I want to commit my classical music CD collection to a PC harddrive for play back through my home stereo system. Can anyone recommend a good flexible database organizer which will do this. I heard that many systems simply put each track in its place alphabetically. This could be a problem since, for example, symphonies have as many as four movements typically recorded on separate tracks. Having those tracks filed alphabetically would be useless. Can anyone recommend a good database software application to organize around this problem. I am sure I am not the only one out there trying to do this. Also can you tell me more about this "tag" thing. I will be using a device called "squeezebox" to bridge between computer and stereo. how do the tags of the database interact with the software of the device, or can't you tell based on this? I may just have to buy the thang and see how it all works together. any helpful thoughts welcome...

PS I think I want to use the flac format to rip my music, but I am not sure what I am saying and will need a whole education but perhaps that could be the subject for another topic altogether.

I would actually recommend iTunes for you. It's easy enough to get started with and powerful enough to handle all your requirements, except the fact that you want to encode in FLAC. iTunes has it's own lossless equivalent however, I'd recommend that. It can supposedly interact with the squeezebox - and the squeezebox itself can play Apple Lossless format.



That is why you would normally include tracknumber somewhere in the beginning of the filename for each track - problem solved.


Yes, a tag on each music file will help you organise your collection. The squeezebox can probably understand most different types of tags (yes, there are different types depending on which format you choose to encode with). But they basically all hold the same type of information. Your organising software would normally take care of this.


Flac is fine - there is no chance you will have noise added to your music from the encodeing process by choosing either flac or other lossless format. Only drawback is that it takes much more space than for example AAC or MP3.

Oh, and by the way, I think this post should not have gone into the Off-Topic section. It is really about music software in general and I think you would have got more and faster replies posting in for example "General Audio" or so...

I've heard good things about Media Monkey, though I haven't tried it myself. Not sure it supports FLAC yet, but I think that is coming soon. The GodFather has a ton of features, and I think library abilities is one of them, though I haven't gotten that far yet in using it (takes a lot of time to wrap your head around everything in there since it's so cram packed with goodies).