My current music solution

People who know me can tell you that I have about zero patience for software.  Especially software that is so integral to my day-to-day use of the computer.

One such program is my media player.  I have tried pretty much every single one out there, and I haven’t been too impressed with any of them.  I constantly evaluate these programs and usually just end up settling. 

(I should also note that I’m probably the only person on the planet that doesn’t have an iPod.  Heck, even the Pope has one!)

• Windows Media Player – The library integration is weak and not very usable for me.  The built-in cd burner is piss-poor, and I generally don’t like the interface.  I usually just use this for viewing temporary media (like my phone’s voicemail or little video clips).  The built-in taskbar toolbar is KICKASS and more media players should do this.
• WinAMP – Fantastic for a file-based collection, but I have grown to need more.  My library was out of control and I was tired of manually tagging/renaming.  The media library didn’t suit me.  The visualizations are top-notch and the skin community is HUGE.  I like the interface, but again, I needed more control over my library.
• MusicMatch – As much as I’d like this one to work for me, it still didn’t feel right.  I didn’t get a good view of my music, and I was sick of it trying to get me to subscribe to it’s mp3 download service.  I uninstalled it.
• iTunes – I have chosen to stick with this one for now.  The interface is pretty well thought-out and I really like the smart playlists.  The ability to share music on the local network is very nice, though I’d like this to be able to stream over the internet as well (authenticated, of course).  It has decent support for podcast subscriptions, though a bit-torrent-aware plugin would be nice for this.  I also like the ability to rate songs easily.

I gathered some tips on generating some good smart playlists from Andy Budd.  Basically this keeps my playlists alive and I can rate songs to help shape the playlists.  I can un-check songs that I don’t want to be included in ANY playlist (like stand-up comedy, podcasts, or 0:20 long tracks that are skits or preludes to other songs on the same cd).

So now that the media situation was settled, I needed a nice way to keep my music in sync from my desktop and laptop (at work).  I’d still like streaming ability over the internet, but these are the machines I use most, so they’ll have to do.  At the advice of Scott Hanselman I decided to give FolderShare another go.  This time around I noticed that 2 things changed:

• Microsoft bought them out
• Now it’s FREE!

This definitely got me interested.  I decided to setup my mp3 folder as my share folder and installed FolderShare on both PCs.  When I get new music in, I import it using iTunes (which copies and renames the files) and will automatically be synchronized with the other PC.  That means I can import music on either my laptop or my desktop and everything will stay organized.  This is a big plus for me.

So far this is working out fairly well.  If I rename or change the tag of a file, then the whole file has to be transferred back to the other PC, so this can use up quite a bit of bandwidth.  I haven’t run into any issues with this so far.

Some other cool music links are:

• MusicBrainz Tagger – This open-source free service is a GREAT idea.  Basically it will scan your mp3’s, make a digital footprint of each one, then try to match it with the online database.  It will give you a percentage of confidence so you can setup to automatically tag those files that are 90% or greater and sift through the ones it wasn’t sure about.  If it cannot find a match, it will ask you to help the community out and supply some tag info.  This can run in the background to automatically organize your mp3s.  Very cool.
• iTunes Registry – Upload your iTunes playlists and get suggestions based on data from the other uploaded playlists.  See what other people are listening to.
• music mobs – Mark songs that you like and see what other people suggest.

Are there any other helpful media links that I might add here?

UPDATE:  I recently saw some issues when synchronizing the folders that iTunes manages on both ends.  If one iTunes collection modifies a filename or adds a file to the list, the 2nd iTunes will not pick it up, since I am not sync’ing the iTunes .xml files.  To fix this, I found a script that will scan your folder and re-import all of the songs.  Best of all, this will *not* reset your playcounts, ratings, or tag info.  This includes songs that were not already in your library, so it’s perfect for me.  If you use it, make sure and edit it to include your music directory.

Click here for the iTunes Folder Sync script.  Thanks to Garreth Farrington for this.  (Anybody want to wrap this script in an easier-to-use app?)