SwingDJs

I am trying to find a program that will help me to organize my music collection on my computer. I am not interested in DJing with it, just a personal collection that is all over the place.

I have seen many programs that can do this, organize by artist, song title, etc....

What feature I am really interested in, that i have yet to find is a program that will allow me to print/copy/whatever my music database so that i can see it outside of the player. I.E. Export into Excel, or whatnot.

Pretty much any format is ok, txt, CSV, Excel, word....doesnt matter. Just something so that I can print a soft copy of my collection.

Any suggestions?

I use the free version of MusicMatch. Apparently, it will print your whole library, and it looks good and I think you can customize the info that's printed. I say "apparently" because the free version won't actually print it, but it will let you preview the print. When I needed to print a playlist once, I previewed it, did a screen capture, and printed it from Photoshop. It doesn't look like it will print to a file. I'm using version 8, though, so 9 might have that feature.

Kyle - What's your starting point? ID3 tags? There are various ID3 tag extractors/reporters out there.

Doug

Not too worried about the starting point. Most of my collection has tags ID3, and those that dont, I want to create tags for those files that dont have them.

Matt- That sounds semi-promissing. I might get a crack for that player and check it out. I can let you know what the full version does for me.

I used MM before, and kinda liked it, but then new winamp came out and i liked that more. I just used MM as a player though, never for this use. yet

I use MediaMonkey to organize my MP3s. It does export playlists/track info to HTML, XML, Excell and CSV, but I haven't attempted to do so, so can't really tell you how well it works. As just a MP3 organizer though I have to say it totally owns any other program I've found. I actually use it for all of my management stuff, and even use it to browse and search my collection during sets (being able to leave notes for myself about songs owns me), although I play my actual music through Traktor.

Kyle wrote:What feature I am really interested in, that i have yet to find is a program that will allow me to print/copy/whatever my music database so that i can see it outside of the player. I.E. Export into Excel, or whatnot.

Pretty much any format is ok, txt, CSV, Excel, word....doesnt matter. Just something so that I can print a soft copy of my collection.

Any suggestions?

iTunes let's you easily select, copy and paste your music library's information into other programs. The information is tab-delimited, so it can be easily used by a program such as Excel. This is the method I prefer. You can also export the entire library in XML format if that does anything for you.

Jesse

http://www.id3.org/implement.html lists and liks to "all" the programs that work with id3 tags. I rip my CDs, use Tag & Rename to adjust tags and export them to a csv file. T&R will also easily in batch mode rename files for you based on the id3 tag data and will find the tags of all the MP3 files currently on your drive. I then store the data from the MP3 tags in an Access data base i wrote that gives me complete control over how I view the tags and lets me easily and, if I choose, automaticaly create playlists based on filter criteria in the database (for example - all songs with 185-245 bpm, all songs that Kyle thinks are shit for Balboa, etc.)

Awesome stuff guys, great information.

I'm not sure where to start first!

MusicMonkey: Didnt like it. Took a long time to add music to the program on the initial search, and i'm not sure if it got them all. It said 30k songs, but kept stopping on 8k.

iTunes: Remembered that my computer doesnt play quicktime or apple anything. I get some serious distortion. I have tried updating codecs and whatnot, but I have no idea what's wrong.

Tag & Rename: So far, awesome! Exactly what I wanted Doug. Thank you very much.

Not that i'm going to be a champion for itunes... but, uh, it's primarily an mp3 player these days. I never had any distortion issues when I tried it.

I'm telling you, get yourself something like BPM Studio or PCDJ. Both of which can organize your mp3's, an probably provide reports for you. I know BPM Studio does. Takes some time to import, but so will everything.

This is one that I tired a while back:

http://www.collectorz.com/music/

This is designed to organize collections.

Not having any MP3 stuff to organize myself, I can't speak for it's ability to handle MP3's.

FYI,

Jerry

MusicMonkey: Didnt like it. Took a long time to add music to the program on the initial search, and i'm not sure if it got them all. It said 30k songs, but kept stopping on 8k.

Eeh. I only have 7300 songs...hopefully this won't become a problem for me too soon. :/

Kyle wrote:It said 30k songs

Where did you find the funds and time to purchase and rip about 1500 albums?

GuruReuben wrote: Where did you find the funds and time to purchase and rip about 1500 albums?

So that's why the RIAA is on his butt.

jmatthew wrote:

MusicMonkey: Didnt like it. Took a long time to add music to the program on the initial search, and i'm not sure if it got them all. It said 30k songs, but kept stopping on 8k.

Eeh. I only have 7300 songs...hopefully this won't become a problem for me too soon. :/

you'll be fine. i have 25,000+ songs in one itunes installation.