Music-Organizing Software

[rcarlberg]

Shot in the dark here.

I can sit in my easy chair, here in my music room, playing music from my iPad. The iPad connects to my iMac and will play any music on the iMac's hard drives, via Bluetooth, over my stereo. The program used is Apple's "Music," which organizes by album or artist, and will play sequentially or in "shuffle play."

I sometimes wish it had more capabilities.

Like taking all albums tagged as "jazz" and making a jazz playlist. Or all albums on which John Abercrombie appears and making a John Abercrombie playlist. Or taking all my music from Denmark and making a Denmark playlist.

I know I could spend a few years creating a database with all this detail, though I don't know of a way to integrate such a database into the Music app. Since all this information is, ostensibly, already in the metadata of the songs, I wonder if anyone, anywhere, has ever created such a front end, such a user interface? It'd be something that takes information that's already there and presents it in a user-friendly interface for the iPad.

Anybody ever seen such a thing?

[Top Cat]

You are too organized. My system is much better. A small flashlight and 2 racks of cds that are supposedly in alphabetical order, a can of beer and my reading glasses.
Once I've realized nothing is where it should be anymore, caution is thrown to the wind and my improvisation skills take over and whatever winds up in my hand becomes part of the new program of music for the evening.
My wife calls me the DJ, not sure if this stands for Disc Jockey or something else.

Sorry I couldn't help you with your question or have something meaningful to suggest.

[rcarlberg]

Is the beer mandatory? I'm trying to cut down my calories.

[Jondon4]

I'm still using Windows Media Player for that very reason, but its no longer supported by Microsoft so when I have to ditch my Windows 7 operating system I'll be searching for something to take its place.

[Top Cat]

Is the beer mandatory? I'm trying to cut down my calories.

completely optional.

[Scott Bails]

I use an app called "Muzecast" that I think does all that you're looking for.

I don't know if it's available for Apple devices, but check it out.

[MissKittysMom]

I'm still using iTunes (Windows) to organize music that's mostly played on my phone while driving. I also edit metadata heavily (again, using iTunes); for music I've purchased, the only purpose of the metadata is to help my find stuff. This is a long-term project that's been going on for years. iTunes is seriously inadequate for this, but I don't know of anything better. It doesn't help that the whole concept of metadata deals poorly with classical. And it doesn't help that different iPod and iOS music players over the years have used different rules for grouping by composer or artist.

Having different rules by genre is a headache, but I get by. For rock and jazz, artist and composer are usually the same. I don't care about who covers whose stuff; I care about the performer. For classical, where I have many instances of multiple recordings of the same thing, the composer is always correct, while the performer may get tagged in at the end of the album title. With classical, the "album" is almost always the composition name, so many times a single CD will get broken apart into multiple "albums." Soundtracks are different again; usually the movie or show title is the "composer" as well as artist. Album title either duplicates or is a season title.

Since I don't want all of this on my phone, genres get broken up into mobile or not, or 1st or 2nd tier. Selecting what goes on the phone is easiest with genre.

At the end of all that, the phone generally runs on shuffle, so with about 16,000 tracks of mixed classical, jazz, rock, world, humor, birdsongs, and other stuff, I can get whiplash every time a new track comes up. I've decided I like that. For non-mobile listening, it's all on my PC and I'll generally use iTunes search, by title or artist or composer.

Your mileage may vary; I'd be astonished if it didn't.

[MissKittysMom]

I'm still using Windows Media Player for that very reason, but its no longer supported by Microsoft so when I have to ditch my Windows 7 operating system I'll be searching for something to take its place.

Windows Media Player is still on Windows 10. Windows 10 also has "Groove" which was supposed to compete with iTunes, Spotify, and the rest, but mostly is still useful as a local player by song, artist, or album.

[Azol]

https://www.progressiveears.org/foru...logue-software

[rcarlberg]

https://www.progressiveears.org/foru...logue-software

Thanks, but "cataloging" and "making playlists" are two distinct activities -- unless somebody's found a way to combine them.

[Jerjo]

Being I have a lot of music on my laptop (most ripped to FLAC) and many playlists, I sometimes that into the living room system. Laptop>Schitt DAC>Amplifier I used WMP on Windows 10 - it works the best for creating playlists according to whatever whim I want. Having a 12' cord to run to the amp doesn't hurt either.

[PixelDelirium]

I actually wrote my own. I have a central server that has all my downloaded and ripped music with a database to support searching, tagging, etc. I have clients (mostly Raspberry Pis with USB DACs) that can stream (PCM) from it around the house and you control everything via a web based interface (so PC, phone or tablet works). It fully supports high bit rates and 5.1 FLAC. Playlists are actually based on tags in my system (basically my tagging uses pairs "genrerog", "rating:wow", "season:christmas", "playlist:whatever" so it's pretty free form). There are several open source options out there that do similar things. I just wrote my own because I can make it do exactly what I want it to do (and I'm a software engineer so it was actually feasible). One of the biggest things for me is that you can also make non-destructive edits (it doesn't change the original files) to artist/album/song metadata as well as reorganize songs/albums.

[Cyberian Cat]

Shot in the dark here.

I can sit in my easy chair, here in my music room, playing music from my iPad. The iPad connects to my iMac and will play any music on the iMac's hard drives, via Bluetooth, over my stereo. The program used is Apple's "Music," which organizes by album or artist, and will play sequentially or in "shuffle play."

I sometimes wish it had more capabilities.

Like taking all albums tagged as "jazz" and making a jazz playlist. Or all albums on which John Abercrombie appears and making a John Abercrombie playlist. Or taking all my music from Denmark and making a Denmark playlist.

I know I could spend a few years creating a database with all this detail, though I don't know of a way to integrate such a database into the Music app. Since all this information is, ostensibly, already in the metadata of the songs, I wonder if anyone, anywhere, has ever created such a front end, such a user interface? It'd be something that takes information that's already there and presents it in a user-friendly interface for the iPad.

Anybody ever seen such a thing?

Do you use Music on the iPad, or Music on the Mac, controlled with Remote on the iPad ? Because Music on the Mac, formerly iTunes, allows you to make intelligent playlists where you can select tracks using conditions such as genre, artist, year, etc. These intelligent playlists have to be created on the Mac, if you want to do it from the iPad, you can use a screen sharing app, such as Screens.

[battema]

I started using Media Monkey a few years ago and love the hell out of it for tagging/organizing. It might be something that would work for you?

https://www.mediamonkey.com/

[rcarlberg]

Do you use Music on the iPad, or Music on the Mac, controlled with Remote on the iPad ? Because Music on the Mac, formerly iTunes, allows you to make intelligent playlists where you can select tracks using conditions such as genre, artist, year, etc. These intelligent playlists have to be created on the Mac, if you want to do it from the iPad, you can use a screen sharing app, such as Screens.

I know these exist, but I haven't really explored them much. Apple Music allows you to set up Smart Playlists based on the following criteria:

• artist
• album artist
• album artwork
• album love
• album rating
• bit rate
• bpm
• category
• checked
• cloud status
• comments
• compilation
• composer
• date added
• date modified
• description
• disc number
• genre
• grouping
• kind
• last played
• last skipped
• location
• love
• media kind
• movement name
• movement number
• name
• playlist
• plays
• purchased
• rating
• sample rate
• size
• skips
• sort album
• sort album artist
• sort artist
• sort composer
• sort name
• sort show
• time
• track number
• video rating
• work
• year

To be honest I'm not even sure what a lot of these are. It sounds like a lot of work to set up playlists using this.

[Plasmatopia]

Not a recommendation, but in iTunes you can sort your music and generate playlists according to all those things you listed above. I used to use it to create playlists that excluded Dream Theater, lol. As far as I know you'd want to do all this on your iMac, but I don't have an up-to-date iPad to know how the Music app works.

For the most part I don't bother with it myself and just shuffle the whole damn collection (on those rare occasions where I want to shuffle). There is no way in hell I'm going to categorize the whole collection, but if I was retired who knows what sort of wild shenanigans I'd get up to.

[rcarlberg]

I started using Media Monkey a few years ago and love the hell out of it for tagging/organizing. It might be something that would work for you?

It looks intriguing. What's it cost? Is it a subscription or a one-time purchase?

[Grimjack]

There are a few options:
There’s JRiver: https://www.jriver.com/
There’s MusicBee which I believe is Windows-only https://getmusicbee.com/
Separately for tagging/organizing power, it’s hard to beat Jaikoz http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/
If you’re looking for a really powerful, multi-room solution that aggregates all your local media PLUS integration with one or more streaming services, there’s Roon http://www.roonlabs.com (I believe JRiver has some of these features but not all)
A lot of people recommend MediaMonkey but I’ve never used it.
I’ve been using xAct and XLD freeware on my Mac for ripping/tagging CDs for years and have a good workflow for that...I don’t believe there are Windows versions available but IIRC software like EAC, dbPoweramp or Foobar will also handle similarly.

[rcarlberg]

It looks intriguing. What's it cost? Is it a subscription or a one-time purchase?

Nevermind. It looks like MediaMonkey is a Windows app, and won't run under OS-X without a lot of, um, monkeying.

[markwoll]

So, I use the LMS product. Logitech Media Server, a multi-platform music streaming system.
At it's heart is a database that allows you to organize playlists among other things.
It works with almost all formats. I don't have 'apple format' music files but they are nothing out of the ordinary.
Super high bitrate files require appropriate available bandwidth and CPU/DAC hardware on the player end.
There are many apps for playing music streams as well as a very active community of developers.
The basic LMS instance has a number of plug ins to enable additional functionality and there are many other add ons.
They are currently working out mixing local playlists with cloud based streams ( spotify, tidal, etc )
The software is "free" to use. Logitech no longer sells the hardware players.
It is very easy to set up ( or buy ) inexpensive players from any pc or raspberry pi ( or other SBC ) and a DAC.
The PiCorePlayer project is very popular and easy to use.
http://forums.slimdevices.com/ for more info.

[battema]

Nevermind. It looks like MediaMonkey is a Windows app, and won't run under OS-X without a lot of, um, monkeying.

Ah, sorry...yeah, I'm a Windows dude. My bad

[Jerjo]

I have read of many audiophiles using this for Apple-based systems: https://audirvana.com/product/

Another choice that gets rave reviews is Roon but it is not free: https://roonlabs.com/

[progmatist]

Windows Media Player is still on Windows 10. Windows 10 also has "Groove" which was supposed to compete with iTunes, Spotify, and the rest, but mostly is still useful as a local player by song, artist, or album.

In my humble opinion, Groove is an absolute piece of s***. I talked my father out of using it when he kept experiencing skipping within tracks, very much like a digital version of skips on vinyl records.

[Sunlight Caller]

I know these exist, but I haven't really explored them much. Apple Music allows you to set up Smart Playlists based on the following criteria:

• artist
• album artist
• album artwork
• album love
• album rating
• bit rate
• bpm
• category
• checked
• cloud status
• comments
• compilation
• composer
• date added
• date modified
• description
• disc number
• genre
• grouping
• kind
• last played
• last skipped
• location
• love
• media kind
• movement name
• movement number
• name
• playlist
• plays
• purchased
• rating
• sample rate
• size
• skips
• sort album
• sort album artist
• sort artist
• sort composer
• sort name
• sort show
• time
• track number
• video rating
• work
• year

To be honest I'm not even sure what a lot of these are. It sounds like a lot of work to set up playlists using this.

I use these smart playlists a great deal, they are so simple to setup, you can select any combination of variables you like, and can slice and dice your collection accordingly. I find them very useful provided you have the source data correct!