Organizing music

[harecanada]

I have a lot of music burned onto cds over the years. I would like to get it organized and burnt onto DVDs in a more organized fashion i.e. by Artist , album etc. Does anyone know the best program to do this? I'm using Hardy Heron 8.04.

harecanada

[andybleaden]

Re: Organizing music

Hmm

I have a large music collection mostly of my own cds ripped for use on mp3 players or for when I am doing this.

First a couple of questions

1 You say you would like to use DVDs. Is this to store them or listen to them elsewhere? ie is it a space issue or do you want to have say all your Beethoven or ABBA ( or what ever you listen to)on one disc to have perhaps on random.

2 Roughly how much space do they occupy at the moment where they are on your pc?

3 What format have you ripped them into ...mp3, flac, wma, wav etc

Hope I can help .

I have mine stored depending according to how I listen to them. All my Jazz is split up under artist, classical under composer. I have a large collection of music from the ECM Music label that is stored in the order they came out...so it varies

[lmilano]

Re: Organizing music

My quick answer is:

k3b for Ripping and burning, and Amarok for organizing and transferring to my mp3 player. These are two of the best Gnu/Linux apps ever (top of the line, even when compared with their equivalents in other OS's). I backup from hard-drive to hard-drive (these days, 320 Gb or even 500Gb of SATA disk space are extremely affordable)

Hope this helps!

[harecanada]

Re: Organizing music

Thanks for getting back to me.
Imilano : Your right k3b is the best. I'm getting back into Amarok. Had a problem with it and dumped it at one time. Maybe your right though, using Amarok together with k3b might be the way to go. Thanks
andybleaden: In answer to your questions (1) I want to use DVDs because they hold a lot more and I want to be able to listen to them elsewhere. Space is an issue at this time for sure.
(2) Some but not a lot is on my pc. Most is on cds and over the years I have accumulated
a couple hundred of these. It's a bit overwhelming and honestly, a confused mess. However I don't want to lose it so that's why I'm looking for a way to organize it.
(3) The formats vary. Mostly mp3 but also wma, wav etc.
It will be a big project to start but when I get what I have organized then that will set up a template for the future.
Any help would be appreciated.
harecanada

[andybleaden]

Re: Organizing music

Well as mentioned , use k3b to burn dvd data discs to maximse your space. Alternatively do what I did with an older bigger mp3 player which I put 30 gb of music on and have it playing on random plugged in my stereo. It is like Radio Bleaden and because it is random I get to hear rarer tracks locked away in the depths of my collection that never get airplay.

I still keep my cds ( well for the medium term) but as I said above 30gb mp3 takes about 400 cds mostly ripped to 320k.

If I have different formats I have tried to make them all the same recently so have mostly mp3 at 320 ...wavs take too much space as I have loads of music and flacs on my pc speakers do not get the quality playback they deserve and do not work on my mp3 player.

It took me about a year to actually extract my finger out and put my Blue Note jazz Collection ( decent jazz from the 50-60's) on my pc (which were all on cd) . In the end I worked for a few weeks coping those I had already ripped over to a seperate folder, then ripped those remaining in batches and started enjoying some old friends again. Now I have approaching 400 classic jazz masterpieces on permanent random play ( or I an pick an odd lp out) It was a little bit of a pain but when it got boring I stopped for a while. Saved it for when I had quiet periods or hassle with my then dodgy internet collection and left it running in the background.

I also use amarok which I find nowadays is much more reliable

[bleu rider]

Re: Organizing music

you guys are not alone. one of my buddies ripped his huge (maybe 300-400) CD's to flac on a dedicated media box. then he copied everything to a server he runs so he can log in wherever he's at and listen to his tunes. pretty cool.

i have about 80G of tunes myself on a system with LVM and RAID1 set up. (this PC has 1.3Tb of non-redundant storage, so music is only a small part of it.) i use amarok linked w/ MySQL to manage the music files, most of which are downloaded from various sources rather than from ripping the CD's i own. that's a project for the future.

a note here on amarok: i corresponded with one of the developers a while ago who said it was never intended to handle huge numbers of files, but i find that with MySQL things work smoothly.

my music files are organized by artist, then album (i have almost no random tracks). These artists range from 1920's jazz to post 80's rock. i enjoy many genres including blues, R&B, and classical but i don't sort my files by genre, only by artist. that let's me set up random-play easily to include all the different kinds of music i like.

i see hard disk storage as much preferable to having stacks of CD's around. with my LVM and RAID setup, i don't have to worry about losing files and with the low cost of SATA disks now, i see no point in 're-inventing the wheel' by burning this stuff to optical disk, because i can expand my storage with a minor investment of time and money.

[lmilano]

Re: Organizing music

Excellent points Bleu Rider. I am doing the same with pictures, home videos, etc

Question: do you guys stream music over the house, so you can, say, listen from your little shinny netbook the music stored in the server? What do you use for that? Would mythbuntu be helpful for this sort of thing?

Many thanks!

[andybleaden]

Re: Organizing music

I wish I could..only got this pc here and one in my kids room...so all I listen to elsewhere is eithe rcd based or as mentioned on a large mp3 through a gorgeous stereo or some ok ish speakers in the kitchen

[harecanada]

Re: Organizing music

This is all great advice. Thanks you guys. I'll start my project and see how I do.
harecanada

[lmilano]

Re: Organizing music

I thought I should post here: I found a beautiful way of sharing the music (and also home movies, DVD's I buy, etc) around the house: mythbuntu (backend package) in my main machine, and mythbuntu-frontend on my eeepc (and also in the main machine). Works very well (with quite a bit of elbow grease, though).