Im extremely impressed by the way that itunes with the help of some extra scripts can generate a very nice web catalogue to peruse through a huge collection of compressed music. Ive been scouring the web to find something half as feature rich and eye-candy filled. My question is has anyone ventured across any really good software that is able to catalogue a collection using id3 tags to generate a nice manageable web interface. My criteria is to be able to display by the usual suspects(genre, artist, album), the ability to display cover art, maybe some description. Since the majority of my collection is musepack, the ability to stream is a foregone conclusion at the moment so that is not a critical feature although the ability to download the track might be nice. Im not even quite so picky as to require this software sit ontop of a database and use any sort of automation, i would be perfectly content if this software did nothing more than generate a static html catalogue.

Ive found a lot of cross platform solutions involving php/mysql which ive been able to run fine on my server but none of them have get been the end all solution for me. Any testaments, rants, ideas or suggestions welcome. If i cannot find anything worthwhile i might end up coding my own php/mysql solution. Comments welcome thanks.

P.S. The free-er the better

Check the Slim Devices' server after they've put in the planned musepack support. It supports basic tag navigation and through plugins can utilize other databases like Moodlogic (Windows only) and Audioscrobbler.

--jth

I like MEXP for WinAmp for this purpose. It's not a web interface or does not produce HTML AFAIK. It just makes access to a big database more convenient.

Ok. Ill air out my ignorance in advance. Now i understand that these programs have to "support" certain formats in order to stream them and do other nifty things to them, however is there such a program as ive described that is capable of cataloguing any type of file (mpc, mp3, m4a, ogg, etc.) provided its tagged using id3v2? Im not really interested in creating playlists or streaming them so much as i want a nice tidy dynamically sortable catalogue to look at or to show other people. I would like to have the option of downloading the individual songs from this dynamically generated html, however that is a low priority. I will definately checkout this slimserver once mpc support is implemented, thanks for the suggestion.

Edit: Learned that mpc doesnt use id3 so that sort of makes all this moot point. So then my revised question is, do any of these cataloguing systems support ape2?

MPEG Audio Collection can output HTML reports based on what you have in your collection. But it only appears as one huge page. I usually just output my folder listing (albums). No clickable links or anything. Free and open source.

MP3 Collector is a possibility. Their sister product, Music Collector, generates more complex HTML files with a list of album and you can click on an album to get more detail (track listing, etc.) I'm not sure if it handles other audio formats besides MP3 though. Not free, but not too expensive.
http://www.collectorz.com/