For the avid downloaders out there, or those en route in that direction, there’s MediaMonkey (MM). I’ve put Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, Apple’s iTunes and Linux’s amaroK to good use. I’ve also tried many others out there. The only one I could recommend is MediaMonkey. You can download it here. With a lot of music, it’s important that it’s tagged properly and that music can be found using more than than the artist’s name. MM offers a high level of customization, features such as auto-tag from filename, auto-organize, a “files to edit” feature, showing files that miss certain tags and files which are don’t have the tags synchronized with the .mp3s, the ability to read a all formats and easily convert, say, all your .flac files (a format that is common on bittorrent, but unnecessarily large) to your format of choice are all very important when you have a large library. It works with iPods. As I said, I tried other software, with iTunes being my last one on Windows, but when my music library grew in size (I have 400 gigs), iTunes just couldn’t keep up.

To improves the customizability of the nodes (the things such as “Artist”, “Genre” etc to the left of the interface), get Magic Nodes here. Below, I have the code for the custom nodes I use (called “masks”). With MM, I began using the “album artist” tag instead of the “artist” tag because some albums feature many different artists and though this is sometimes presented in the title tag (ie: “Eclipse (Feat. Substantial)”), it’s often presented in the artist tag. So it’s better to keep “album artist” for the name of the overall artist or band, and keep the artist’s tag as they are. This also goes for compilations, such as the Café del Mar and Buddha Bar compilations, which I prefer tagging as “Café del Mar” rather than “Various” (which I do with some one-album compilations). With a lot of music, the artist/album artist tags are just not enough, so it’s better to use genres and subgenres instead. I organize mine as such:

So my “genre” tag contains, first the overall genre (Chill/Electro/Hip Hop/Indie/Modern/Rock/Avant-Garde/Classical/Chanson etc), then the specific vein of it (Chill Afrobeat, Chill Downtempo, Chill Reggae, Chill Samba, Chill World, Chill Trip Hop, Chill Acid Jazz, Chill Big Beat etc). I also have some artists with multiple genres, such as a tag for the Ninja Tune label (Chill Ninja Tune) and one for the specific genre (Electro Dubstep). To do this, just use a semicolon (;) between the genres, so the genre tag looks like this: Chill Ninja Tune; Electro Dubstep. This messed up a bit in the overall genre tag (”grouping”) I talk about later, which is why “Chill Ninja Tune” appears in all groups, but it’s still useful to use multiple genres. To use your “Genre” tag with “Album Artist” instead of the default “Artist”, after having installed Magic Nodes which I mentioned earlier, go in Edit->Magic Node Settings (or just hold CTRL+9) and then replace the text at the bottom of the window with the following:

Subgenres|Child of:Location\<Genre>\<Album artist>\<Album>

It’s also possible to turn this distinction into a hierarchy like this:

This is the magic nodes mask:

Genres|Child of:Location\<Grouping>\<Genre>\<Album Artist>\<Album>

The main use is when you want to listen to an overall genre at once.For example, if you want to listen to Chill Trip Hop, Chill Downtempo, Chill Reggae and everything else with “Chill” at once. You will need to tag every genre with the grouping tag containing the first word of the genre, so if genre is “Hip Hop Smooth”, grouping is “Hip Hop”. Well, that’s it for now.

Well, that’s it for now.

-Dussault

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