Once again, thank you all for the suggestions.
I have looked at all the suggested software, or at least looked at the
information about the software available at the publishers' web sites.
Here is a short report of the outcome.
I have not found a software that suits me perfectly. I have, however,
decided to go with J. River MediaCenter for the time being. The primary
reasons for this are:
a) the ability to read and write user defined custom tags (this ability
is not perfect yet, because id3v2.3 TXXX tags not supported natively
cannot be handled and because certain tags are already "occupied" by the
software and cannot be used as custom fields/tags),
b) the ability to make custom views of the data and custom searches -
one example is that I through rather easy scripting can combine data
from different tags, i.a. to combine into one list/column data from the
id3v2.3 tag TPE2 ("band/Album artist) in MP3 files and data from the tag
(Vorbis Comment) ALBUMARTIST in flac files,
c) I feel confident that the software, when writing tags back to the
music files, will not mess up my tags (at least not in an unexpected
way; it does write automatically superfluous data in the tags),
d) active development, which seems to act on user requests, and a
knowledgeable and active user community.
One major disadvantage for me with J. River MediaCenter is its
inability to read (or write) multiple ARTIST and COMPOSER tags (Vorbis
Comments) in flac files, i.e. the software is unable to read and display
all information about artists and composers available in the music files
in a manner consistent with standard use. I hope that the company will
soon add support for this, and I have already made an enhancement
request (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=53022.0). I
would also appreciate more user configurable options, such as which
preceding articles to ignore when sorting (like "The, Le, La, A, ', ...,
( and [) and which list delimiter to use. And I would not mind if the
software should be even faster than it is already.
The only software I found that could read multiple ARTIST and COMPOSER
tags (Vorbis Comments) in flac files are Foobar and MediaMonkey (I have
not checked the ability to write multiple tags). Foobar may be what I
really need, but that software just has a too steep learning curve for
me. It was, however, a pleasant surprise for me to revisit MediaMonkey.
That software has developed far since I last tried it out (obviously a
rather long time ago); sorry if I expressed my prejudice against that
software earlier, based on prior experience. I think I will use the free
version of MediaMonkey as a supplement to find my flac files with
multiple artist and composer tags (although I must admit that I
experienced more crashes with that software than any other I tried out,
but that could be just my set up).
CATraxx seems to be the software to go for if you want to add a lot of
information about your music to the software's own database. I was
tempted for a while by all the options that software provides, but I
decided that I will not spend time on entering information into a
proprietary database. I want to be able to save all entered information
to the music files to ensure that I can re-use the information with
another software (this is based on my experience with reference
management software like EndNote). Unfortunately, the ability of CATraxx
to write tags seems a bit limited (as do the ability to read tags;
support for reading custom tags seems to be lacking).
Since I am not able to write my own software, or properly configure
Foobar, I am still waiting for the "perfect" software to manage my music
files... Please feel free to continue to suggest other software you know
of, since my quest for the "perfect" software to manage a rather large
digital music library is not over yet.
--
vagskal
2 x SB3 (wired), Receiver (wireless), Boom (wireless), Controller, iPeng
on iPod Touch, muso on remote computer running Win XP | 7.3.4 on Win XP
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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