Need advice dealing with music files.

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by Aaron Here, Dec 22, 2009.

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  1. Aaron Here

    Aaron Here Registered Member

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    I will definitely checkout Soundlike, but right now I already have a lot of music (mostly mp3, but some ape) on my hard drive that I need to tag/organize and burn before downloading much more!

    Btw, now that I've installed MediaMonkey, how would you suggest I learn to use it. Are there any really good tutorials?
     
  2. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    MediaMonkeys help files are very good and thorough, also there is an active forum which is linked to under Help and of course you can ask here. The program is very feature rich so its probably best to go to the help file contents section and read through the program overview.

    Also, don't assume your existing tracks will need to be tagged by you. MM will take tag info from the files themselves, or can/will go to the web to download tag info and album art (if you want).

    By the way, as luck would have it, Soundike just began one of the $50 deposit gives you 55 bonus dollars as an X-Mass special offer. Its not often you can more than double your money so easily.

    PS: I just did a google search of < mediamonkey tutorials > and there were a lot of hits. If you have some time to kill you might want to check the search results out but I think your probably just as well off, or possibly better off, with the help files.

    http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&s...amonkey tutorials.&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2009
  3. dbknox

    dbknox Registered Member

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    Something to try Aaron it may cost you a CD but I think not. I use to always burn my MP3 Cd's simply as Data and I never found a player that wouldn't play them. ( I even did some with "multissession").
    It might be worth a try. MP3 is "Data".
    I have Nero 9 now ( mostly to deal with video) and after paying for it I figure I should use all it's features. Nero rips and Has an online site that will tag the music while ripping and nero also gives you the choice of compression for your MP3's.
    Good luck and Merry Christmas to all.
     
  4. Aaron Here

    Aaron Here Registered Member

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    bg, thanks (again) for the 'heads-up'.
     
  5. Aaron Here

    Aaron Here Registered Member

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    Thanks Denis (you're probably right), but since Ashampoo Burning Studio and MediaMonkey have provisions specifically for burning music files I might as well use that!
     
  6. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    I will have to try this as being able to have that much music on 1 CD would be awesome. I don't have Nero though (I use Ashampoo Burning Studio). When you do this are you burning with files in folders or just the data files themselves? Also, do you have any idea, on average, how much play time can you get on 1 CD? The only draw back I can see here (If it works at all) is that you could not create any sort of a play sequence unless you renamed the files so they would burn in the order you want them to.
     
    Last edited: Dec 25, 2009
  7. dbknox

    dbknox Registered Member

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    I have run into the odd player that didn't not run with folders, so I would simply tag ( using a "batch renaming" program) the MP3's with numbers starting at 001 and onward, I use the shuffle/random feature on the player. So the CD won't play the same songs sequentially each time the CD is inserted in the Player. The MP3 CD's hold about 200 songs, most songs being approx. 3 minutes this would be approx. 10 hours.
    My last van was a 2005 chevy uplander and it would play through the folders ( ie: shuffle through the folders) with no problem. I tried it in a friends 2005 Hyundai and his player had trouble shuffling through folders but MP3 burned as data worked fine. I even tried "multisession" and had no problems which was handy. I use Nero for all my burning and try to make sure I have a full cd before I burn my MP3 CD ( I have heard negative things about multisession, Although I have had no problem, I would rather be safe then sorry)..
    I have read about people having trouble reading their dvd/cd from older operating systems and having trouble with Vista. I have no problems at all with any dvd/cds that have I burned using Nero from Windows 95 through to vista.
    Therefore I have stuck with Nero. Let me know how it goes for you.
    This has turned out to be a pretty good thread with lots of ideas good going Aaron Here
     
  8. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    Excellent, thanks, I will give it a try (hopefully over the next few days) and see what happens with Ashampoo. If it fails I guess I will have to get a copy of Nero.

    Just to be clear you are burning a simple data disk, just as you would if you were backing up files, correct?

    Out of curiosity, have you tried this with DVDs?

    OH yes, which version of Nero are you using?
     
  9. dbknox

    dbknox Registered Member

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    Yes I copied and pasted the MP3 files as straight Data ( Ie: data CD)and I tried burning with windows and Ashampoo and they worked fine.
    I have Vista and I could not install my version 7, so I purchased Nero 9. I am very happy with it, but as you may have read on this forum, it is somewhat "bloated", I would not have bought it for just burning audio or data. I do a lot of Movie Authoring" with my home movies plus slide shows to DVD, Yes I have burned DVD MP3's as data and they worked fine on my DVD player but I have a fairly cheap player and could not get "shuffle or randomizing" to work on the player. Nero 9 also has MP3 to DVD feature in the MP3 burning program. I have not tried it. I back up all my music to DVD and a USB hard drive can't be too careful .
     
  10. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    Thanks, I will get back to you once I try this and will let you know how things work out.
     
  11. dbknox

    dbknox Registered Member

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    YES PLEASE DO!
     
  12. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    Well, I am extremely pleased to report that burning as data and playing in the car worked beautifully. As an extra bonus I discovered that MediaMonkey has a feature that enables you to do this from within the program so there is no need to use a burning program like Nero or Ashampoo.......even better MM allows you to burn the tracks in the order you want so there is no need to have the CD player set to random.

    Imagine that, a CD with up to 10 hours of music that will play according to your play list. AWESOME.

    I have attached 2 jpgs showing the MM Burn Wizard set-up for this. Really easy as pie.

    Thank you hugely dbknox for opening me to this. Really great.

    PS: MM is free for those who are not aware of it. There is a paid version which adds some functionality which I find of value but others may not. The free version is still quite the program though so really no need to go the shareware route although the program is so fine you might feel the developers deserve to get compensated, I certainly did.
     

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  13. firzen771

    firzen771 Registered Member

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    i like mediamonkey and used to use it, but it really sucked since u culdnt sink ur iTouch or iPhone apps and videos (i think) so i felt it to be no point having both itunes as well as mediamonkey and just stuck to itunes even tho i did like MM better.
     
  14. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    I could be wrong but I do believe you can in fact sync iTouch now, probably not video but I do not do this sort of video so I have no idea. Even if you can,t MM is so superior to iTunes that you might want to think about finding a standalone to do the syncing (these are the ones that I am considering for my iPod, since I don't have a touch or iPhone I have not worried about syncing with them. One of these may do for you though - YamiPod, SharePod, PoddoX - I have looked at many others but discarded them for 1 reason or another. These are on the short list for my purposes).

    I did also find something that sounds allot like MM but have not had a chance to install and test it yet. Its the Portable J.River Media Center 13.0.152 - see link at the end of the post.

    iTunes sucks, it is probably the worst music organizer on the planet and I have looked at a lot of them,,,,,but thats just my opinion of course.


    J.River Media Center 13.0.152
    http://www.darelease.com/software/19173-portable-jriver-media-center-130152.html

    MediaMonkey feature list:
    http://www.mediamonkey.com/download/ (and if you take a look at the add-ons the capability expands

    PS: just checked the MM site and it will sync iPhones no word on videos though.
     
    Last edited: Dec 29, 2009
  15. firzen771

    firzen771 Registered Member

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    apps syncing is my biggest issue, if only MM culd do it :D
     
  16. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    What,,,ya want everything in 1 app? Ya,,,,, me too. :D
     
  17. Aaron Here

    Aaron Here Registered Member

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    I don't understand how burning mp3 tracks as a data CD can possible result in the same musical quality as compared to burning them as an audio CD. It just seems to me that packing 4 times the amount of mp3 files onto a CD (by burning mp3 files as data) has to compromise quality! If that's not so, please educate me.
     
    Last edited: Dec 29, 2009
  18. firzen771

    firzen771 Registered Member

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    unfortunetly itunes is the only one that does it all, not the best at it all, but at least it does it, if only another program could be made with all the abilities that itunes has, but i dont think Apple would allow that :D
     
  19. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    I am certainly no expert here but I suspect the answer would be that its not a question of how the data is stored but rather a question of how it is interpreted by the player. After all, the file on the hard drive is a data file just as is the file on the CD. Its the job of the player to translate that into sounds we can hear. If the translation is good, and the system through which the sound is generated is good, the sound will be good.

    I would guess at its most basic level its all in the algorithm that translates the information contained in the base data file, and it probably does not matter when that data is translated (before burning or after), as long as its unraveled well.

    But really, I am just guessing here. As far as my actual experience is concerned I did not notice any difference in sound quality between the 1 disk I burned today to test this and those that I had burned previously. I guess the only way to tell would be to burn the same track to 2 different CDs, once in a traditional music format and once as a data disk, and then see if you can tell which is which. Obviously if you can't then .............

    EDIT: I should mention that I rarely play CDs at all. I have my entire collection on one of the old 160 gig iPods and I plug that into a jack in the car, in the house, or in the park (head phones) and I can listen to the collection. I find CDs limiting for a number of reasons 1:because you need a relatively bulky player (it has to be able to hold the CD after all), and 2: the amount of music you can get on a CD. Imagine having my entire 109 gig music collection on CDs. Lugging those around would be onerous to say the least, even if we are talking about data CDS (which I only found out about recently). And then there is the "find the song" issue associated with CDs (no less onerous with data CDs, in fact its much worse), what a job that would be in even a moderately large collection,,,,,,its so much easier with the iPod. Still, its exciting to know about the data CD thing. There are times it will come in handy. For example when we travel by plane we usually rent a car at our destination. Most rentals would not allow me to plug my iPod into the cars sound system and in the past I would have to drag a bunch of CDs with me. 10 hours of music would mean 8 or 9 CDs, now I can do it with 1. Or how about that party you are having, I would rather have 1 CD thats in the player than a couple dozen lying around that have to be attended to.

    So would I put my entire collection on CDs,,,,,definitely not! Will I ever burn traditional music CDs in the future,,,,,,most likely yes. Its just that its good to know that there are different ways to proceed given whatever the needs of the moment are. Thats a good thing I think.
     
    Last edited: Dec 30, 2009
  20. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    Obviously whatever works for the individual is the route they should take. For me its about ease of access and organization of my music collection and iTunes is grossly inferior to MM in that respect. The final straw with iTunes was when I found out what was involved with backing up the iTunes library for the purpose of updating my iPod, and how, if that library were damaged or inaccessible there could be serious problems. So I unlocked the iPod and dumped iTunes.

    MM is not perfect but for what I need and want its much, much better than iTunes.
     
    Last edited: Dec 30, 2009
  21. dbknox

    dbknox Registered Member

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    When you say "audio CD" I get confused, an audio CD has "cda" files which are just pointers for your computer or player to play the music on the disk and they are approx. 10 times the size as an MP3 file. (With the modern compression this could be 12 time the size) From your original post I thought you wanted to make MP3 CD's not ordinary CD's If you are burning MP3 to audio CD's then you are taking a 3 meg data file and making it into a 30 meg CDA file which is not going to encode it to sound better then the original. (But it will play on all players).
    Although bgoodman4 claims to not be an expert he has summed it up very well. In order to play an MP3 disk you have to have a player that can read Data witch MP3 is. By the way I do not see any difference in the amount of songs I can burn on a CD by burning as data or using a MP3 burning program, I could see absolutely no difference in the two disks when I explored them and that is why I started burning MP3 CD's as data.
    I am so happy that everything worked for you bgoodman4 I like to use the random/shuffle aspect of my players because every time you eject and insert the CD again. it is going to start at the beginning and I have to listen to the same songs over again. Some new players have an USB plug on the front, now that is awesome just think how many songs will fit on a 16 or 32 meg usb flash drive.
     
  22. bgoodman4

    bgoodman4 Registered Member

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    Good point about the CD starting from the beginning again,,,,that would grow old real fast. Also the idea of the USB plug is very interesting, it certainly would make movings collections from vehicle to vehicle real easy. No doubt this will quickly become a standard feature,,,,,I for one look forward to it. I recently saw a 64 gig flash drive. It was rather expensive but with the way prices drop it will be affordable in a few years (or sooner).
     
  23. Aaron Here

    Aaron Here Registered Member

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    Don't forget, I started this thread because of my ignorance about mp3 files. I thought that mp3's, being compressed files, are decoded (decompressed) when burned as an audio CD, and it seemed to me doing that would deliver better quality than playing the mp3s on a player that has to decompress 'on the fly' (while playing the file). If that's not true, then I have learned something (which is what I'm trying to do here)! :doubt:

    ------
    Edit: Now that I've thought about this some more, I can see that once the more extreme frequencies, dynamic range, etc. are lost while compressing the original audio tracks to an mp3, they can never be restored. So then it would seem that the only reason for burning mp3's as an audio CD would be to provide compatibility for CD players that are not mp3 compatible.
     
    Last edited: Dec 30, 2009
  24. dbknox

    dbknox Registered Member

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    You are a fast learner! How are you making out?? ( Just curious )
    I for one ( getting old) can not hear the difference between MP3 and an normal music cd, which is probably a good thing. I only have to carry a couple of CD's with me.
     
  25. dbknox

    dbknox Registered Member

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    I bought a Chevy Colbalt this summer ( rather small after owning mini-vans for the last 10 years) upon reading the manual I read that they have an USB option that one can purchase on the unit that came with it, I am sorry I didn't know this beforehand. "A ton of music" in your pocket!!!
     
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