Library management - "homegrown" compilation CDs

[eirepaul]

Hello - I'm new to this. I have a large CD collection that I want to burn to an external hard drive and then access with WMP to download to an I-Pod on occasion (all songs in .wav format). Problem is, I have started this process in a haphazard manner because I wasn't sure exactly what I was doing. I burned a few CDs in I-Tunes and a few in WMP, all in .wav format and then moved the files to a hard drive folder. Now I have a collection of .wav files on my external hard drive and WMP won't recognize many of them. To complicate further, a number of these CDs are personal compilations with manually entered file info.

 

Help - how can I get WMP to recognize all these files without having to re-enter a ton of file info manually, and how do I get WMP to find the .wav file on my hard drive so it can be played?

 

Thanks a lot for any help/education on this - it's pretty frustrating for me.

 

[vortecjr]

Vortexbox. My buddy Andrew makes the unit and you could drop your wav rips into it and it would then share the files on the home network for access by any player. You could then use the unit to continue ripping in flac or wav. Check it out at vortexbox.org

 

Jesus R

www. sonore.us

 

[Audio_ELF]

Okay not quite self promotion as it's your friends product - but what has the Vortex box got to do with WAV files without metadata (which the question is about)?

 

To the OP: unfortunately if the files ate in WAV format they are unlikely to have metadata associated with them if you ve manually moved and them. They could well end up with simple file names like "track01" etc which will be of no help. Sorry but reripping maybe your only recourse. Ideally you should rip a copy into a format which supports decent tagging/metadata such a FLAC, ALAC or AIFF even if you want a final copy in WAV format to playback. This avoids this situation where you've no idea what file refers to what track (if thy made sense).

 

Eloise

 

[vortecjr]

I'm not so quick to say that wav does not have metadata especially if he entered it. I have media monkey currently looking at my entire collection via tags on wav files and it works very well. Much to my surprise! Not sure what it's doing for the cover art, except to think it's just looking at the same folder. Besides I was trying to help him in finding these files in one central location and provide a solution that would also help him properly rip additional content moving forward.

 

Jesus R

www.sonore.us

 

 

[eirepaul]

I have now switched to Media Monkey - how do I set it up to access the files on my external HD? I don't want the files on my desktop HD all the time as I don't want that capacity used up. Basically I need to know this - how do you set the library up to run off the external HD?

 

Thanks much for the help.