How can you have any music if you don't have your tags?

Anyone who's ever lived within a few thousand feet of me knows how important music is to me. There must be others out there like me. That being said, why can't I find one music program, that can interface with a mobile music/media device, with all the right features?

Let me explain what I need, and why I need it; this all stems from how I listen to music. (This post is rather long, but it's one of the few areas of computer related stuff that I actually know a bit about and care a lot about. I need to vent about it, and I'm also hoping maybe this will lead to suggestions from other people. I have added headings and subheadings hopefully for the ease of the reader. Skim away.)

The Importance of Music

Music is very powerful; it is raw emotion. As you may know from my last post, emotions are what drive my life and let me know I am alive. Sometimes I may want to listen to a certain song or album. In these instances, any media player or tangible music medium (cd/cassette/record) will work fine. But usually, I know how I feel, or how I want to feel, and I want to listen to music that matches that. Music is a force unto itself. If I am very upset, and can put on the perfect angry song, that force can pull that anger out, express it, release it. If it's a gorgeous day but I need to stay inside and work, and I play the right happy, uplifting songs, the whole day is bright and good, whether I'm inside or out.

Before all this digital stuff, when listening to music meant playing my cds or records, I could still choose my music by emotions. Usually when I got a new cd, I played it over and over and over until I knew nearly every single word. And as I played it, (if I wasn't driving) I looked through the booklet. That had the nice side effect of causing me to associate the mood of the music with the album art. That's why all the booklets were kept in my cd binders with the cds. I could flip through the pages, see the image that gave the right emotional response and put in the cd.

My Essential Features

I need to have album art. So often this doesn't automatically come up. I want to have an easy way to attach the proper album art, and as a last resort, be able to find it online and just copy and paste it to my files.

Mood settings. This is a rather no-brainer after the explanation above. Even better is to have two or more settings applicable to this area, such as Mood and Occasion.

Album artist different than artist. This is pretty standard now, but back when I first got my i-pod, it drove me crazy that I had to put half my stuff under Various, or mess around with the albums or artists to get things to line up right.

A decent rating system. Yes, including the option to mark something I hate. Don't give me that, if you don't like it don't have it bologna. Music is meant to be shared, someone else may want to hear that song.

Tags. Please, attach all the information I spend so much time inputting to the actual file. I hate moving files, switching players or restoring lost files and finding I've lost all that important info!

The Players I've Tried

Basic Players

Simple media players like WinAmp, Foobar and VLC, that require dragging or opening specific songs from your file structure just don't cut it. In order to effectively use one of these, you have to know exactly what song or album you want to listen to at any given time.

Foobar and VLC do have benefits that make them must haves for certain purposes, but they do not work for me as general media players. Foobar allows you to convert files from, say flac, to a good bit rate mp3. It also allows you to listen to different bit rates of the same song in order to find out where you can hear the difference, instead of relying on the so-called-experts' opinions. VLC can play video formats that no other player I have found can. Youtube videos saved via keepvid.com can be played back on VLC, allowing you access to them even without the Internet.

Players that Sync with Devices

Obviously, the grand-daddy of them all is i-tunes. Hate it. Apple's the devil. Maybe it's how many times I've had my i-pod repaired (gave up after it died a 4th time). Maybe it's how often I've lost all my music. But there are other issues with i-tunes as well. People tell me the newest version is better, but when I stopped using it, it did not have a lot of what I needed. It did have the album art at that time, but they don't attach to your files as part of the tags. That means, when I backup my library on my hard drive (because I will need it), that info doesn't go with the song file. I liked the smart playlists, too. However, quite often I would spend hours updating info and playlists and things, i-tunes would freeze and when I re-opened it, all my hard work was gone. It also caused my computer to crash so many times that I finally just had to delete it. The drm mp4s from the i-tunes store, also a major sucking point.

Windows Media Player is another standard. This one isn't so bad, except again it doesn't put the info into the file tags. Move it and lose it. I was kind of dumb and ripped a lot of my music using this program, with the default settings. That means I have a whole lot of .wma files. Not the best option. [Now I only use EAC for ripping. It allows me to rip into flac, which I can then change via Foobar into whatever bit rate file type I want.] The interface isn't bad most of the time, but occasionally it drives me nuts; doesn't give me enough options. With my amount of music, only having 5 stars (as in i-tunes) can feel a little stifling. Like the i-tunes stores, the stores available through Windows Media Player cater to that player's format and tend to be in wma. At least they're drm free.

I just downloaded the new Zune player yesterday. I've heard great things about the software. I am not impressed. It only has 3 ratings options. What am I supposed to do with that! I don't want 5,000 songs to come up when I select a rating that to me should mean "things I really like" or "songs I enjoy but aren't my favorites". The options for setting things in properties don't look too promising either. So far, I don't really jive with the interface, but as I said, I downloaded it yesterday. Maybe as I use it more, I will like it more. The problem is, I just got a Zune. (Carrying my laptop around as a media player was really not working so well. Often afraid that it would fly off the front seat of the car, or having to carry my backpack on a walk just to have music.)

Other Players

By far, the best software I have found is Media Monkey. It has album art, moods, occasions and spaces to add extra tags. I love that because then a song that works for more than one mood can be tagged for both! It interfaces with amazon.com for updating album information, including album art. That doesn't always work right, but it is still extremely helpful. The best part is that most of the information you enter into the properties window is actually attached to the file tag. It even attaches album art! Media Monkey also plays pretty much any file type, including flac and mp4. The interface can be extremely confusing, but that just takes some getting used to. It does give a lot more options than any other interface I have used. I especially like that I can change the column headings in the track browser (those threes columns like i-tunes has on top.) Oh, and it lets me do half-stars, plus it has a little bomb to mark tracks I hate (usually skits.)

Media Monkey also has some good side purposes, much like Foobar and VLC have their own things. Media Monkey is ideal for sorting music at the file structure level, i.e. straightening your vampire out. If your file names are in good shape, you can tag all your music from there. If your tags are good, but your file names aren't, you can do the opposite. I like to fix my tags via the internet/amazon sinc and then use another feature that allows you to fix your folder structure right from within the program. That is awesome. Media Monkey can take a lot of time to scan your drives for music, even if you've only added a few new songs, but by far the worst thing about it: it doesn't interface with any devices (that I know of.)

Current Plan of Action

So now I have a big mess of music files and folders, in darn near every format from wav to wma to mp3 and mp4 to flac, scattered across 3 of my 4 drives (my computer's a dual boot with a middle drive, and I have my external.) I have started flacing all my new music via EAC. The original plan was to flac everything, put the flacs on the external and convert them to a 200-level mp3 on the computer itself. That might still be the plan. However, it can be a major pain because cds from certain periods of my life, i.e. hut in Africa or car in college, aren't in the best shape and can take over 8 hours to flac.

Flacing aside, I at least still need to get my stuff cleaned up. Seeing as how I have a Zune, I'll need to sync it to either Windows Media Player or the Zune program. Guess that will depend on how many of the player's features transfer over to the device. (5 stars or 3 hearts, etc.) But I'm going to continue using Media Monkey to organize the music and label it. At least then my changes will be on the file tags and should transfer to the other players. I may need to make separate playlists for each mood that I want, enabling me to effectively pull up songs by mood on my Zune. Luckily, Media Monkey allows me to save playlists in a .m3u format readable by the Zune player. And I'm only buying digital music from sites like amazon.com, drm free baby! It seems like a cumbersome and probably problematic approach, but at this point, it seems the best I can do. What I really need is a media device that can function with a Media Monkey or a program with its features. That would be a good start. What do other music aficionados do?

(Original Post)

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Frustrated

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