I listen to a lot of music and I also use my music to DJ with using Rekordbox.

I'm not a fan of Apple Music as it's messed up my tagging in the past and n longer trust it. I want to be able to tag my music using my own tools (I currently use mp3tag and OneTagger to tag everything perfectly using Beatport tagging standards) and use Rekordbox to DJ with and create my playlists etc within the DJ software.

However, I want a separate music management software to use for more general listening and playlist creation. Some of the big player out there that allow for importing of own libraries are Apple Music and Spotify. However, there are less popular solutions too, like Helium Music Manager, beaTunes and so on.

I'm ultimately looking for something that won't interfere with my tagging, something that's quite clean and uncomplicated in terms of the UI, and something that will auto arrange my music into their respective albums and EPs and so on.

Anybody got any experiences or recommendations?

 

foobar2000 ---> www.foobar2000.org

 

I see this recommended a lot, but looks a bit too...."text-y" for me and not like something that would be a pleasure to use in terms of a nice UI experience. I might be wrong though

 

Waveform - Powerful Music Manager and Player
www.wideanglesoftware.com/waveform/
www.wideanglesoftware.com/waveform/help/

 

Thumbs up for HMM (I tested many programs but most were a pain for big collections)

I use it in connection with MS SQL Server on a file server for > 10 years now. It's good for really huge collections because of SQL fuctionality and I use it to play out music locally on my PCs and PA equipment for outside use.
SQL server is rock-solid and if you know how to use it you can edit the database with your own Transact SQL statements (no rocket science at all)
I never had a single problem.
IDK if it's the same for the other underlying SQL server platforms like MySQL but I think so (For full-blown SQL dbms, 1m records are a tiny exercise)
Update: Tested with Postgre SQL - works.
HMM is cheap, flexible and most important scalable; it works almost with the same speed with 100 or 1m songs. So more or less a nobrainer. Moving the db to another machine is a question of seconds.

Local text-based applications are also ok up to say 500 to 1000 music files and single user mode. After that it gets annoying because the loading time increases noticeable proportionally to the number of files. And moving between datasets is slow because the apps need to read everything from files again and again. Scaling is a problem. If your collection gets big you'll wish to have started with a more scalable solution.
Also moving from one PC to another is complicated. Most complicated is using >1 users at the same time concurrently when it comes to sync local libs from PC to PC (time stamps?).

Spoiler: PS.: A tip I learned the hard way

If you ever want to use a music collection in a network now or anytime in the future: Always use a fully qualified network name (UNC path) for the music files (like \\machinename\music\xy.mp3) instead of mapped drives (like S:\music\xy.mp2) or something because in a network an UNC path makes it possible to find a file without changing anything in the program or mapping drives for every PC.
Even if you only use one PC atm, use \\myPC\C\music\xy.MP3 instead of C:\music\xy.MP3
It makes life easy in the long run.

 

Last edited: Jan 20, 2025

This is useful to know. I was actually contemplating HMM as it looks good and seems easy to use. I am also recently making the move to using portable apps where I can, which makes the OS cleaner, snappier, and easier to reinstall everything. Have you used a portable version of HMM at all and any experience of that?

 

I haven't used it as portable app.
It should not be any problem, given the portable app is produced correctly.

Spoiler: Recommendations for network use

For Network use you should take in account that - depending on vendor - the software that makes an App portable (e.g. thinapp) maps drives, registry, OS paths etc. out of the normal paths of your machine into folders like app, data and so on.
Thus it may be not so easy to find the database directories from outside of the PC and it may be necessacy to change user rights to access those paths for network use.

To avoid these kinds of problems I would suggest to have one machine where the App is normally installed so that you can access the database files without manual changes. And the use the database from this "server".
I do it this way (using a server) not only because it's good for use of HMM but for a lot of other tasks that are best used on an always on machine (I use it for downloads, for rendering music/video, running databases, encoders etc...).
Lately I don't use a server OS anymore. A normal Win10Pro OS with a low power consumption micro PC (2 to 5 watts) is enough.
This way I don't need my main machine (>500 watts) to stay all day on for those tasks.

I recently built a new tiny "server" on Win10Pro (Pro for RDP usage) with a 10GBit network, which consumes just a little more power (60 watts max, 12 watts average over 1 month), but is extremely fast (a used HP Eilte Mini 600 G9). Now it is even capable for demanding encoding tasks, the older was not really good in.
In fact, in the case of HMM in the network, I would recommend installing a fully-fledged SQL server, i.e. MSSQL Server or mySQL server, because they are stable and fast. They are also much more flexible and scalable than MS localDb. And it works just great.

 

Last edited: Jan 20, 2025

Thanks, look good. I'll give it a try.

 

foobar2000 ... And for all things elated to tags MP3tag. There is nothing comparable to these 2 apps. And there is nothing left to wish for.

 

I still use serato but im also a dj. I like beatunes and mixed in key to help with tagging. But its a different kind of organization and music experience than most.