Best music organiser/player for PC?

[extracampine]

How come all the upmarket music players are for the MAC rather than PC (Amarra, Pure Music, etc)?

 

What do members consider to be the best PC-based playback software? Ideally software that provides a good GUI with good oranisational capabilities. I used to use Mediamonkey though currently use JRiver.

 

[blueixus]

For PC XXHE is quite outstanding for SQ, actually I think it certainly at least equals all the Mac systems.

 

The GUI is an acquired taste, I think once you get it, it's great but as the music is so magnificent one should forgive it it's little foibles

 

[manisandher]

... by a country mile, IMHO.

 

This is really down to its 'genius' developer and the very active group of users who offer detailed and specific feedback after each new iteration (see phasure.com).

 

But not the easiest to get your head around.

 

Mani.

 

[extracampine]

I just tried xxhighend again, by downloading the latest version.

 

After getting more than 10 error messages on startup, struggling to navigate round an incredibly confusing and mis-fitting GUI and not getting any actual playback due to "illegal sample rate or bit depth conversion implied", I gave up.

 

Maybe a future version will be more user friendly

 

[manisandher]

Yeah, it's become a bit of a monster really. I know a couple of people who would like to try it but are just too afraid to go anywhere near it.

 

But then that's what you get for being at the leading edge of PC audio, which I believe it is. You can tweak the sound 1001 ways (literally), and yet remain totally in the bit-perfect realm throughout. Or you can upsample (up to 8x) with zero pre and post ringing. Or use it's transparent volume control. Or load all the tracks into RAM and conduct all pre-processing before a single note is played. Or...

 

If you weren't too interested in a library function, I would recommend you try HQPlayer, which I've been playing around with for a few days now. This has a number of different upsampling as well as noise-shaping/dithering options. Nice sound, though I'd like a bit more bottom-end weight.

 

Mani.

 

[audiozorro]

you should use MediaMonkey or JRiver. The best music organizer should be able to play all music file formats, handle music libraries of unlimited size, handle multiple libraries or music libraries spread over multiple discs, be able to find all music files on your drives regardless of where they are located, be able to retrieve all tagging info and album artwork with ease and without restriction, provide very good flexibility for custom tagging, and provide great flexibility for playback options including playlists, repeat, and continuous playback functions.

 

If you want the best music player you should use cMP/cPlay, XXHighEnd or HQPlayer. That is you want the very best sound, a player that will trump all others including anything Mac has to offer (except perhaps for AyreWave, which I have not had the pleasure of evaluating).

 

Of course the best is usually just a snapshot in time and today's best is not guaranteed to be tomorrow's best. Which is why I strongly feel that if your music library is locked to any one software player or hardware, you are just limiting yourself to something that probably is not the best or the best for long. Just imagine if your CDs were locked to a particular CD player and they would not play on a better CD player or it was too much trouble to make the switch to a superior CD player.

 

[extracampine]

I just tried cPlay, and didn't notice much difference in the sound quality compared with JRiver with the WASAPI output. Also, cPlay has a basic and ugly GUI which is no use for organising a 1TB+ collection.

 

[SidHo]

I find MusicCollector very convenient. I've been using it for the last 8 years or so. First to keep track of and organize my CD's and now to do the same with my flac files ripped from about 2,500 CD's.

They have a program for the iPad and Itouch as well so once the music files are in the computer (Mac or Windows) you can up date the iPad.

I can zip through my collection on the iPad very quickly. The cover art and info is presented very well then it's an easy matter to find the selection with the player. Currently I've been using AW and I coupled with MusicCollector I find the combo perfect for my needs.

 

[extracampine]

Thanks - it would be useful to know what "AW" is!

 

[winst]

I have been using this for two weeks now

>http://www.twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=8703

These guys I think wrote the book on media servers and their communication.

With the right hardware, one can pull and or push media to

any device in any room. It also have a great GUI, atv with XMBC/firecore no problem.

 

Another of my recent acquisition, have been sagetv; they have a nice gui also sells a little box same size as atv2 but this thing plays everything, it finds all your network in seconds, setup is very certainly for grown-up who don't want to spend hours or days buried in

configuration tunnels.

Regards

Winst

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi SidHo - Can Music Collector sync with an iTunes library yet? I would buy the program in a heart beat if I could carry a database of my music collection on my iPhone. That way I'd know if I'm buying a disc I already own when I'm at the local record shop.

 

[SidHo]

I'm sorry, I dislike achronims myself. AW = AyreWave

 

[SidHo]

It may be able to pull info from an iTunes database but I'm not sure if there's enough info to make it worth while. I don't use iTunes but I think it has little more than cover art in addition to track titles and lengths.

The beauty of musiccollector is once you enter in Your CD info (which can be read off the discs or bar code or cd titles). It pulls cover art, track titles, label name& number, release date and some other stuff automatically. You can enter in recording dates, artists, composer, reviews and anything else you want. I normally cut and paste most of this. It can link individual cd's and artists to web pages and track and filter a collection virtually any way you want.

It's fairly quick to install a collection and download info automatically. In addition I've entered in or cut and pasted reviews over the years making it as informative as having the cd booklet in my hands. MC can do batch editing to cut down on repetitive tasks but once the db is how you want it it's easy to keep it up to date as you ad to your collection. I can say it has added a lot to the enjoyment of my jazz collection having this info so available.

The windows version will link music files to a player so things can be played from the computer kind of like iTunes. The Mac version doesn't do that yet but they say it will in the future.

The musiccollector site obviously explains it better than I can. It sounds like I own shares in the company (but I don't ). I think it's a god send for a music lover with too many CD's or files.