How do you manage you music library?

I debated on whether or not to post this in music but felt it was more on the tech and software side of things, so here we are. For the longest time I've maintained my massive music library on a windows partition because iTunes is just such a useful program. I love and understand the interface, but windows is bullsoykaf and I was tired of using it just for my music. So I've been looking for a suitable Linux replacement and honestly things aren't that great. I was a really big fan of how banshee can import your iTunes library with relative ease, but it kept crashing upon trying to import new music and was hence un-usable. In addition, it's no longer maintained. Amarok is a bloody mess and near incomprehensible so that is definitely out of the question. I've settled on Rhythmbox so far, but even that is a mess when it comes to installing add-ons, and it misses the mark when it comes to how it manages syncing with an iPod (no good way to specify what artists, songs, genres etc you want) it just syncs your entire library. So TL;DR, for those of you who maintain a large music library and use a mp3 player, how do you do it? What software do you use? Is running iTunes in WINE a reasonable solution (apart from it not being free)? I guess this sort of setup is falling out of widespread use, but it's one of the essential things I want in my computing.

I use Rhythmbox but I have a Fiio mp3 player so I have no problems with syncing as you have.

I run mpd on my homeserver and then connect to it via LAN by a mpd client for whatever machine I happen to be using. It's really good for this kind of thing.

I personally use Cantata, which does support device sync and isn't soykaf at it, although i've never tried it with an iPod. It's an mpd client (but you can also let Cantata manage mpd if you prefer). I've personally never used iTunes or an iPod though, so I don't know how it compares or works with them.

I use Banshee without problems...

>>6988 What version and distribution do you use? I'd prefer banshee if it worked. There doesn't seem to be a way in rhythmnbox to sync videos either which is very annoying.

I use beet for managing my library. It also pulls in tags / album art / lyrics / etc. MPD / NCMPCPP for playing on computers. libimobiledevice + shell scripts for syncing to ipod. The same script populates a folder full of hardlinks to my music that syncs to my android phone via syncthing, so I can just run the script and eventually the music shows up on the phone, no need to actually connect it or anything.

>>6981 I just manage things through the file system, and I use Foobar2000. I'm on windows though, so it's sorta different from if you're on linux.

>>6992 no, its no different on linux. I do the same with deadbeef as a player, until recently. Now ive ended up just using mpv.

>>6981 cmus or vlc... how much do *really* need in a music player anon? mpd seems nice but i haven't bothered to set it up. if you want a program to organize music and clean up tags, i recommend this one: http://docs.puddletag.net

I'm not sure what I'd be doing if I were still relying on my iPod. I've moved to an Android phone with a large SD card for mobile music playing, and just manage everything by hand in the filesystem.

I use a shared partition to store my files ( and a backup on a hdd). I use it on linux and windows, I don't have music on my mac. /Music /Artist /Album I edit the meta data with Easytag.

Management? I just throw evrerything I found in whatever folders I want and use VLC to play them

>>6981 I keep 300 or so youtube tabs with music in them open at all times.

I use Clementine and have all my music on my home server. I can mount it from anywhere via sshfs, so no dedicated mp3 player needed. Everything is tagged with musicbrainz picard and structured like so: Artist/Year - Album/ or if there are Singles or something else I want to keep I make directories for Albums, Singles etc.

>>6998 chaotic neutral >>7007 chaotic evil

>>6997 >metadata by hand why noone uses Picard?

Artist - Album (year) {country, re-release year, record label, misc info, media} [FORMAT]

Audio/Genre/Subgenre(s)/Artist/Album ID3 tagging is garbage, especially for compilations, rare/non-tagged soykaf, and genre tags. It's a lot more comfy to use a media player like Audacious or FB2K too. Downside to this organization approach is that subgenre can get messy with artists with a wide range of style, or splitting up a grouping into two or more specific groupings. It's also a lot of initial setup but it's easy enough to maintain if you're not lazy soykaf.

~/music/%ARTIST\\%ALBUM/%TRACKNUM\\%TITLE \\ represents any random seperator. any of these values might be enclosed in some random characters like brackets. some other random garbage like the comiket it came from or other stuff might be in the name too, generally whatever archive I download from the internet comes close enough to this to begin with so I just leave it.

>>6981 deadbeef and write our own plugin for what you want it to d.

I'm ashamed to say I just keep directories with artist names in a folder called Music. Nothing too fancy.. but I prefer homebrew things over complex programs.