Using SageTV as the primary music library

[DMZ]

Hello,

I've never really gotten into the whole music player / ripping / cataloging very seriously. I know something about it -- have digitized music into various formats and fiddled with a few programs. However I have no music player which I turn to for cataloging and stuff.

What I figured that I would do was use SageTV as my primary music repository.. However there doesn't seem to be any way for adding or editing the song information (title, artist, album, etc) via SageTV.

I guess what I'd need is something to edit and/or add the song information to my MP3 files outside of SageTV or preferably something to do it from within SageTV.

Suggestions?

One thing I'd like to do though is not get hooked into any sort of song selling swiss army knife stuff like RealOne, QT, WMP, etc.

Additionally I guess that I don't really want to use a different player from within SageTV since I will be using PlaceShifter primarily to operate the HTPC.

Thanks!

[PhillJones]

I don't think sage was ever designed with that functionality in mind. I manage my ID tags with a programme called ID3-TagIT. It's freeware, small, isn't connected with any music selling service, doesn't try to hijack your computer like WMP or real and is very powerful.

It'll change tags to match filenames, filenames to match tags, download cover art and put it in the files ID tags or as a folder.jpg file. It'll even take a directory full of songs from an unknown album and work out what album they came from (I don't know how it does this, possibly based on track lengths).

[CollinR]

I do similar but I use Tag&Rename which is not free and not overly stabe either.

I use Exact Audio Copy to rip the CDs to the network share.

[Berg]

I use dbPowerAMP to rip and tag my CDs (not a free solution) and keep Tag&Rename to clean up tags and manage the folders (not free either, and less necessary since using dbP).

I don't use Sage for my music because it doesn't have the tools I am looking for and doesn't seem to handle a large collection very well (60000 tracks).

[mrcandu]

I use MP3TAG
It is free, has plenty of features and is very easy to use + it also supports the Album Artist tag (BAND) the SageTV makes use of.

[matt91]

As much as I hate to admit it, I use WMP - and actually like it.

I tried a couple of other programs, but they all require user intervention to tag and rename files. WMP will, if you let it, go out to the internet and see if your songs appear to be from a specific album. If so, it can automatically grab the correct tag information and album art, perform the re-tag, and move the files to a new folder.

I had lots of song, acquired from lots of sources, that didn't have tags in the same (or complete) format. WMP did wonders for most of them. I haven't seen it get anything wrong yet (I think the bar is kinda high for it to determine that the album is a match with something it finds on the internet.)

Might be worth checking out if you haven't actually tried it.

Matt

[bastafidli]

Actually I have really bad experience with WMP. It messed up quite a bit of my albums especially since I have quite a bit of specials/extras/international editions. I use MP3Tag.

[DMZ]

Thanks for the reccomendations!

I am mildly familiar with WMP since it's pretty much like IE and .NET, I can't seem to avoid them coming into play from time to time, nor get them unbound from Windows..

With any luck ID3-TagIT will be happy with the core .NET in Windows XP since I have yet to be force fed .NET 2.x or 3.x yet. Maybe SP3 will finally cure the shutdown hangs in XP .NET and I'll not be so shy about upping the versions.

I was kinda hoping there might be some SageTV add-on to help with music collections. I may scour the java sites looking for something open source and see if maybe I can work out a way to integrate it into SageTV.

I'm not well versed in java so if any of you java pros are reading..

I'm still very new to SageTV so my guess is that any sort of tagging or player based tagging software (WMP, Winamp, etc) will not be usable via a placeshifter connection.

I followed some of the threads about the Winamp plug-in for SageTV but am guessing that would be usable only at the local HTPC/sage.exe system. Correct?

For my small collection I could be fine with the contortions of external (to SageTV) but I am aiming to cover the others in my household who will be remote control bound. heh.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by DMZ

I was kinda hoping there might be some SageTV add-on to help with music collections. I may scour the java sites looking for something open source and see if maybe I can work out a way to integrate it into SageTV.

What are you hoping to do? IMO a 10ft interface like sage would be horribly clumsy for managing a music collection. I manage my music in J River Media Center, or sometimes I use Musicbrainz Picard to fix/fill in tags.

For my small collection I could be fine with the contortions of external (to SageTV) but I am aiming to cover the others in my household who will be remote control bound. heh.

If you talking using your collection (selecting and playing) I've given up on SageTV for that (and not for the reasons most here complain about). At one point I was working with another member to get JRMC integrated into the Sage GUI, but I've since realized that Sage, or more accurately, 10ft, "TV" UIs are just wrong for music.

The basic problem is, for me at least, listenning to music is not something I do with the TV on, if I want to listen to music, I'm either not by the TV or don't need it on. Having to fire up the TV seems like a huge waste just to listen to music.

Conversely, if I have the TV on, nine times out of ten I'm watching something on it and not listenning to music. I don't think Sage, or any other 10ft, video-centric system is well suited for music playback, mutually exclusive is to strong a term, but it does describe how I feel about music and TV.

For those reasons, I firmly believe that the dedicated network audio player is the way to go. I've already got a Roku Soundbridge for one room, and I've all but ordered a Squeezebox for my HT (I may get one to replace the Soundbridge as well).

I'm all for integration, but trying to integrate audio and video, two things with very different usage models, just seems like integration for integration's sake.

[Opus4]

BTW: for whatever tag program you use, you want to be sure it can set the Album Artist field, or its equivalent (some tag apps call it something else). SageTV uses that field to help distinguish between one Greatest Hits album and another, for example. WMP can set that field.

- Andy

[Brent]

Just to put in a dissenting viewpoint here (I'm a little surprised to be in disagreement with some of you who posted above) I prefer to use my HTPC (SageTV in this case) to run my music collection. Reasons:

1. Easily view and navigate playlists, genres, albums etc and select music while seeing the songs in the list.
2. My HTPC is connected to three additional TV's via cable modulator. I can control my music playback from four different rooms in the house and view/navigate the play list from any of those TV/AV Systems
3. My family is more apt to use the tons of music we have when they can browse it simply with the remote. No need to find that CD etc. when trying to decide on what to listen to.
4. We like to play photo slide shows with music playing in the background - it's easy to do this with the HTPC.
5. One remote, one system, one interface for the family to learn and use. Simplicity is key for anything getting used by anyone in the house - me included.

There are certainly disadvantages when using the HTPC for music, many of which were addressed by several people in this thread. For me at least the advantages far outweigh any disadvantages though.

Regarding managing the music collection, I use MP3Tag to tag my music files and have used JRiver Media Center to organize etc, and iTunes as well. I now use iTunes just because we're a two-iPod family and its just easy to do that way. I agree that SageTV probably isn't the best place to tag and organize your collection, but it is a great place to browse and listen to your music collection imho.

By the way, cncb on the forums made a JRMC program for Beyond Media a while back and now that he's using SageTV, you never know - he might build one for SageTV too. Really though, I'm pretty happy with how SageTV handles music - even though I'm sure I'll have some feature requests and bug reports once I get into it further.

[tmiranda]

I also use Sage as my primary music-playing interface. It is not ideal but for me it is sufficient.

The music interface has gotten better, but it still needs some work. For example, navigation and searching is difficult. Stranger89 hit the nail on the head, a TV is just not well suited to listening to music (for now at least.)

Pet Peeve: Sage thinks "The Beatles", "the Beatles", "the beatles", "Beatles" and "beatles" are five different artists.

[DMZ]

stanger89 : The jist of it is that I'll probably be dumping a bunch of MP3, with lacking or bad tag info, into the HTPC but won't necc have the time to edit the info first or be able to work with the HTPC locally.

The HTPC will be sitting in an empty house recording mostly so centralizing the music with the video with PlaceShifter access is great for obvious reasons. SageTV serving music and video to me is probably also against the ISP TOS but not as blatent as running an FTP server. Frankly with the wad paid to the cable company each month they'd be stupid to hassle me for any sort of server -- after all the outbound bandwidth on the consumer service is metered.

Anyhow, AFAIK I have to dump the music into the HTPC while I am able. I suppose that I could edit and such before putting it on the Sage system but it'd be nice to be able to do it as time permits, remotely.

Opus4 : Thanks for the heads-up.


Aside from my own situation born desires for SageTV, as mentioned above, I see value in the centralized music+video possibility. I'm considering buying an appliance PC like the mini multimedia ready HP and hooking my parents up with an HTPC and extenders. They would love the all-in-one setup. At 70+ and 80+ they'd be in heaven without the presnt remote control shuffle and having to fumble with separate components, music CD, VCR and so forth.

Sadly, the machine would probably have vista on it and frankly the windows media center is a very polished and easy to use application IMO. Kind of a hard decision to pick SageTV or WMC for someone else.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Brent

Just to put in a dissenting viewpoint here (I'm a little surprised to be in disagreement with some of you who posted above) I prefer to use my HTPC (SageTV in this case) to run my music collection. Reasons:

1. Easily view and navigate playlists, genres, albums etc and select music while seeing the songs in the list.
2. My HTPC is connected to three additional TV's via cable modulator. I can control my music playback from four different rooms in the house and view/navigate the play list from any of those TV/AV Systems
3. My family is more apt to use the tons of music we have when they can browse it simply with the remote. No need to find that CD etc. when trying to decide on what to listen to.
4. We like to play photo slide shows with music playing in the background - it's easy to do this with the HTPC.
5. One remote, one system, one interface for the family to learn and use. Simplicity is key for anything getting used by anyone in the house - me included.

I don't think anyone is disagreeing on 3, playing CDs is so 1990's

As for 1 and 2, I've got one picture for ya:

Originally Posted by tmiranda

I also use Sage as my primary music-playing interface. It is not ideal but for me it is sufficient.

The music interface has gotten better, but it still needs some work. For example, navigation and searching is difficult. Stranger89 hit the nail on the head, a TV is just not well suited to listening to music (for now at least.)

It's not so much that a TV is bad for listenning, a TV is actually a pretty good interface for browsing a music collection. The problem for me is music is inherently simple to browse, and I don't want to need the TV (especially my projector in the HT) if I just want to have some music on.

[Brent]

Stanger89,
Looks nice indeed and yes it does give me gadget envy . In fact I've looked at that very device, but to be quite honest I can't justify the expense when I have what I need at the moment. Down the road perhaps though...

[DMZ]

Looks neat but at MSRP of $400 methinks it's a 'squeezeme twice'.

Right off a few sour spots for me:

- I'm kind of moody about battery packs.. I'd imagine AA or AAA NiMH would suffice
- why they didn't stuff a slimline audio CD player and have ripping soft/firmware?

Lastly, and maybe I am wrong, but why does the manual not contain the language of the country of manufacture? If that is made in Silicon Valley or the Tech Triangle perhaps I could be inclined to spring the bread for an music/internet appliance such as the squeezebox duet.

[wacole]

Have been using MP3Tag with good success to fix various tag problems.

We've got a pretty good sized classical collection and it would be great to be able to sort by Composer as well as Artist. This distinction isn't so important for non-classical music, but is for a classical collection.

Just a suggestion.

Am finding SageTV/Media Center really great; changes the whole we way consume media.

[pjpjpjpj]

The problem with using WMP to auto-tag is that it doesn't embed the art in the file, it just creates hidden jpgs with coded names (along with "folder.jpg") and throws them into the folder where the music is. So if you have a folder with a bunch of songs that you auto-tag, Sage will use the "folder.jpg" (usually the album art from the last song you tagged) and show it for every song in that folder. Terribly annoying.

I fought with WMP for MP3 tagging for about a year, manually chugging through tons of songs, and then discovered MP3Tag. Hallelujah, what an easier and more-successful experience. One of the best freeware pieces of software I have used. I went as far as to manually "disassemble" all my greatest hits albums and research and label each song per its original album, so that the years are correct (I hate when songs from the 70s and 80s are listed as "2010" because they were on a greatest hits album from that year). I also used MP3Gain (also freeware) to normalize the volume level for my entire catalog, so I don't have some really soft songs and some really loud songs.

Now my music catalog is neat, organized, and works very well in Sage.

(by the way, there are numerous other threads about this topic around here, including a currently-in-discussion thread in the Sagev7 Customizations forum about creating a new music interface)

[nwboater]

We use JRMC for music. It is probably the best player for large music collections and has incredible organizing ability. A bit of a learning curve but they have a very helpful forum. It is also probably the best player from a sound quality perspective if you are an audiophile type (I am).

For critical music listening we use JRiver, but for casual we use Sage, since it is often on anyway.

Re trying to organize music with a 10' interface, we do all our organizing on a regular PC Monitor but for everything else we use a TV screen.

There is a nifty plugin by cncb called Jrmc Media Explorer 2 here http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/down...do=file&id=298 that will allow you to explore and playback your Jrmc library within SageTV.

Have fun.

Rod