jae

i'm really sorry because this is the least helpful advice ever but all my music just lives in an directory on my file server (organised by artist, then subdirectories for albums) and i wrote a TERRIBLE bash script that reads an .m3u playlist file, checks to see if songs from it are already on the walkman, and copies it over if it isn't.

it seriously needs a rewrite and also it occasionally makes duplicate copies of tracks on the walkman, which i don't notice until i go to play an album and hear each song twice in a row

I just drag and drop files onto a sd card, though I only load up full albums and not individual songs

in the days of the past, I used Rhythmbox for this. Not perfect but it offers a drag-and-drop UI for adding and deleting artists/albums/songs/playlists from any device that's mountable and has a .is_audio_player file dictating the folder structure.

There’s not really a need for a software solution to getting files into the device the way there used to be for iPods because most music players can be mounted as a storage device and you just drag and drop your files. (Although I often take out the micro SD card and use a card reader bc it’s faster)

In terms of loading/organizing files on my audio player I just have one folder per artist and then put one folder per album in the artist folder. There are some edge cases where one just makes an arbitrary determination, like when filing an album with two artists.

File organization is actually not super critical on most players because the software will scan the metadata for you and doesn’t necessarily care about where the files are as long as it can find them. Stuff bought digitally should already have good metadata and most CDs will also be correctly tagged when you rip them with Foobar2k or iTunes or whatever you use for ripping. If it’s something really obscure you might have to manually add the metadata yourself which can be annoying but most folks don’t have a ton of stuff that isn’t in the databases.

In terms of what software folks use for keeping their music library organized on their host machine, Foobar2k is certainly popular for the nerdy crowd, and free. It’s got that open source UI jank factor though. There’s also some commercial software, when I last poked around I think I liked Audirvana okay? But you can certainly also use iTunes or windows media player or basically anything. Audiophile grade media playing software is mostly distinguished by its ability to do stuff like take exclusive control of an external DAC, do complicated EQ or run VST plugins to fuck with the sound, which most people don’t need.

Everything is drag and drop these days, so the frustrating answer is: You just have to make up a system using folders yourself. It's an unfortunate time commitment! (But worth it as your music storage gets bigger and bigger truusstt)

What OS are you using? For Windows, I typically sync my devices with WinAMP (pre-"reboot" 5.x), which works surprisingly well after all these years. Some people have been making updates to the plugins and I've heard some good things, but I haven't tested it out too much. All of my portable devices are pretty old anyway.

Of course that's if you want an "all-in-one" solution. I enjoy that, but I know a lot of people don't.

if you don't mind using your windows PC for it, i think musicbee does a decent job of handling this for my phone (using MTP)... not sure if your player is supported or not tho

Haven't tried this yet but it promises sync: http://www.mywinamp.com/winamp-for-mac/

beets and a bash script. i have an "unprocessed" folder where i put all my new music to be organized and have a script that runs beets which tags the files, converts them into ogg for my phone (kept in a separate directory), adds them to the library all nice and structured-like, followed by a few rsync calls to copy the new files to the other places i put music files. i used to have it sync the library to my phone but havent bothered getting it to work with my new phone, so i just cp -n the library to my phone over usb when i remember to.

took a good days work to set up but now i dont even really think about it, just run the script when i download some new music and it does its thing

heres the script (andrew is my hard drives name)

#!/bin/bash
LASTCONVERTDATE=$(cat /home/sierra/andrew/music/.lastconvertdate)

cd /home/sierra/andrew/unprocessed

count=`ls -1 *.zip 2>/dev/null | wc -l`
if [ $count != 0 ]; then
  for i in *.zip; do
    newdir="${i:0:-4}" && mkdir "$newdir"
    7z x -o"$newdir" "$i"
		rm "$i"
  done
else
  echo "No files to unzip."
fi

beet import -t ~/andrew/unprocessed
beet convert "added:${LASTCONVERTDATE}.."
rsync -av /home/sierra/andrew/flac/ sierra@192.168.1.116:/mnt/jeff/flac
rsync -av /home/sierra/andrew/music/ sierra@192.168.1.116:/mnt/jeff/music
echo $(date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") > /home/sierra/andrew/music/.lastconvertdate
echo "Done."