Thanks to everyone who's provided advice and suggestions. It seems I've opened a can of worms here - mostly as a result of my lack of knowledge...
To summarize, recommendations for cataloging software have included: J River Media Center OrangeCD Helium Music Manager (HMM) as well, its been suggested that I don't really need cataloging software - that SlimServer works just fine without it. I had originally thought I'd try Media Monkey, as I'd heard good things about it, and was looking for confirmation of peoples' experiences with it. I downloaded it yesterday, and have had some reasonable success, however, I've run into a few problems that have more to do with my collection than anything. I think I'll give some of these other apps a try as well. Provided that they all play nicely together, I should be able to give them a try at the same time, as long as I only have one app running at a time. When I first started ripping my CDs to disk, I used iTunes, and the m4a format. (My thinking was that I was building a library to be used for my iPod, and had heard that the m4a format was a 'better' lossy format than mp3.) Later on (about 400 CDs later on), I decided that I would use the LAME converter along with EAC to rip to mp3, since I could automate it somewhat, and mp3 is more common than m4a. What I discovered when using Media Monkey is that the m4a files don't appear to have any id3 tags associated, so I'm thankful that I was fairly meticulous with my file and directory naming conventions. I have a LOT of work to do adding tags to clean up what my library... My existing CD-based archive of SHN formatted files unfortunately doesn't have any tagging information included, but I'm guessing that it would be reasonably straightforward (although tedious) to tag the files as I imported and converted them to flac. Next issue is that after doing a bit of research, I've discovered that flac files don't use id3 tags, but "Vorbis comments", so I'm trying to sort that out... If I use flac as my archival format, and use mp3tag to write the vorbis comments, hopefully I'll be able to utilize the vorbis comments to create id3 tags if I export the flac files to mp3 for use in portable players. I like the idea of a separate library for mp3 files, especially given that the disk requirements are fairly minor. I think I'm going to have to re-engineer my music storage from scratch though, as my current setup isn't going to cut it. With all my CDs archived to disk in a lossless format, I'll have to give some thought to the type of drive(s) to use. Up to now, I've been using a 250GB USB drive, but even with m4a and mp3 files, I'm not going to even come close to fitting everything on... My current pc is a bit dated (so much so that it has a BIOS limitation on the size of hard disk it will recognize of something like 230 GB), so I think I'd do well to buy a refurbished pc and add some big disks to it (probably internal IDE drives). I can get ahold of a refurbished 2.8 GHz P4, for around $300 CDN, and a 500GB drive is running around $200 CDN. If I could get a Linux system up and running with that hardware, running SlimServer, and map/mount the drive to my Windows box, then I could use one of these cataloging programs to manage the library, and tagging software to clean up/edit tags. It looks like I have a bit of work ahead of me... Thanks to everyone for your advice and assistance - its greatly appreciated. Thanks also for allowing me to ramble... Brawny -- brawny ------------------------------------------------------------------------ brawny's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=11131 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34786 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
