erland;566383 Wrote: > However, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be the only one interested in > this kind of functionality.
No you're not alone in this :-) erland;566383 Wrote: > 1. How do you find music in your own library ? All my browsing/searching of the SBS library is done through iPeng usually by artist or by album. I don't use the web interface at all except to track down tagging issues and I rarely use the SB3 remote. I also use Trackstat, Dynamic playlist, MusicIP and Spicefly plugins to delvelop 'on the fly' playlists when I don't have anything particular in mind and imported playlists for manually produced efforts. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently > don't have in your library ? For sometime I have been using a combination of Spotify, Last.fm and Groveshark. This started from the fact that I have only recently (this year) joined the ranks of SB users and have a much larger vinyl LP (4500 records) collection than a digital collection (700 CDs). I therefore wanted to hear lots of the stuff that I have on vinyl (hence the use of Spotify free) and I started using the biography and related artist festures to listen to music I don't currently own. I have subsequently broadened my searches by also using Last.fm. I now use these two products plus Groveshark to preview music I might want to buy. I recently discovered the Biography plugin for SBS and have started to use that to track down related artists but still tend to go back to the computer to preview any new music found rather than trying to do it through the DSBridge/Spotify setup I also use via the iPod Touch. I would tend to use the computer rather than my hi-fi due to the low quality of most (free) streamed services. I have no desire to use subscription based services at present as I wish to have bit perfect recordings held digitally and played back through my hi-fi. As with everyone friends also play a large role in introducing me to new music. The biggest difference today is that I can then perform more discovery on a new band/performer recommended to me by a friend using the tools identified above. I'm not a fan of community sites like Twitter and Facebook but this is probably due to my age (50)! erland;566383 Wrote: > > 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in > the future ? As a long time vinyl collector I find myself both liberated and strangled by the digital era. By this I mean that the speed with which I can now play music and the ability to produce static and dynamic playlists is awesome, but it could be improved and it tends to make one lazy and stop searching and playing individual albums. As I've stated I use MusicIP and Spicefly on SBS and get great value out of both. I've also started using Moodagent on the iPod and am beginning to think that this has a very bright future. I would like to see these types of feature more heavily integrated into the base feature set of SBS. However, they still don't go far enough IMO in that sometimes I want a feature similar to the Last.fm artist radio feature to randomly play artist related music from my own collection. The combination of these features would give me all I need to produce all the random playlists I could ever want. I feel particularly strangled in the area of searching music, although I find this much harder to describe properly. My vinyl collection is held on purpose built selves where each shelf holds about 600 LPs. The LPs are not ordered alphabetically or by genre, but are grouped by artist/ composer and very loosely by classical, blues, rock. The point is that I can find any individual album very quickly because I know where they are on the shelves I think through some sort of pattern recognition. Accepting that I can always search for a known album alphabetically I would like to be able to search via album art and find that the current mechanisms are all lacking in some way. The coverflow (ala itunes) mechanism doesn't do anything with a big collection because it's just an alphabetical listing. I would like something that gives me an overview of the entire collection, ordered as I want it (and its not related to current tag info), and then allows me to drill down to see more detail. I know this is vague but I want to graphically recreate and use my LP shelving system as a search mechanism. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the > future ? Having recently discovered the Biography plugin I really want to be able to perform the functions that I currently do through Spotify, Last.fm and Groveshark on my computer without ever leaving the iPeng/SBS wrapper and my hi-fi from my armchair. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to > your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? I think that my tagging is fairly standard in that I rip through EAC to flac, tag via Mp3tag, add cover art to all tracks and manage my library through Foobar 2000. Any MP3 downloads I have are managed in the same manner with the same tags. I then add replay gain though FooBar and analyse through MusicIP and finally add to the SBS library. I don't add any non standard tags. The physical file structure within which my library is stored is important to me in that I seperate flac from any lossy files I have. I do not want any library management software playing with my chosen directory structure or file naming conventions. I do manually rate music in SBS for use in dynamic playlists although I still haven't figured out how to sychronise the SBS library with Foobar 2000. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to > make it easier to find interesting music ? As stated I do use MusicIP but don't export back to it. I do use iTunes but this is only to get apps onto the Touch and to allow me to manually put music onto the Touch. I keep the iTunes library physically seperate from the source files for both SBS and Foobar. This is because I don't either trust or in anyway like iTunes. I do keep tracks played in SBS scrobbled to Last.fm so that they can make more recommendations for new music. I realise that this is a long winded reply but I think it is an important topic for us to discuss. I will happily elaborate on anything if asked. -- russelc ------------------------------------------------------------------------ russelc's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37254 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
