Personally, it's a mess and I'd love to have a better paradigm.
I have a stack of CD's in my car because I lack an aux-in port, and a cassette deck to put a faux-cassette in. These CD's are burned from itunes, which I now only use to burn cd's because all the music I download automatically goes into my iTunes folder (Even though I have an android now) and I have to physically connect my phone to my computer to transfer files (Not an outright complaint, but it seems like there should be a way around that by now).
All my audiobooks are managed by one app, my podcasts come in through stitcher (Which I'm actively looking to replace, because they just added in-app adds in addition to the ones IN the podcasts themselves, and I make a point to listen to as little advertisement as possible.
So in short, I'm looking for a good way to unify all my audio (mp3's, m4b's, podcasts) through one manager so I can finally get rid of iTunes, stop listening to ads on stitcher and just have a more streamlined audio management system.
Musicbee. That's what's used on my Windows side. Here's a list of features: Manages all your media and supports a number of formats including MP3, AAC, M4A, MPC, OGG, FLAC, APE, Opus, TAK, WV, WMA and WAV. Create and manage playlists, and "smart" playlists that update based on custom filters Enqueue songs into a "Now Playing" pane for on-the-go playlist creation. Watch folders on your hard drive for changes and automatically adjust your library accordingly Import libraries from iTunes and Windows Media Player Sync Android phones, USB drives, some iPods, and many other portable music devices with your library Convert files on-the-fly as you sync to your devices Auto-tag your music using the music databases of your choice Keep your files automatically organized in folder based on tags Customize a number of different keyboard shortcuts Subscribe, download, and listen to podcasts, either by searching MusicBee's podcast directory or by adding feeds yourself Use advanced audio features like a 10-band equalizer, crossfade, WASAPI and ASIO playback, and more Customize your player with skins, different layouts and views, and three different players including a mini player and compact player A plugin architecture that lets you add lots of functionality to the player, like extra supported formats, skins, library organization tools, and other features (Winamp plugins supported) An integrated browser that allows you to browse for just about anything in-player (useful for browsing plug-ins, skins, and so on) Hopefully that's helpful. Sounds like it's what you need. Requires a little tweaking, but once you get the workflow down, you'll find it irreplaceable. On the Mac side I still use iTunes, because it works better with that architecture. Sometimes I use Vox if I want something more lightweight, but I love the album view on iTunes.
There was recently a comparison of Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba. Western Digitals are the best overall, with failures occurring steadily, but not many, over a five year time scale; less than 5% fail overall. Toshiba, after six months, was the best. Around the same failure rate as WD, but over that short time, and then virtually no failures. Seagate was abysmal. 15% failed rather quickly, and after three years nearly 30%.
I would definitely go WD. But I'm also biased because A: I like their products and B: I've done some work involving their hard drive disks and have a greater knowledge of their products than others. Edit: Responded to the wrong comment. Oh well.
Right. So check it: every external drive you've ever seen is an internal drive with a dingus attached. That dingus takes it from SATA (typically) to USB or Firewire or Thunderbolt or whatever. Probably less of a problem with USB, but with Firewire it really fucking matters. For the longest time those of us who dealt with media and macs shared little lists of who was using a particular chip (Oxford 911). That only covers Firewire, though, and has long since been superseded. Seagate USB drivers are flaky as fuck. I've got like four WD Mybooks, all of them triple interface (USB3, Firewire 800, eSATA). The USB interface is usually great but slower than eSATA. Firewire works so long as you aren't expecting to use it for Time Machine that much. Probably not problems you run into on the PC side, but here in the land of Mac it matters.
That could be it. What sort of interfacing do you have on the computer side? I'm a big proponent of eSATA; the cards are cheap and they basically allow you to connect an external drive using the exact same protocol as an internal drive, no fuss, no muss. On the downside you need to unplug it before you disconnect it, but that's pretty minor most of the time.
Oh ok. It's USB. I don't move a whole lot of files too often, I just like to put everything on the external as I've had several computers stolen and had various mishaps where my computer at the time was rendered unusable for whatever reason. Whenever I'm able to get a new computer I think I might just get a desktop since I don't really need to bring a computer around with me (though that could change). Anyway, thanks.
Seagate's supposedly crap. I've had mine for a while now and I actually have a hubski sticker over the brand -- heh -- but I'm pretty sure it's a standard WD. I've never had a single problem, nor do I expect to. They've gotten kinda cheap.
music/artist/year - album/disc.track.title.flac ext4 on a RAID5 with backups on an external. Podcasts and junk sit in my rss reader and I stream when I want them, I don't bother to download. My torrent client has a folder of audiobooks under the book root. Everything's served over the network with sshfs, samba, and whatever web streaming app I fancy this week.
Well.... I have about four binders full of CDs, and usually I have them organized alphabetically each, and then each binder is generally from a different period of time in my life, so I can kind of guess what's going to be there based on that. I need a new binder if I'm going to keep up with this though. I keep two of these binders (smaller ones - one fits 20, one fits like 76) in my car. The others stay in my house unless I know I want something out of them or really, really want to change it up a lot. Uh, also, I keep my records alphabetized. I break them up into two sets because even with just 100 it's hard to keep them all in one place. I put each set on one side of my record player. I really would like some milk crates too, they get heavy but they're great for organization. I have an iPhone that I use like an iPod for podcasts and music that I download. I do not download anything to my computer(s). I also do not rip CDs onto my computer. I am lazy and I have had to back up crazy amounts of music and put them back onto computers too many times. It's all on a hard drive somewhere. Pretty archaic, right? :) Not exactly what you were asking for, I'm sure.
I use the filesystem. I keep my mp3s in directories alphabetized by band name and album (A/A Band Name/album, B/Band Name/album, ...), and have a script that runs every hour to build directories of symlinks alphabetized by album name and genre. Getting mp3 players that want to organize my music for me to play nicely with nfs is more trouble than it's worth.
Everything on Google Music. Since all my devices are Android, everything syncs seamlessly. If it's available to buy from Google, I do. If not, I buy from Amazon MP3 (which conveniently has a similar cloud store and Android app, should Google Music implode) and immediately upload to Google Music. PC listening is browser-based and requires internet, but I'm seldom without. If I am, I use my tablet or phone instead (Bluetooth speakers are great for that). You can "pin" music offline on Android devices. Google has a PC app that regularly scans folder(s) and uploads whatever you drop in them. If internet was a problem, I'd find some random media player and point it at a Google-syncing folder.
i don't totally understand. Are you just looking for an alternative player to iTunes? I use MusicBee right now and i'm happy with it. i don't have podcasts or audiobooks so i can't speak to MusicBee's effectiveness in that regard but i know they're both supported. I don't know that it'd let you load files to your phone without physically connecting it, though.
Something that will let me organize/view my music, build playlists easily exportable to android (Doing it on my phone sucks), and I don't care so much about the physical part except that I know it should be possible without doing so, this is 2014, we should be past that shit by now.
haha agreed. And i believe at least iphones have a sync feature with itunes that accomplishes that. Check out MusicBee, it might be what you're looking for. Super customizable, great device compatibility, it might seem a little weird coming from iTunes but its easy to get used to. The biggest selling point for me was that i could put my music on my friends' devices because you don't have to deal with iTunes' profile-specific device bs. I don't have an android so i can't tell you for sure how playlist exporting works. I don't see why it'd act any differently, though. Make it in the program and then drag+drop like itunes.
Lemme know when you find it. I've been trying to ditch iTunes since 10 came out. What a piece of shit. I have an aux-in port in my car. So I let iTunes organize my shit on the living room computer, which has its own external drive. That external drive gets mirrored every night via CCC to a volume on the NAS. It also broadcasts to three other computers should I need them. But it's all iTunes. Audiobooks I used to do through iTunes because the Audible app was so terrible. It's been pretty usable for the past year or so, though.
I ditched iTunes in favor of foobar2000. Quite customizable and very light program (as opposed to iTunes), may be a good idea to check it out. But now I use Google Music, with All Access enabled. Love the fact that I can upload 20k songs and stream them in any browser.
Also a fan of foobar2000. Its the plugins that make it. I use the discogs tagger, facets for organising by genre and the DLNA plugin for streaming.
I'll second foobar2000. It's a great little program, I use it fairly often and it's nice how customizable it is. A lot less bloat than iTunes, and it accomplishes the same things and more.
Yeah.... google music. My living room computer didn't quite understand "backup" when it met the NAS. It... ate all my MP3s. But hey! No worries! Everything's up on Google, right? After all, I backed up 28,000 songs up there... ...yeah. Not so much. It corrupted hashes on 68% of them. It downloaded garbage. Fortunately I was able to restore from an older backup, but my faith in Google Music is nil. Also: Foobar is Windows only. Those of us on the Mac side? Yeah, getting away from iTunes is impossible.
I haven't seen iTunes Win since 2006 but at the time, I recall wondering why you'd run it over, say, Winamp. I'm not surprised to hear it's gotten worse. On the plus side there are viable alternatives on the Win side. On the Mac side?
Right... but if I want to keep a library organized, share the XML over the network, control it remotely via my phone or sync it with my devices, I still need iTunes. That's the real problem with everything on the Mac side - iTunes is damn near an extension of the Finder, which means you can't do shit without it. It sucks.