Background: I have about 1700 albums and use the Squeezebox Duet to play them. I live in Australia, so services like Last.fm and Pandora are not available to me. I don't play music via internet services at all - everything I play comes from my PC's HDD.
erland;566383 Wrote: > 1. How do you find music in your own library? > I often download albums to hear them once or twice and decide if they're worth buying. Such "audition" albums are all stored temporarily in their respective folders under my library's "Downloads" folder, so I use the Controller's "Music folder" option to drill down to the album I want to hear. To play normal albums I usually drill down by Artist, often spinning the Controller's wheel to a semi-random part of the alphabet and choosing an artist who grabs my fancy at that moment. I also use "Random Mix>Song Mix" a lot, typically when I'm too lazy to choose an album or I just want to be surprised. I'm always discovering stuff that I haven't heard in years, so I like this feature a lot. I use Trackstat occasionally if I want to hear a random mix of just my top-rated songs (of which I've only rated about 120 tracks out of 20,000 or so.) If I have guests visiting, I pre-choose 8 or 10 albums which they might like as a starting list and store them temporarily in Favorites. I use the PC's Fishbone interface to do this, as it's faster than the Controller. Then during the visit I select albums one by one from Favorites via the Controller. I do have album art stored with every album, and I find that seeing the thumbnail of the cover can sometimes make it faster to choose which album I might want to hear. > > 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently > don't have in your library? > I don't listen to the radio at all as it takes too long to discover something I like. Instead I first search out albums of interest, then listen to samples online if possible (typically via All Music Guide or Amazon) and then try to download the full album to audition it before deciding whether to buy it. I also have an eMusic subscription (via which I purchase a set number of tracks each month) - I use the web to scan their most popular albums every month or so. To find possible albums of interest I read reviews from: Magazines (mainly Uncut) Email newsletters (All Music Guide, Village Records, etc) Some web sites of interest (eg. Americana-UK) Occasionally I get recommendations from friends. And finally every once in a while I'll search online (eg., via All Music Guide) to see if artists in whom I'm particularly interested have released new albums I'm not yet aware of. For any music which I download, I audition it on my main hi-fi speakers via the Squeezebox. > > 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in > the future? > I'm frustrated a bit with the Controller for finding music. I used to like browsing my physical wall of CD jewel boxes, and I miss that functionality. Now I keep a printed list of my last 200 or so purchases, and often browse that in preference to using Squeezebox's Controller or browser interface. I guess Squeezebox's "New Music" feature comes closest to that, but the albums displayed in New Music are in reverse chronological order, whereas I'd prefer them also grouped by Genre. I almost never use the Controller's Search function, because typing in a name via the Controller is painfully slow. > > 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the > future? > Ideally I'd like to somehow browse new music of interest via the Controller, and hear short samples from each track. Maybe Pandora etc would suit, but they're not available in Australia. While my tastes are wide, there are many styles of music I'm not interested in at all, so searching by genre subgroups (eg. alt-country) seems to work best for me. But I'm frustrated by the sheer volume of music out there - I love to discover new artists, but 99% of the previously-unknown artists I listen to are junk (perhaps a result of every Tom, Dick & Harry being able to record an album in his bedroom these days). So something which helps me find what's most likely to be good (eg. reviews and ratings) helps me a lot. I'd also love to be able to search for specific styles, such as electric 12-string guitar bands [I grew up on The Byrds], but this can be quite difficult. > > 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? > Before I audition anything I edit its tags to get them all exactly how I want them. I use about 10 genres and no sub-genres. That way I can go straight to (say) "Country" and find all my albums in that genre. I don't use any special tags, although I do use Trackstat to rate my very favorite tracks. Folder structure is also vital to me. I have all my music stored in hierarchical subfolders. > > 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to > make it easier to find interesting music ? > Unfortunately no. I'd also love to be able to rate tracks (or albums) and have those ratings stored as tags in the files themselves. (Storing ratings in say Trackstat's database raises the risk that if I switch to another product in future I'll lose all my ratings.) I also use Catraxx as a database of all my albums, as it's easier to search than the Squeezebox database. -- pg5555 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pg5555's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=19272 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
