How do you manage multiple parallel music libraries?

Question

I have a main music library containing ripped lossless files (in WMAL for now) and original downloaded MP3s, AACs, etc. I also have a couple parallel libraries that contain the exact same set of music, but in a different format.

For example, I have the following libraries:

Full\: lossless, original lossy downloads
Mobile\: lossless transcoded to HE-AAC, lossy copied over without transcoding
MP3\: lossless transcoded to MP3, lossy MP3s copied over, others ignored

This is all a bit clumsy to manage for me. I have each library in a separate folder on my media drive, and I manage the Full\ library with WMP (which gets me playback, automatic tagging, album art, folder renaming, etc.). I manage Mobile\ with iTunes so it can sync with my iPod, though any iTunes Store downloads go into Mobile\ instead of Full\ where they belong. And I haven't started the MP3 library yet.

Whenever I rip a new CD or something, I'll point foobar2000 at Full\ and transcode it all at once to Mobile\ and MP3\.

There have to be other people doing this; how do you manage it all in a nice way?

Note that I'm on WinXP.

Answer 1

If you could have a Linux fileserver, you could put the FLAC files there and share the filesystem over MP3FS, it would transcode the files into MP3 on-the-fly when needed and there wouldn't be any need to store files multiple times.

Unfortunately I haven't seen a similar thing for Windows. My solution there would be to write a simple script that monitors the FLAC-folder and would detect new files and transcode them to MP3 every night or something of that sorts. Not as handy.

Answer 2

I don't understand the need of separate libraries. With foobar2000 you could classify the library by codec...

Here is my album list panel code for "codec / codec profile" order:

%codec%|
$if($stricmp(%codec%,vorbis),%__bitrate_nominal%' kbps (nominal)')
$if($stricmp(%codec%,MP3),$if($stricmp($left(%codec_profile%,3),VBR),VBR|'['$substr(%codec_profile%,5,6)']',%codec_profile%|$ifgreater(%bitrate%,64,$ifgreater(%bitrate%,128,$ifgreater(%bitrate%,160,$ifgreater(%bitrate%,192,$ifgreater(%bitrate%,256,$ifgreater(%bitrate%,319,$ifequal(%bitrate%,320,=320,),<=319),<=256),<=192),<=160),<=128),<=64)kbps))
$if($stricmp(%codec%,AAC),$replace(%codec_profile%,LC,Low Complexity,SSR,Scalable Sampling Rate,HE,High Efficiency,LD,Low Delay,LTP,Long-Term Prediction,SBR,Spectral Bandwidth Replication))
$if($stricmp(%codec%,Musepack),$replace(%codec_profile%,'',))
$if($stricmp(%codec%,WMA),%codec_profile%)
$if($stricmp(%codec%,Monkey''s Audio),%codec_profile%' ('$info(version)')')
$if($stricmp(%codec%,FLAC),%codec_profile%)
|%album artist%|%album%|%tracknumber%. %title%

(you could use a similar "title formatting" code in most of the components)

And you could do everything you do with wmp: playback, automatic tagging, album art, folder renaming, etc... And certainly more...

And even you could transfer songs to/from your ipod with the foo_dop component.

The only thing that doesn't work with fb2k is the iTunes Store