Michael Calore has the same problem that I’ve run into lately — what do you do when your music library starts to get really big?
My friend — let’s call him Jimmy — has a music collection of truly epic proportions. His library consists of roughly 90,000 MP3s at last count, which is about 560 gigabytes of data. That’s enough music to bring just about every software media player to its knees.
While Jimmy was building his massive library (which he stores on a local 1 terabyte RAID), he was importing and managing everything using iTunes. As soon as the library grew beyond 300 GB, iTunes started acting sluggish. After Jimmy’s music library passed the half terabyte mark, iTunes was so bogged down that it became almost unusable.
The folks in the comments section recommended a couple of solutions for Windows users — Media Monkey and Foobar 2000.
Personally, I like and use Media Monkey. It is not as slick as iTunes, but it handles the very large number of MP3s I’ve got without a problem. I especially like the fact that it embeds song ratings as metadata within MP3s which is much preferable to iTunes practice of simply storing ratings in the iTunes database (which means if you lose the database you lose the ratings — precisely why I never bothered with rating songs when I used iTunes).
The weird thing is that when I mention this to other people the typical response is, “why would anyone need 1 terabyte of music? Who has time to listen to that much music?”
I certainly don’t have time to listen to all the music in my collection. Then again, I don’t have time to read every web page ever created, but this doesn’t stop me from going to Google on a whim and finding exactly the pages I want/need to read now.
Music is the same way. I have no idea what I’m going to want to listen to tonight, tomorrow, or six months from now. Might as well just grab it all now and let the computer sort it out with the metadata and smart playlists.