How do you organize your audio-video collection on PC?

[musicbee]

You should give MusicBee a try. Excellent for managing and tagging and it pulls/displays lyrics, Last.FM artist page, artist Wikipedia Page and YouTube videos for the artist. Also, scrobbles to Last.FM and pulls data from there so you can sync and see which artist/song you have played the most.

It also has options of auto playlist like play songs with 5 star ratings that have not been played in the last 2 weeks and other options like these. Plus, lots more options you will discover in their forums.

Plus its 100% free with no paid upgrades.

I've been a MediaMonkey user for a long time... probably used that and Winamp the most. But I noted since version 4 MM was becoming bloatware and they were trying to do too many things like even play video files with it and make it a more pro s/w with paid options. Just for music it was an 800 pound gorilla and simply the best... add in the video player and other features it began to hang and then it even stopped adding all my albums to the library with errors like Did not import xx files (did not match import criteria) and that forced me to move to MusicBee.

If the latest version is improved perhaps I'll give it a try again.

I'm using MediaMonkey to manage my music collection and XBMC for Video collection. MediaMonkey is a great tool. If you have properly tagged the music files, then it is a breeze to find any song which you want. For example you can right click a song and select the option 'Find more from same artist' or composer to get all the songs by that particular artist/composer. It also supports multiple artists, if a song has two artists A and B, then it will list that song for both Artist A and Artist B. You can also install minilyrics plugin and embedder to view synchronized lyrics. A snapshot of my mediamonkey in action is posted below.

 

[saikatbiswas82]

So we have tons of audio and video content in different format. Now the next big question is how do you keep count and manage them?

Tagging is one way to identify the content quickly. But how do you access the content instantaneously? Like for example I want all songs by RD Burman in my collection. Are there any tools that you use? Does any tool support offline access(means I connect external drive and my library maintains reference etc)
Music library is one helpful tool to organize them. Whats your favorite? Winamp for example has pretty good library and you can use jump to search for any song and it gives result by filename, artist etc.

Any hands on experiences and strategies? Please share it here folks!

Try XBMC.
I just fell in love with it. I liked it more than Foobar, Mediamonkey, VLC, KMPlayer, Winamp, PowerDVD or our well known Windows Media player.
I'll give you feedback on music section later (as I haven't tried this yet). But for movies, XBMC is the boss.
Just by few clicks you can organize all your movies with thumbnail preview. If the movie title is correct (as spelled in IMDB) and you are connected to internet, just enabling IMDB in settings will download all information from IMDB site (thumbnails, posters, genre, artists, cast n crew, rating etc etc). You can then filter out or search by the director name, genre, artist name, etc. in your collection.
Its simply amazing.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Very little video on my system. Audio happened, over the years, without my really thinking about it. My vinyl digitisation still proceeds at the speed of a glacier and, generally, I find myself playing CDs rather than ripping them.

Still, there is a fair amount of music on my hdd. I continue to think in terms of directorie trees and files for organisation, rather than using any media/music database software. In fact, I choose my media players for simplicity, rather than for such features, although they may be there incidentally.

The mistake that I made in previous years was to save my music as WAV files. The reason for that is obvious: lossless. But I did not consider the possibilities of tagging, and the advantages of other formats except for loading on portable players. It is only recently that I have settled on FLAC and tagging. It's a lot of work to go back and do all that from scratch!

Of course, there is software that will create tags, either by from directory/file names or even by online CD information database lookup.

However you store your music, keep at least one backup copy on external media.

 

[musicbee]

It is only recently that I have settled on FLAC and tagging. It's a lot of work to go back and do all that from scratch!

Not too much work. Just give 2 months of your life to the project and you'll be done (assuming you have around 1000 CDs).

 

[EthenHunt]

XBMC for movies. Yet to organise audio files..too lazy to do that

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Not too much work. Just give 2 months of your life to the project and you'll be done (assuming you have around 1000 CDs).

Actually, only a few hundred CDs. Yes, it can be done like that, once one gets around to it. The real work is digitising tapes and vinyl where it is hard to get through more than one or two in an evening even if they are in fair condition. At least CD ripping is not real-time, and does not require actual listening, sometimes multiple times.

I lent my collection of a couple of hundred carnatic CDs, handful by handful, to my mridangam teacher in London, who ripped them all onto his computer --- but I have never ripped more than a very few onto mine.

 

[KoolPal]

Not wishing to hijack this thread but can anyone suggest a good movie database app which has a corresponding Android phone app which can be synced?

 

[sam9s]

For Audio MP3 nothing, its huge and clustered so I have left it the way it is ...

Not for FLAC thought, since from day one when I started collecting FLAC. I have manually tagged them and stored them with proper cover art and all.

For videos, nothing can beat XBMC, check out my collection in my sig ......

 

[sam9s]

Not wishing to hijack this thread but can anyone suggest a good movie database app which has a corresponding Android phone app which can be synced?

XBMC all the way, and since XBMC for android is on its way I would not wast time searching for anything else, instead would wait for it.