dbpoweramp and perfect tunes OR?

It's the first painful, time-consuming part.

The next time-consuming part is sorting out the metadata and artwork, depending how OCD you are... Admittedly, that's getting easier with better online metadata and high-res artwork sources. These days, I rarely have to do more than tidy the odd track name, and select artwork. When I ripped the bulk of my collection 7 years ago, I entered album details by hand, and scanned, cleaned, cropped, balanced and resized the artwork...
I find going back to sort out tagging really tedious.
I'm in the camp of getting it right at rip time, and then being done with it. By the time I drop a disc in my drive and fire up EAC I've already sorted out what I'm naming it, and have gone online and found a decent cover image and have it saved to my desktop to drag into EAC.
 
Before that? Lets just say that me and MP3Tag have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Gotcha... A metadata-based file browser wouldn't work so well, would it...?

I was lucky with my ripping (this is beginning to sound a bit like Clint's speech in 'Unforgiven'...); for starters, HDDs had fallen in price such that a 1.25TB drive was reasonable, and I decided from the outset to rip lossless (a number of my friends regret ripping to lossy formats, but can't face the re-ripping task). I wasn't online then, but I did have a big file of metadata for most of my collection, with disc details and track titles and durations, all laboriously entered by hand, starting with my trusty Sinclair QL computer... It was in a semicolon-separated format, so easy to parse with AWK. So I used those details, and wrote my unix scripts to take the album metadata file, parse it, and create a renaming script that could be run after ripping (without needing to enter any metadata during the rip, other than album artist and album title, to make sure it got saved in a unique folder). I'd developed my own metadata format preferences over the years; they are subtly different to those usually adopted by freedb entries.

That system continued even after I got online, as the public databases were generally pretty poor, and it took as long to check and correct metadata before I ripped, as it did to type in the metadata whilst ripping. Now I have a 42x CD drive in my computer, I can't type it in fast enough, and the metadata sources have improved. So I have largely stopped manual entry of data.

I have other media sources that aren't so well tagged. And those have taken considerable effort to identify and get good artwork for. The latest OCD process is to refresh the artwork with 1200 or 1400 pixel images that are becoming available; I scanned to 300dpi, and resized to 600pix square. I kept the original, though, so I'll soon be running a script to copy the larger images into the CD folders, whilst retaining any newer artwork I have downloaded (an idea on how to do that has just popped into my head)...

Poor man's NAS is exactly the approach I first suggest to people: see what your existing equipment can do. I bought my NAS before I was online, so I use that, but my router does have a USB port that can support both file server and DLNA media server. I did have to spend quite a long time figuring out how to get the NAS DLNA server to work properly without getting broken every time I touched the NAS. I wrote up my findings on the WD forum, and that thread has now accumulated about 120k hits...
 
Oh, I've got a great player, made by the same company as my file browser.

Stratospherix? As in the iThing FileBrowser and the media player (name escapes me)? Yeah, FileBrowser was one of the few apps I bought to the iPad, having found that it didn't come with a file manager of any sort, and objecting to the "Nanny Jobs will look after your data for you; you don't need to worry your pretty little head about it" approach adopted by iOS...
 
Stratospherix? As in the iThing FileBrowser and the media player (name escapes me)? Yeah, FileBrowser was one of the few apps I bought to the iPad, having found that it didn't come with a file manager of any sort, and objecting to the "Nanny Jobs will look after your data for you; you don't need to worry your pretty little head about it" approach adopted by iOS...
Yeah, that would be the company.
I like those apps a lot. FileBrowser just might be the best $7 I've ever spent on audio. I've got it on 4 devices right now; two iphones, and ipad mini, and a really old ipod touch I literally pulled out of the sand at a playground.
I couldn't fathom the number of hours of music I've listened to because of that app. It gets music playing in pretty much every room of the house, plus the garage and backyard.
 
Gotcha... A metadata-based file browser wouldn't work so well, would it...?

I was lucky with my ripping (this is beginning to sound a bit like Clint's speech in 'Unforgiven'...); for starters, HDDs had fallen in price such that a 1.25TB drive was reasonable, and I decided from the outset to rip lossless (a number of my friends regret ripping to lossy formats, but can't face the re-ripping task). I wasn't online then, but I did have a big file of metadata for most of my collection, with disc details and track titles and durations, all laboriously entered by hand, starting with my trusty Sinclair QL computer... It was in a semicolon-separated format, so easy to parse with AWK. So I used those details, and wrote my unix scripts to take the album metadata file, parse it, and create a renaming script that could be run after ripping (without needing to enter any metadata during the rip, other than album artist and album title, to make sure it got saved in a unique folder). I'd developed my own metadata format preferences over the years; they are subtly different to those usually adopted by freedb entries.

That system continued even after I got online, as the public databases were generally pretty poor, and it took as long to check and correct metadata before I ripped, as it did to type in the metadata whilst ripping. Now I have a 42x CD drive in my computer, I can't type it in fast enough, and the metadata sources have improved. So I have largely stopped manual entry of data.

I have other media sources that aren't so well tagged. And those have taken considerable effort to identify and get good artwork for. The latest OCD process is to refresh the artwork with 1200 or 1400 pixel images that are becoming available; I scanned to 300dpi, and resized to 600pix square. I kept the original, though, so I'll soon be running a script to copy the larger images into the CD folders, whilst retaining any newer artwork I have downloaded (an idea on how to do that has just popped into my head)...

Poor man's NAS is exactly the approach I first suggest to people: see what your existing equipment can do. I bought my NAS before I was online, so I use that, but my router does have a USB port that can support both file server and DLNA media server. I did have to spend quite a long time figuring out how to get the NAS DLNA server to work properly without getting broken every time I touched the NAS. I wrote up my findings on the WD forum, and that thread has now accumulated about 120k hits...
That's hardcore, and way over my head!
 
I couldn't fathom the number of hours of music I've listened to because of that app. It gets music playing in pretty much every room of the house, plus the garage and backyard.

MM/MB on Windows, and BubbleUPnP on Android are the same for me. Former free, latter £3.16 for unlimited copies; it's a DMC, DMR and can even be a DMS. And there's a server version that acts as a proxy DLNA client, and allows you to access your DLNA server remotely.
 
MM/MB on Windows, and BubbleUPnP on Android are the same for me. Former free, latter £3.16 for unlimited copies; it's a DMC, DMR and can even be a DMS. And there's a server version that acts as a proxy DLNA client, and allows you to access your DLNA server remotely.
This is the stuff I need to stop being lazy about, and get on with figuring out.
I've got a barely used Android tablet that could really get a lot more use as a music device.

My ISP is sending a tech over tomorrow to tweak my recent upgrade, and I may be getting a different router. I'm on hold until that bit is sorted out.
 
Yeah, I know it's a bit nuts, but I have a few years' experience hacking shell scripts; it was crude, but very effective, and grew organically...
Hell, if you've got the experience with anything like this, you might as well use it, and roll with it!
 
Back
Top Bottom