Community poll forum: How much storage space do you have for music files?

...do you use any utilitities to 'clean-up' your music library and keep tracks in some sort of logical order. do you simply depend on iTunes/Windows Media Player to handle it?

I use MediaMonkey, and it organises files by artist, and separately by album, genre and other criteria.

Why do people spend time producing their own filing systems? Am I missing something here? Couldn't the time be more productively spent actually listening to the stuff?

The only thing I'd really like would be a nice kind of 'pub jukebox' interface which showed all my album covers in a scrollable list, with perhaps another little clickable list with the tracks on each album. I don't suppose any of you guys would know if such a product is available before I start trying to code one up?

And perhaps a USB coin slot device so that I can make a few quid when my mates come round for a drink and want to listen to an old track or two

re:"The only thing I'd really like would be a nice kind of 'pub jukebox' interface which showed all my album covers in a scrollable list, with perhaps another little clickable list with the tracks on each album. I don't suppose any of you guys would know if such a product is available before I start trying to code one up?"

Don't bother writing one.. Get the latest version of iTunes (v7.0).. it just added ablum art covers in a juke-box-like list. Check it out. And it's free!

If you go to:
http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/sep_2006/event/index.html
you will see an announcement video that was made when Steve Jobs made the new iPod product announcement recently.. towards the end of this video, is quite a comprehensive view of the new iTunes 7.0 software. It includes the cover art search function.

I have never used iTunes, so can't answer all your questions about MP3 files.. my suggestion is to download it and try it with a few of your MP3 tracks before doing your whole library.

With regard to the cover art, Apple says it is making a cover art library available free to any iTunes user. Supposedly, no matter how you got your album tracks into iTunes, there is a function to access the cover art DB and download the cover art for it for free.

Watch the video.. it is very informative. (unfortnately, you will probably need to download and install Quicktime if you don't already have it)

Credit card details, eh...

Hmm... I just remembered, of course, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Time to break out the old Delphi compiler, I think, and get going on something of my own!

Thanks for all your suggestions guys, anyhow.

It's a valid point about letting people who use the software tell you about it - you're the first I've found who's actually been able to answer the credit card question (I know very few people who use iTunes... and none of them are interested in any more than loading up the iPod as far as I can tell)- all I knew was during the installation it says something along the lines of "if you have an account at iTunes you can now access cover art". That made it sound like they wanted card details to me.
I've now tried it & you're right, I gave them nothing & got some cover art. I say some because it's about 50% on a test sample of random tracks. I'll have a bit more of a play before I let it loose on all of them though.

I've got about 270 GB of music on an external drive with about 15 GB on one of my desktop computers. I try to do a full backup every several months or so but the Internet is changing my perspective on storage - why bother with storing it when it's easy and fast to download the music if you want to listen to it?

(All my music is legally downloaded (Emusic.com and other companies) or ripped from my own CDs.)

Good point.

I have a 8 MBit connection with 'unlimited' downloads - memo to self: call ISP to check if unlimited really means unlimited.

i have 66 gigs of music total..the majorety of it is wav files. i like wav better than the compressed lossless formats because it rips and converts faster, and its like having an HQ master of the song, and everything plays .wav files without problems..its codec-less, it allsow has the absolute best sound qualety compaired to the crappy lossy formats like mp3,wma,ogg,m4a etc, and theres no copyright or DRM BS tied to them in anyway. space isent an issue because i have a 300 gig drive and a 120 gig portable mp3 player (the DMC HD500 with a custom hitachi laptop HDD). even with that much space my drive is 20 gigs away from being full (i have a extensive...movie...colection that is in exess of 130 gigs...)so im going to be buying 2 new perpendicular recording 320 gigers soon and set up a RAID 1 for my music and other personal files...and the 300 will become the new dedicated smut drive...

*note that where I mention 'MP3s' here, you can also read 'WMAs' or indeed any other compressed format, to a greater or lesser extent*

Very roughly, the difference between the WAV and MP formats is:

MP3s are designed to be more portable than WAV files: they're obviously much smaller which makes it easier to transfer them, either via your internet connection or onto storage media.

Therefore, it's quicker to upload or download them, and you can fit many more of them onto your iPod.

However, with that convenience comes a big 'BUT'...

The MP3 format relies on encoding the audio into a packed form (a little like JPEG compression) at a particular bitrate (ignoring MP3 VBR format for the moment). For example, you can encode MP3 at 64, 96, 128, and 256KBps. The lower the bitrate, the less space the file takes up and the quicker it is to transfer. But the lower the bitrate, the less audio quality you get in the finished file. 64KBps is just about 'telephone' quality, and is the sort of thing you only really want to use for spoken word files. 128KBps is good for music on portable players (it's roughly FM radio standard, I think), but won't really stand up when compared to a CD on a good stereo system without being given a lot of signal processing. 256KBps is well on the way to CD quality (my middle-aged ears have trouble telling the difference!) - but each of these formats DOES lose some audio quality compared to the original recording.

WAV format can be thought of simply as 'what was on the original media'. There's no compression, and no losses. If you REALLY have to have the very highest fidelity, then that's the format to go for. Which is why so many people on here have *quite* so much storage for their music files! And probably such large bills from their ISPs, too

A compromise would be something like FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format. These are a little smaller than WAV files, with no losses. But there aren't all that many players that will reproduce FLAC files.

Don't know if anyone wants to add anything to that...?

I use Vorbis instead of MP3.
And i use around 1GB which is about 400 songs.
who else uses OGG Vorbis?

I too use Ogg Vorbis, mostly. I hate to say "mostly", because it's such a great format, but it's hard to find support for it in anything except for linux and winamp.
I have about 160 Gigs worth of music on my main computer, it's on a seperate drive that both WINDOZE and Linux can access (that's in case WINDOZE crashes, or freezes, or gets infected, or tries too hard, etc, etc).
But for my car head unit, it can only read mp3's on a CD, so I have to convert the songs I want to listen to on the road from .ogg to .mp3.

Can mediamonkey convert Apple's M4A format to MP3?

I like a variety of music, but don't have time to be messing with downloading and organizing music. Satellite radio is low cost and requires nothing more of me than to select the place (car, home, office, or portable) and the type of music I feel like listening to. There's no way I could buy a music library the size available through XM or Sirius so while you guys are farting around with it, I'm just enjoying. To each his own.