Folks looking for some tips and experience of managing music collections. Situation currently is I have music purchased in:
-ITunes
-Google Play
-Amazon Mp3
-Plus a few hundred CDs ripped as Flac and MP3

It’s starting to feel a little out of control! I subscribed to ITunes Match to try and bring everything together but that’s not really worked for me and I have now ended up with some (but not all) also in Google Play.

IT wise I have Android Tablet and Phone, Windows PC and Laptop plus Apple MacBook and Apple TV.

What I would like is a central music ‘cloud’ with some music on each device (depending on local memory).

So does anybody have any tips, hints or experience they want to share?

Many thanks db

I use a NAS, with everything on here, available to all devices. match it up with a sonos system and you’re laughing

Ok got a NAS already which is where the local Flac files are. Do you download music directly to the NAS from shops – what about syncing/copying to phone and tablet?

Backup of NAS – Dropbox Skydrive GDrive?

*grumpy old man*
It was much easier just to go to HMV and buy music!
🙂

Personally, I use iTunes as the central “cloud”.
I’ve ended up with a 1TB disk with a folder structure:

Gentre > Artist > album

Add everything to iTunes so I know what I’ve got and (as I’ve only got iPods and iPhone) its easy to keep track of what’s where.

That said, if my 1TB drive dies, I will lose a good proportion of 5000 albums/singles which I guess isn’t very wise!

How the cd’s are tagged and stored is a whole different debate! 🙁

I’ve used a 3 or 4 different programs to rip the cd’s either windows or mac based and so the albums are a bit of mess with different tags formats. iTunes Match seemed to offer a way of sorting it out and giving me nice standardised collection but doesn’t seemed to have helped.

Perhaps I just need to invest a little time on defining a process that I follow. It tends to be I see/hear something I like and buy it on a phone or tablet via say Amazon but then don’t import that back into Itunes.

thanks for input

Use this for tagging

http://www.blisshq.com/mp3-tagging-software.html

I rip my CDs using EAC and then use bliss to give me the artwork.

I use mp3tag to tag everything before it goes into iTunes. Essential to have Artist and Album artist tagged the same for sorting. Compilations are tagged so that they appear in order of the compilation not the artist.
Gotta have a system!

I use foobar2000 for all my database management, its a learning curve but very powerful with all the plugins and scripts available.
mp3tag is also useful for somethings like seeing multiple embedded album art.
i download everything to the nas in its original format in its own dir
like amazon, itunes, beatport etc in either singles or albums
then i duplicate that into the main music file structure after tagging as i like in foobar2000 with a script as follows

music/genre/artist/album/01.title.mp3

or for an album with various artists
music/genre/various artists/album/01.title (artist).mp3

for singles in a flat format like this
music/singles/artist-title.mp3

for singles i embed album art so it shows in the car and on my mp3 player and media center properly
for albums i just add the cover as folder.jpg to the album folder

i use rsnapshot/rsync running from the nas to automatically backup everything to another drive

to copy tunes to another device i just do it from explorer or foobar2000 to copy what i like.

checkout subsonic/madsonic to stream music from your server to your pc and android devices or use a server like serviio so you can access all your tunes via dlna on your devices

i dont currently have this lot in a cloud as basically i have a lot of music and no one service currently provides what i want.

all sounds like a lot of hassle but really isnt now its all setup as i like

if you use multiple services for music then it can be a pain to keep all consolidated and working smoothly.

All good stuff, thank you. I think sorting out all the tags may be the first step!

cheers
db