Managing Music Efficiently

Can you imagine a life without music? It’s said that music has the power to heal diseases. Music has the ability to change moods, soothe minds and lower tensions. Music is a great way to recover from stress and pain. And, thankfully, music has come of age from LPs and cassettes, to optical media. And now, with computing becoming a de facto standard, everyone prefers listening to their music on PCs.

PCs have become media hubs thanks to the astounding development in media formats. Ease of audio management has added to PCs becoming the centralised media for all entertainment needs. Storing music in PCs has a great advantage over other storage resources. It saves space, lessens optical disc usage, and having a soft copy around the corner makes it easy to access it anywhere through a network or the Internet.

And today, portable media players (PMP) make it even easier to access music.

However, for everything to work impeccably and to get the most from the environment, it’s necessary to maintain and keep things in order. To get the best out of our PCs and PMPs, and use the latest features, we need to manage our music collection.

Manoeuvring through music collections might be time consuming and irritating, but once you are done with it, you’ll only benefit by it. There are several reasons that make music management worth investing time in. Consider a library in which everything is haphazardly arranged! Will you be able to find what you’re looking for? Similarly, I’m sure it gets on your nerves when you can’t find the song you are looking for. After a few hours of tagging and organising the songs, life can become much easier.

The benefits of a properly-tagged and managed music collection are:

1. Easier and faster search
2. The ability to use advanced music features like album art, cover switcher (in iPods only), etc
3. Identification of albums and artists
Figure 3: Banshee shows the added albums

Figure 3: Banshee shows the added albums

To get started with managing your music, all you need are a few supplementary tools. So here is a guide to editing and managing your music effectively in GNU/Linux.

You will require a few specialised tools and media players:

* EasyTag: An advanced music ID3 tag editor
* Picard: An online music editor from MusicBrainz
* An audio player
o Banshee 1.4.1 for GNOME users
o Amarok 2.0/1.4.10 for KDE