MediaMonkey

When I had hard drive problems recently and had to restore all my music library from a backup, I only had backups of the actual tracks and not all the associated itunes stuff. This means I lost most of my album artwork and things! Annoyingly itunes when itunes saves the album art for displaying as your song plays, it doesn't do it the standard way*. If you stay within itunes / ipod then you're fine, but if you want to move your mp3 somewhere else, that extra info is lost. If you right click a track in itunes and choose "get info" you can store the image properly no problem, but this is a slow manual process with the 10,000+ tracks I have here... Introducing MediaMonkey, an alternative to itunes that I'm giving another go. This looks pretty snazzy, and automatically updates the actual mp3, grabbing an image file from the internet if it can't find one locally.

I know I tried this once before but didn't stick with it, itunes probably has other advantages over it, but I'm giving it another go now, will report back with how useful it is.

What do you use for organising your music and media, is there something better I could be using?

Up very early today, what with the clocks changing, I was up and about by 7.15. Had a night in last night, watching films and TV. We were meant to be babysitting Poppy, but Jen's done her back in so they couldn't go out so we didn't need to. Watched Cloverfield which I thought was quite good if a bit annoying, but Clare really liked. Tried to watch St Trinians, but too rubbish so turned it off. Fringe has a few things in common with Cloverfield (also by Lost creator JJ Abrams, annoying, no answers, and Clare liked it a lot more than she thought it would), a lot of an X-Files rip off, but good, so got a few more of those lined up to watch. I'm enjoying Spooks too.

* Moving the geek details further down the post so as not to bamboozle some of my readers... The standard way involves saving the image itself into the image, writing into the id3 tags of the actual music file. ITunes stores it in an external file (windows media player does the same thing). I can see an advantage to this, there's no need to store the image repeatedly for every track that wants the same image, but if you want to move just one track from one computer to another (say emailing it to yourself at work, not pirating it for a friend of course) then the itunes and media player way this extra info is lost. The standard way, the media monkey way, everything goes along with the mp3.

I think the same thing applies for other meta data, all my ratings and play counts and things were definitely lost when I reimported all my music :-(

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