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I'm looking for ideas to organize my music collection

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Which version of Windows? Windows 7 has WMP 12 built in, which is pretty effective. If you're on XP, you should upgrade to WMP 11 though. – nhinkle♦ Jun 28 '10 at 0:47
As I see it, Zune Software looks like the new Windows Media Player to me so I would rather use Zune Software than WMP... WMP can do fine too but I would like to suggest you to try a few programs to see which works out great for you, compare the features and pick one when you're done. iTunes is a mash-up of WMP and Zune Software to me, as WMP contained (less good) Smart Playlists and Zune Software contains Genius a-like features. Winamp doesn't work out for me for managing and it looks more like a music player to me, Songbird might work out great and that's my alternative if I ever stop iTunes. – Tom Wijsman Jun 28 '10 at 9:44
Remove the ebooks from the question. It seems unrelated. – h3xstream Aug 15 '10 at 15:35
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5 Answers

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There is only one product I will probably ever have used of Apple, and it is iTunes...

It's great to organize your music collection, at least that's what it does for me. Besides that I like the Smart Playlists you can make for example "Music I Have Never Listened To", "Unrated Music", "Best Rated Music", "Music I Haven't Heard For A While", ...

Another good feature is the Genius which can get you a list of similar songs for a song, in that way I pick a song that sounds great for a dinner party and click the Geniuis button, and tada, the list that show up is pretty accurate to pick songs that fit for my Dinner Party. Once I went through the list I can then pick the best song out of that list again and I'll have a Dinner Party Playlist up in minutes.

I moved from the Zune software (which is also very great) because I was in need for the Smart Playlists as I want my entire music collection rated which allows me to remove bad songs and more easily find and listen to the songs I like. And for discovery there is always Grooveshark or Last.fm if you want to pay, the Genius sidebar does show some songs which you don't have too.

Ebooks, I just store them in a folders, in what way would you want to organize those?

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iTunes is one of Apple's worst products. I installed it for one purpose, activating my nano. Right after I removed every Apple software with Revo, to rid the crap of my life. – TheLQ Jun 28 '10 at 3:10
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You have tried it for barely a second and have removed it right after, how can you determine the quality of such a product in that way? Please provide a reason rather than saying something is the worst product, there are obviously worse products on the market... – Tom Wijsman Jun 28 '10 at 9:35
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up vote 1 down vote

Are you wanting to just view them in a library, wanting folder organization tips, help with finding software, what?

If you talking about music library software, then you should first try Windows Media Player which comes with Windows by default.

With external software, you have many choices, including WinAmp, SongBird, and MediaMonkey. I would highly not recommend iTunes, as you will just be digging yourself a hole.

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Why is iTunes bad? – Tom Wijsman Jun 28 '10 at 9:38
2 years old and this article is (mostly) still relevant: pcworld.com/article/149297/11_things_we_hate_about_itunes.html – TheLQ Jun 28 '10 at 18:24
None of the points in that article bother me in any way, the negative recommends above the article almost match the positive which makes the article have a bad quality. You can find such an article for every kind of software... To find the best personal match one must try and compare multiple applications. – Tom Wijsman Jun 30 '10 at 20:11
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as long as music is tagged correctly, it should not matter what folder/drive you put them in.

I used to keep all my music in albums, back in the day when CD's were popular. I long since retired that notion and just dunk all my well tagged music in a folder named, "well tagged"

audio books should belong to the same album, thus they shouldn't be a problem. I use plain old wmp 11. My mom uses winamp, which isn't bad at all.

Song bird might be for you. But if you're a hard core music junkie, foobar might be the ultimate choice, if you have time.

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As far as i know, there is no usable tag-base filesystem on windows (or some other OS). so now i put tags in tedious filenames(e.g a folder named """[bach][classic][piano]xxxx(ape)"""), classify the directory tree with one attribute (say author/field/genre), and use a software named 'everything' to maintain and search list of files.

about indexing and searching: 'everything' or windows search are able to put file content into index. But since tags are just contained in filenames, periodically execute "tree /f >filename.txt" and "grep TAG filename.txt" performs almost the same task.

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I personally dislike all applications that don't use standard UI widgets and try to roll their own.
However, iTunes has good searching capabilities, decent GUI, good assistance for making backup copies. Super-easy and convenient restore from backups.
Like all other critics, I originally didn't like iTunes at all, until my wife gave me an iPod for christmas, and I gave it a fair chance. - Now I really really like it.

Just make sure you untick safari browser at installation time (unless you want it, obviously).

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