Personally, it's a mess and I'd love to have a better paradigm.
I have a stack of CD's in my car because I lack an aux-in port, and a cassette deck to put a faux-cassette in. These CD's are burned from itunes, which I now only use to burn cd's because all the music I download automatically goes into my iTunes folder (Even though I have an android now) and I have to physically connect my phone to my computer to transfer files (Not an outright complaint, but it seems like there should be a way around that by now).
All my audiobooks are managed by one app, my podcasts come in through stitcher (Which I'm actively looking to replace, because they just added in-app adds in addition to the ones IN the podcasts themselves, and I make a point to listen to as little advertisement as possible.
So in short, I'm looking for a good way to unify all my audio (mp3's, m4b's, podcasts) through one manager so I can finally get rid of iTunes, stop listening to ads on stitcher and just have a more streamlined audio management system.
Musicbee. That's what's used on my Windows side. Here's a list of features:
Manages all your media and supports a number of formats including MP3, AAC, M4A, MPC, OGG, FLAC, APE, Opus, TAK, WV, WMA and WAV.
Create and manage playlists, and "smart" playlists that update based on custom filters
Enqueue songs into a "Now Playing" pane for on-the-go playlist creation.
Watch folders on your hard drive for changes and automatically adjust your library accordingly
Import libraries from iTunes and Windows Media Player
Sync Android phones, USB drives, some iPods, and many other portable music devices with your library
Convert files on-the-fly as you sync to your devices
Auto-tag your music using the music databases of your choice
Keep your files automatically organized in folder based on tags
Customize a number of different keyboard shortcuts
Subscribe, download, and listen to podcasts, either by searching MusicBee's podcast directory or by adding feeds yourself
Use advanced audio features like a 10-band equalizer, crossfade, WASAPI and ASIO playback, and more
Customize your player with skins, different layouts and views, and three different players including a mini player and compact player
A plugin architecture that lets you add lots of functionality to the player, like extra supported formats, skins, library organization tools, and other features (Winamp plugins supported)
An integrated browser that allows you to browse for just about anything in-player (useful for browsing plug-ins, skins, and so on)
Hopefully that's helpful. Sounds like it's what you need. Requires a little tweaking, but once you get the workflow down, you'll find it irreplaceable.
On the Mac side I still use iTunes, because it works better with that architecture. Sometimes I use Vox if I want something more lightweight, but I love the album view on iTunes.
posted 3627 days ago