So you've decided you want to work with MP3s. I thought I share some thoughts on how to rip, burn, store them.
Ripping
ExactAudioCopy. Slow, but it's exact. I use 192kbps Variable rate to get the best trade-off of quality/size. Better than professional version of winamp. And Windows Media Player is hopelessly castrated with it's lack of mp3 ripping.
Burning
I use BShare Recorder Gold5, but that's because it came with my dvd burner. WinAmp, Windows Media player suck. Lots of skips, static. EAC didn't work that well for me either.
Updating ID3 TAGs
MP3 Tag Tools. You can synch ID3 tags with filenames/directories. It's by far the best tool so far. I've imported 3000 songs, then tagged them all and done a bulk file rename and it works like a charm.
The automated ones that guess don't do a very good job. Windows media player is good for doing drag and drop updates to artists and albums. WMP doesn't allow for folder/file renaming or bulk editing. Sometimes allmusic uses different artist names for the tricky ones so you can't use it if you want a single artist. Belle & Sebastian is a good example, as wmp/allmusic will also show them as Belle and Sebastian or Belle And Sebastian.
Players
Windows media player and winamp are good. WMP has this wierd "bug" where it will often show different albums if any of the tags for the same album are different, like different artists, comments, year, etc. And it uses the "orchestra/band" field to differentiate as well. If you want the album cover to show in wmp, you need this orchestra/band field set. This field isn't editable by mp3 tag tools, so you have to just drag 'n drop the albums without the field into the albums with the field. argh.
I also am using the Creative SoundBlaster Wireless Music station to wireless broadcast music and it works pretty well too. It really needs cleaned up id3 tag tools as scrolling through albums/artists on the small lcd can be painful.
Metadata strategies
Put redundant information in the tags and in the filename. You'd be surprised how often you mess up.
We have 2 different directory strategies: By Genre/Artist/Album allows you to use the windows explorer to navigate to the folders of the styles you want. Others do by Artist/Album. This does cause problems when trying to synchronize between the styles, as it's hard to normalize to a single data model.
For filenaming, we use the Artist - Album - Track - Title style. There are 2 hard corner cases: Multi CD albums and collections. For Multi CD, we generally will make the Track also contain the disc number, so tracks like 101 and 215 will occur. In cases where each of the discs has a name, like the Buddha Bar "Joy" "Dinner" etc, then we put the name or number of the cd in the Album. This has the side-effect that it appears there are multiple albums when there is only 1.
For Collections, there are yet again a few different techniques depending upon the CD. In cases where a particular person has created the CD, then we use them as the Artist, ie Claude Challe. Otherwise, the albums are sorted into a "Various Artists" directory. Then the true artist and title is used in the file name and the tags. Sometimes the Title of the song is actually the true Artist + Title so the artist tag can be "various artist", but that's a bad approach.
Genres are the hardest metadata to specify. We chose a fairly small number of genres, knowing that some would get very large. So far it's Blues, BlueGrass, Country, Electronic (includes all the lo-fi, ambient, chillout), Folk, Jazz, Latin, Pop, Punk, Rap, Reggae, Rock, Techno, Vocal, World. Trying to figure out "indy", "progressive" etc is too brutal.
Web sites for information
Allmusic. Used by id3 tag tools and windows media player.
File transfer mechanism
USB 2 drives are the only way to go. It's back to sneaker-net when you've got 50 gigs to move around. As tannenbaum said, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway".
File synchronization/backup
Super flexible file synchronizer is really good. I've got a really junky usb 2 drive that fails under high speeds, and sff allows a speed limit.
Downloading
Soulseek. Much better than Kazaa, Bearshare or other p2p. The downloads are more reliable, the searches produce way more results, and you can download an entire folder at once instead of song by song. I suggest paying the small amount to move to the front of the queue. Don't be confused by the site that charges you gobs per minute.
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