Ihave a large music collection in MP3 format. I’m having a hard time keeping it organised. iTunes wigs out after about 100 gig. Anyway I hate the way it handles compilations, or maybe I just hate the way I have no control over its filing method. Its also a pain syncing with others who also have a large collection.
Here are some notes on some features I’d like to see in MP3 collection manager software. I’m almost ready to write it myself so these might be the beginnings of a new venture.
- Syncing collections! Choose a host and a target and list all the tracks not in the host collection. List which track are of a higher quality.
- List missing tracks from incomplete albums.
- Flag tracks as bad copy or corrupt so when syncing, will look for them and get them.
- Integrate with MusicBrainz.org, freedb.org, discogs.com
- Browse albums by cover
- Cover art fetcher
- album cover is stored once in the folder not in the tracks (optional?). Perhaps ether or transparently
- When there is ambiguity as to which album a tracks belongs to, use the other tracks in the directory to guess i.e. try to minimise the number of albums for a give set of tracks.
- Add extra metadata tagging such as ‘remix by’, more than one artist per track, tagging for genre and/or add a style like in discogs.com. Search, filter browse by these extra fields.
- From this meta data change the tagging scheme used though out the library easily at will. make policies like: The Cure -> Cure, The, Dj -> DJ etc. Adapt from one library to another when syncing
- Store ratings for tracks. Possible to download others ratings and comments from others in an XML format (FOAF?). Perhaps upload to last.fm or make my own site if they arn’t up for it?
- Find people who have albums/tracks you want for trading (naughty)
- Update iTunes when tags are edited i=in the library