Best Music plugin

[womble]

Hi

I have finally started to put my CDs on to the HDD, what I was wondering is if someone could recommend one of the music plug-ins.
As I have about 300 CDs that will be going on I need the plug-in to be able to cope with this amount along with probably about 1000 individual tunes in addition.
I expect that they would all handle this amount but one might be better than the others for usability.
So if anyone has already gone through this and they could pass on some advice it would be cool

Ta

[nightwalker]

I don't know if there is one 'best' music player. It will have more to do with how you listen to music. Single tracks at a time, whole albums, by genre, random automatic play, etc. More importantly at this point make sure your directory structure for music is nice and tight and makes sense. Make sure the ID3 tags are correct. Some music player index by Directory, others by Tags, again a personal preference. After that it's a matter of personal preference. Try several, you'll know the one for you when you see it.

[tkgafs]

Are you going to use it on the PC or the MVP ?

if on the PC I'd go for musiclibrary2, but if on the mvp I find that musicplayer is the more reliable.

tkgafs

[groover km]

More importantly at this point make sure your directory structure for music is nice and tight and makes sense. Make sure the ID3 tags are correct.

Speaking from bitter experience - after ripping 500+ CDs and then having to go back and correct tags (especially for compilations) - nightwalker is 100% correct.

- Settle on a logical directory structure (I use artist/album/)

- Pick a codec and sample rate (MP3 @256k for me; uses more space but I didn't see the point of spending all that time to end up with distorted sound)

- Whatever software you use to rip your CDs, make sure that it is looking up and writing the TAGs correctly; different players may handle v2 tags differently*; I recommend mediamonkey, but it's personal choice.

*I ripped all my CDs with WMP10, and then found that iTunes didn't recognise the album art. Hence me having to go through them all and fix 'em.

As far as plugins go, it's personal preference; for a file based structure (artist - album - etc) the current My Music works well. For a TAG based structure (Genre, etc.) the forthcoming My Music plugin (available as beta from reven's site) will work.

Hope this helps.

[gEd]

IMHO, the ONLY way to rip CD's to mp3s so that they sounds good AND haev the correct tag info, is to follow this guide:

http://www.ubernet.org/?p=UberGuide

nothing else will do!

[psycik]

I found winamp does pretty good for the ripping. Then I use tag&Rename to sorting out the tags. Since I use ML2 for music you do have to be stop on for tagging.

With Tag&Rename it can take a directory, and this works really well on one of those compilation albums, where the artists is "Various", and download the tags again from freedb. There's an option in the Tag&Rename to say this is a compilation album,and it sets all the artists to the artist for each song.

[Maelwys]

I use a program called Exact Audio Copy to do all my ripping. It handles id3 tags very well and uses the Lame mp3 encoder to encode in vbr. Audio quality is exceptional, even if size isn't.

[daphatty]

I'm using the latest My Music beta plug in and use AudioGrabber (w/ LAME) and WMP10 when freedb.org isn't able to provide me with the music data. My Music works as well as can be expected. My only issue is getting the album art to show up. I haven't figured that part out yet.

[womble]

Thanks for all the advice, I will try them all tonight.

[gEd]

btw: if you use Exact Audio Copy (EAC), you should ideally run it in secure more to ensure that it reads the cd's bit perfectly. This does however mean that it takes quite a bit longer to rip. If you are not bothered about having bit perfect rips, disable secure mode.

For best results, it is important to use the "--alt -preset standard" switch with the lame encoder.

EAC can easily download the album info from cddb and write this to the mp3's as they are being created.

With EAC and lame, you don;t have to wait for the mp3's to be created before starting to rip the next cd as the tracks are held in a queue and converted by an serparate lame process.