My view on MP3s, updated.
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.
One thing I haven't found yet, though I've heard that I tunes does it, is burn a CD from a playlist. I've made some Indie playlists based upon 107.7 playlists, and I'd like to burn it.
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. Don't use the build 09 beta, it's really broken for renaming by directories.
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 sucks on the album view because it uses the "orchestra/band" field to differentiate, instead of the "Artist". If you want the album cover to show in wmp, you need this orchestra/band field set. This field isn't editable by most 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 and Genre/Album for complilations. This allows you to use the windows explorer to navigate to the folders of the styles you want. Others do by Artist/Album without genre. 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 or Album - Track - Artist - Title for compilations. There are is a hard corner cases, which is multi CD albums. 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.
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, Indie, Jazz, Latin, Pop, Punk, Rap, Reggae, Rock, Soul, Techno, Vocal, World. Trying to figure out "indy" vs "progressive" etc is too brutal.
Selecting Music
Given a large library, it's hard to select which music to play. I've been using Predixis for a while and it's done a pretty good job of selecting similar music to a playlist.
Playlists
Only use .m3u files, not the Windows Media player default .wpl files for playlists. The .m3u files can be read by everybody, like predixis. Make sure to use relative file paths for transportable playlists.
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. It has different levels of access. It also allows uploads. 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. If I know you and you email me, I'll add you to my list so you can jump earlier in the queue.
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