Over the years, I’ve used many different desktop aplications to listen to audio files, as well as manage my vast library of digital audio files. RealPlayer. Real Rhapsody. Musicmatch. Windows Media Player. iTunes. I’ve used them all at one time or another. Until very recently, I’d been mostly using RealPlayer because of its integration with Yahoo Music Jukebox and Radio; however, with Yahoo Music Jukebox switching over to Rhapsody this past summer, I’ve been thnking about exactly what is the best application for my needs…
I’m running Windows Home Server on a separate standalone file server for all of my audio, video, picture files, which is accessible by my desktop and laptop PCs as well as E.’s notebook. It’s been working out OK as far as having one consolidated place for all of these media files, but each PC has been using its own application to access and utilize the files. The problem is that each application has it’s own way of creating and managing metadata about the audio files, which are not necessarily consistent. For example, iTunes will automatically update whatever it believes to be the album art for a file, even if it does not agree with what Windows Media Player or RealPlayer thinks the album art is. iTunes will also rearrange file locations and directory structures in its own unique way.
To help eliminate these inconsistencies, I want to standardize on one application for the audio files particularly, and although I’m not a big iTunes or iPod fan I’m probably leaning toward iTunes, for it’s ability to easily export my entire library into an XML file, but I’m curious to know if anyone else has faced a similar situation and how it was decided.