%bpm%,.,),%bpm%,$div($add($replace(%bpm%,.,),50),100)),3) | ]$if2(%albumartist% ,[%artist% ])$ifgreater(2400000,%length%,['['$replace($upper($cut($abbr($cut(%album%,$sub($strlchr(%album%,'('),1)),5),5)), ,)']' ],['['%genre%']' ])$if(%artist%,- ,)[$num(%track%,2). ]$if(%albumartist%,$IfStrNotEqual(%artist%,%albumartist%,[%artist% - ]),)$if2(%title%,$filepart(%filename%))

 

hope that helps

[ariScotle]

I use pretty standart folder/files structure.

Genre 1
   Artist1 - Album 1
   Artist1 - Album 2
   Artist2 - Album 1
   ...
 Genre 2
 ...

I have made structure for one huge ftp. It was like this:

Genre 1
    1995
     Artist1 - Album 1
     Artist1 - Album 2
     Artist2 - Album 1
     ...
    1996
     Artist1 - Album 1
     Artist1 - Album 2
     Artist2 - Album 1
     ...
     ...
    2005
     January [ <--- this is useful for DJs ]  
     ...
     February
     ...
   
 Genre 2
 ...

BTW, you can highlight albums in Finder with colors, which mean something to you.

 

If you are DJ and you need to listen fresh music every day, it is useful to have some extra folders like

[unlistened Music]

[For mixes]

 

It can't be all-purpose solution to fit everybody.

 

That's not a problem to make new original structure for your personal needs.

 

Just drink cup of coffee, sit with blank list of paper, pencil and eraser. Draw some schematics, think again, redraw.

Do it until it become perfect for you

 

I was thinking of doing exactly the same thing - get a piece of paper and a pencil and go till it makes sense.

Curious again - what are you using for genres? I'm always searching for nirvana I think when it comes to how to classify things

and let me say its not really about defining the music as much as it defining a system for finding it.

Gets pretty convoluted sometimes when you have artists like Astral Projection, Etnica or Jaia that have albums falling into several categories.

Interested to know what general divisions you use.

[PRS]

I keep all my music twice, once per genre complete albums for listening.

And once for mixing. per genre, but just seperate mp3s only, so mostly only 1 or 2 per album, because the rest im not gonna use in a mix anyway.

[(OM)Open_Mind]

Gets pretty convoluted sometimes when you have artists like Astral Projection, Etnica or Jaia that have albums falling into several categories.

Interested to know what general divisions you use.

 

My collection was goa trance/psychill oriented.

 

I define album genre by most lovely tracks.

 

If I like output of Jaïa in any genre for example, I prefer to keep it in [Trance Goa] just to keep full discography in one place.

 

If I dislike some fullonish or dark output of goa masters it goes to Trash or to [Trance Foolon-bad], [Trance Dork-bad], [suomee] which is perfect candidates to wipe out if I need space

 

I had also [Trance Full-on] and [Trance Dark], [suoumi] without "-bad" folders for interesting albums.

 

Why it was? Because Hdd with file structure is unrecoverable broken and now files are in total mess.

 

PRS, Indeed PC have much more tools and players to choose from to listen and organize things.

 

But good news for MAC users. MacOS has aliases and symbolic links. It can be helpful to make separate folders structures with one physical media. It gives me idea. For example you can make structure

 

Discographies
 Jaïa
  Jaïa - Blue Energy
  ...
  Jaïa - Epsilon - Tesseract Remix E.P.
   ...

And make Alias to it from your different location (in 2nd folder system):

Trance Goa
  Jaïa - Blue Energy
...
Trance Postgressive
 Jaïa - Epsilon - Tesseract Remix E.P.
...

If it's lossless collection, this trick can save some extra space.

[DreamWalker]

FLAC is indeed the digital-music-listener's best friend. Rip to nothing else!

 

I'm on Linux, and I use Banshee Media Player to play my music, Ex Falso to manage my ID3 tags, and Audacity to encode my tracks.

 

These are all open source, but I'm not sure if there are any OSX ports for them. There might be.

[Sawfly]

Winamp for Windows and iTunes for Mac (I can't stand it though )..

 

edit. and occasionally foobar2000 also

[RTP]

I listen to it on my PC and on my cellphone who has a media player. I have an ipod, but its accu is too low and I'm too lazy to order a new battery...

 

And apart from not having that many digital releases anyway, I do not organize my collection.

 

Some have tags, some have none, some are mislabeled, I don't care. I know what song is what and I'm the only one who should listen to those tunes, so it doesn't matter.

[Insejn]

I listen like this:

 

[Ormion]

WMP 12 because it has the best library.

[ariScotle]

I listen like this:

 

 

Man I do greatly miss winamp from my pc days.

Isn't there a simple player out there for mac that has a view like that?

Albums on one side, songs on the other - wouldn't that be nice...

[Insejn]

Man I do greatly miss winamp from my pc days.

Isn't there a simple player out there for mac that has a view like that?

Albums on one side, songs on the other - wouldn't that be nice...

 

Yes. It's very clean and functional.

I have no idea what players there is for Mac.

I feel sorry for you iTunes users. It sure is a crappy program.

[d2kx]

I'm a Windows/PC guy.

 

I don't like that iTunes is part of the proprietary, "all-or-nothing" setup that is Apple. But I do enjoy the ability to create smart lists, and how it allows me to easily tag and file my music. I also enjoy that all my dj software programs read those lists.

 

As for FLAC. I like the quality. But don't like that I can't tag the files nor do I like that very few media players or software programs recognize it. So, I use 320kbps .mp3 files.

 

All proper media players support FLAC. Also, of course you can tag FLAC files. It only becomes a bit problematic with portable music players like the iPod (I own one). You can encode your FLAC's to high-quality MP3s (with LAME, not that crappy QuickTime encoder), or encode them to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) like I do.

[Twisted D*U*O]

What DJ software do you use? And what is the benefit?

I had heard that Traktor would go through your iTunes library and add the detected BPM for each song to the BPM field in the tags.

Do you know anything about this (or does anyone for that matter? Feel free to chime in) I could see that being a cool feature

and yeah like you say - iTunes is pretty powerful for tagging/renaming/sorting and so on and probably because it has millions of dollars in it that other software doesn't have, but man the "all or nothing" kills me

 

I used M-Audio Torq for the longest and have recently switched to Traktor. Both of which easily linked up with my iTunes storage. Torq even read my iPod, meaning that I could use my iPod not only as a personal player but as a pocket drive. I also use Mixed In Key to get the BPM/Keynotes. It's all around efficient for storing, tagging, and sorting. Not to mention that I can tag tracks with *new* or release dates so I know what's my freshest tracks or what's a bootleg.

 

All proper media players support FLAC. Also, of course you can tag FLAC files. It only becomes a bit problematic with portable music players like the iPod (I own one). You can encode your FLAC's to high-quality MP3s (with LAME, not that crappy QuickTime encoder), or encode them to ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) like I do.

 

I beg to differ. NOT all media players support FLAC out of the box. You usually have to purchase/acquire another codec. And if you want to listen on a portable media player (which I do pretty much exclusively). Then you're completely out of luck. That's not to say that I don't like it. In fact, I think it's great!! Compact file size and lossless quality is the audiophile's wet dream. But until I can universally use FLAC, then I must have to say that it's inefficient and inconvenient. And therefore, FLAC is useless to me. I can listen to a 320kbps .mp3 anywhere.

[Elysium]

All you need is a good sound card with enough line out's for dj'ing and then a nice MacBook + Ableton Live. Then you are set to go!

[ariScotle]

All you need is a good sound card with enough line out's for dj'ing and then a nice MacBook + Ableton Live. Then you are set to go!

 

What do you like about Djing in Live? I switched to Traktor because I liked the idea of loading a song

rather than having to set all my songs as "clips"

Interested to know how you use Live, cuz I was really diggin the program, but thought it felt short for DJing.

Thoughts?

[Elysium]

What do you like about Djing in Live? I switched to Traktor because I liked the idea of loading a song

rather than having to set all my songs as "clips"

Interested to know how you use Live, cuz I was really diggin the program, but thought it felt short for DJing.

Thoughts?

 

I like the fact I can use multiple audio samples and create new tracks out of the tunes on the fly making the Dj set unique and much more concentrated on flow control. It's more geared toward a live performance Dj set which is as far as I know only possible using "Live" compared to most other Dj software out there.

[PRS]

What do you like about Djing in Live? I switched to Traktor because I liked the idea of loading a song

rather than having to set all my songs as "clips"

Interested to know how you use Live, cuz I was really diggin the program, but thought it felt short for DJing.

Thoughts?

 

I use Torq, which is nice, I would recommend that or Traktor if you are starting out. I would go with Traktor if I would be more serious about it.