Organising your music?

[Cybertrash]

Hey everyone.

I recently bought a MacBook, with music and (as I learn) DJing in mind. I plan on ripping my entire CD-collection to some neat format. I am however unsure what application would be suitable for managing aforementioned collection. The obvious answer is of course iTunes, but I hear it does not handle FLAC files very well, and the interface for handling tags is a bit cumbersome. So I was wondering, do you guys have any recommendations for one or several programs that works with FLAC, allows you to organise your music efficently and allows for easy tag-editing?

[Afterhour Ali]

The tool xAct makes it possible to use FLACs in iTunes.

I never tried it though (only use the Mac for work).

I recommend FLAC myself but Apple Losless is natively supported by iTunes. It is another format with non-destructive compression like FLAC. There have been a lot of arguments in audiophile-forums which one is the better. I prefer FLAC because it uses the same headers (metadata) as the open (Ogg)Vorbis format.

I'll post a detailed performance comparison on audio-file formats in DJ software on my blog soon.

For tag-editting on OSX Tagalicious is very good.

[photojojo]

I use mp3's and iTunes.

[Afterhour Ali]

I use mp3's and iTunes.

just j/k'ing

[photojojo]

[Cybertrash]

The tool xAct makes it possible to use FLACs in iTunes.

I never tried it though (only use the Mac for work).

I recommend FLAC myself but Apple Losless is natively supported by iTunes. It is another format with non-destructive compression like FLAC. There have been a lot of arguments in audiophile-forums which one is the better. I prefer FLAC because it uses the same headers (metadata) as the open (Ogg)Vorbis format.

I'll post a detailed performance comparison on audio-file formats in DJ software on my blog soon.

For tag-editting on OSX Tagalicious is very good.

I would like to use FLAC myself, as I prefer free and open formats. Tagalicious seems nice, but I'm not sure I'm willing to pay that ammount.

As for organising the library files-wise, is that something better left to Traktor/<insertDJsoftware> or should I be doing it "manually"?

[Afterhour Ali]

I would like to use FLAC myself, as I prefer free and open formats.

That's the right attitude!

As for organising the library files-wise, is that something better left to Traktor/<insertDJsoftware> or should I be doing it "manually"?

Traktor doesn't organize files. You can specify the folders your music is in or (since Traktor Pro 2.0) use the iTunes library (read-only sadly).

I recommend to organize them manually since you have full control and always know where to find your stuff even if you put your music library on a pc without that software knowing where your tracks are.

[Cybertrash]

That's the right attitude!

And my heart bled when I gave in and bought that MacBook... How I wish Traktor ran on Linux.

Traktor doesn't organize files. You can specify the folders your music is in or (since Traktor Pro 2.0) use the iTunes library (read-only sadly).

I recommend to organize them manually since you have full control and always know where to find your stuff even if you put your music library on a pc without that software knowing where your tracks are.

On my Windows PC, I've been using Songbird to manage my library in folders (Album Artist -> Album). This worked fine for a while, but when I started using the library with other applications (Mixxx for example), everything became garbled, the tracks are still there, organised as before, but neither Songbird, nor Mixxx seems to understand that. This is something I'd like to avoid with my Mac + Traktor/VDJ/ (still not sure what the controller will ship with).

[Afterhour Ali]

And my heart bled when I gave in and bought that MacBook... How I wish Traktor ran on Linux.

I'm still wrestling with myself about that. Did you ever try Traktor in Wine?

On Windows I go with J.Rivers Media Jukebox. Its a great piece of free software which outdo's iTunes in almost every aspect (library management, formats, conversion, dsp etc. etc.).

On OSX there is no way around iTunes I guess. I gave in on that but configured it to keep the music where I put it.

[Cybertrash]

I'm still wrestling with myself about that. Did you ever try Traktor in Wine?

I read up quite a bit on that, and it seems that Traktor and WINE don't really play very well together. At least not in Ubuntu.

On Windows I go with J.Rivers Media Jukebox. Its a great piece of free software which outdo's iTunes in almost every aspect (library management, formats, conversion, dsp etc. etc.).

On OSX there is no way around iTunes I guess. I gave in on that but configured it to keep the music where I put it.

Oh yeah? I use Songbird on Windows, but it works for OSX as well. and in my mind, it is superior to iTunes, unless you want iPod support, unfortunately...