I’m looking for a music manager that does not do a lot, mostly as a replacement for Windows Explorer. There’s a lot of software out there that claims to be your best friend when it comes to music. It also wants to do almost everything for you: ID3 tagging, ripping a CD, browsing through your files, renaming them, moving them and oh yes, let’s not forget playing them! Well, that’s not how I roll.

Part perfectionism part habit I would describe my music tool-set as. I play everything with Winamp (there’s your habit) because I’ve used the program since 1997 and I know the plugins and hotkeys by heart. I repair ID3 data and rename files with Tag&Rename, and a sometimes a little help from Bulk Rename Utility. All info coming from the near-flawless music database of Discogs.

my music directory structure

My music library directory structure, clean as a whistle.

The missing piece of the puzzle for me is a tool that keeps track of my music library and helps me re-discover what I already have. These are some features I am looking for:

  1. Drag and drop into a player of choice. (Winamp, VLC, Traktor, SAM Broadcaster etc.)
  2. Double click or default playback opens in a player of choice.
  3. Search, in both filenames and ID3 tags.
  4. Browsing, by directory, artist, album, genre and year.
  5. Tagging or bookmarking of tracks, albums and artists. To mark all ‘club bangers’ for example.
  6. No modifications to the music itself. All data must be saved outside of the library.
  7. A small and simple GUI.
  8. At last but not least, lightweight.

Not that much to ask for I think, it’s not rocket science. Unfortunately I haven’t come across the right tool yet. Or maybe I have but I didn’t realize it because there were 100 other features overshadowing these basics.

So this is my call out to you. If you have a recommendation of what software I should check out please send me a tweet, query, email or text and if it turns out to be the one for me I’ll grant you everlasting e-fame here on my blog.

2011/01, added the result.

If you’re reading this you’d probably like to know if I found something to suit my needs.
I did, it’s the internet-fabled and Winamp-nemesis foobar2000 after all.

Foobar is like a starter set of Lego. You don’t get what you want right out of the box, but it’s meant to be customized. With the help of hundreds of freely available plugins you can make it do exactly what you want and show none of the features you wont use. So if you are an avid computer user and don’t mind spending a few hours searching for the plugins you want/need, foobar is truly the music manager of anyone’s dreams. Contrary to what I expected, it has even become my main mp3 player and tagger.

  1. Drag and drop into other software.. – Yes!
  2. Double click.. – Couldn’t find it, but I decided I didn’t need it anymore.
  3. Search.. – Yes
  4. Browsing.. – Yes
  5. Tagging or bookmarking.. – Yes
  6. No modifications to the music itself.. – Yes
  7. A small and simple GUI. – Yes, as big or small as you want.
  8. Lightweight. – Yes, very.

And finally, here’s how I customized my foobar up til now.

my customized foobar2000

My customized foobar2000, exceptionally functional.