[OT] (ish) MP3 library management...

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

Chaps,

Spent a *huge* amount of time recently trying to clean up & sort out
the
quality of the tagging of my MP3 library (and I'm still doing it!)

What becomes increasingly apparent when you go through this excercise, is
just how many duplicates turn up when there are more than a few compilation
albums in there.... there are some tracks that just *always* appear on
every
single one of those "the best XXXX in the world.... Ever" type
albums, and I
keep noticing many many duplicate copies of tracks...

Now, this arises primarily because the logical organisation of my
collection
adheres to the original album paradigm, - i.e. I maintain a folder
structure
as follows:

Artist1\album1\songs.mp3
\album2\songs.mp3

The aforementioned compilation albums obviously don't fit that model, and
so
are organised thus:

Various\compilation album name 1\songs.mp3
\compilation album name 2\songs.mp3

and so on...

Having so many duplicates is obviously very wasteful, so I'd like to
eliminate them all, so that I only ever retain a single copy of any given
song. However, not having yet found a decent (SWMBO friendly) alternative
front end interface, the main method of searching & selecting songs is
via
Windows Explorer, and so the Windows filesystem is currently the
"database",
hence the folder structure above is used extensively to select music by
artist & album....

So something of a radical rethink is required....

Myself & SWMBO are both quite used to the Artist\album search &
select
paradigm, and I don't want to force her to have to change habits in one
fell
swoop... (when/if I find a decent database front end that we both like, and
that looks good on a TV, then I'll start to "encourage" her to
change...) so
I'm looking for suggestions...

One idea that I had was to create an M3U playlist file for every
compilation
album, then move all the MP3 files up one level, as follows:
Various\songs.mp3  so there would be a "Various" folder with no
sub-folders
for albums beneath it, but bazillions of assorted tracks (but at least
there'd be only 1 copy of each!), then use the M3U files if/when we want to
play by album... - anyone got any other ideas?

I would like to get the issue of the front-end sorted out as well though,
so
I'm looking for a nice, TV-friendly, SWMBO-friendly database driven
interface, that uses Winamp as the player, has decent playlist management
features, and good search & select facilities... - any suggestions?

Eventually, I'd obviously like to abstract the underlying filesystem from
the user interface, so it won't matter where the files are stored, but for
the time being, that's just the way it has evolved over time... I very much
like Keith Doxey's jukebox front end, but that's not something that is
"available" per se, but as a starting point for the search &
select tools,
it gives a pretty good idea on where to set the bar...


Thoughts?

Paul G.

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