I'm in the midst of re-organizing all of my multimedia, and cleaning out my libraries of junk that I've collected over the years since a recent SAN crash left me in recover mode. I thankfully have recovered probably 99.9% of all my 6 TB of data, and am in cleanup mode now where I am removing duplicates, and hopefully streamlining things for easier future management.
This Herculean task includes coming up with a new system for managing all my multimedia, ranging from photographs taken, to audio files, and videos. I realize that one all-encompassing app to manage all these libraries is likely non-existent. Even if there was one, it would probably be too heavy-handed to deal with the various metadata fields that span different file types. So, I'm trying to organize things by media type.
Photography
The lions share of my files are photographs from over 10-15 years, and this is already pretty well dialed in via my Adobe Lightroom software which has its own database of metadata tags for things like f-stop, shutter speed, etc. When I finished the SAN recovery, the Lightroom database was intact, so that's pretty taken care of.
Music
I am still in search of a good platform for the music files (though video is coming soon too). The current mainstream ones like Apple iTunes, Google Play, and Microsoft Media Player are all well and good for music native to their libraries, but I've got music from all of them (plus my own content that I've created). I've already talked to a few musicians (my boss - a drummer, and my brother-in-law - a composer), and they both admit to just using folders and filenames in their operating system to organize things. I'd rather let an app do the work for me though, so am wondering: is there any sort of desktop-based software that is good at organizing/managing music files? My primary goal here is to be able to organize my music by artist, genre, and album. Additionally, the ability to update/correct ID3 container information for things like bitrate, codec, track number, release date, etc. would be nice too. Currently I am using a free utility called MP3tag, but that's only for ID3 editing, not really for music management. The best thing I can think of is to ask others, so here we go: what music management software do you use for your audio files?
This Herculean task includes coming up with a new system for managing all my multimedia, ranging from photographs taken, to audio files, and videos. I realize that one all-encompassing app to manage all these libraries is likely non-existent. Even if there was one, it would probably be too heavy-handed to deal with the various metadata fields that span different file types. So, I'm trying to organize things by media type.
Photography
The lions share of my files are photographs from over 10-15 years, and this is already pretty well dialed in via my Adobe Lightroom software which has its own database of metadata tags for things like f-stop, shutter speed, etc. When I finished the SAN recovery, the Lightroom database was intact, so that's pretty taken care of.
Music
I am still in search of a good platform for the music files (though video is coming soon too). The current mainstream ones like Apple iTunes, Google Play, and Microsoft Media Player are all well and good for music native to their libraries, but I've got music from all of them (plus my own content that I've created). I've already talked to a few musicians (my boss - a drummer, and my brother-in-law - a composer), and they both admit to just using folders and filenames in their operating system to organize things. I'd rather let an app do the work for me though, so am wondering: is there any sort of desktop-based software that is good at organizing/managing music files? My primary goal here is to be able to organize my music by artist, genre, and album. Additionally, the ability to update/correct ID3 container information for things like bitrate, codec, track number, release date, etc. would be nice too. Currently I am using a free utility called MP3tag, but that's only for ID3 editing, not really for music management. The best thing I can think of is to ask others, so here we go: what music management software do you use for your audio files?
