Basic query re storing MP3s etc

[Uplander]

I am a senior citizen and totally new to MM so please forgive me asking something that will seem very basic. I should add that iTunes fries my brains a little so I have ended up looking at MM.

Anyway, I have a Windows 7 64 bit laptop on which I have stored a large number of lengthy MP3s / MP4s; these fall under differing categories and I want to be able to choose a category and then play a single track. I would also like a simple way of replicating this on another laptop for occasional use. So my points are:

1) Am I right in thinking that the tracks are stored somewhere on (say) my C drive and that I then add them to MM by scanning (i.e. they cannot be stored within MM itself)?

2) Having done the scan, is assigning the tracks to genres the best way to differentiate the type of content?

3) What is the best way to achieve what I want on two computers whilst avoiding the need to assign tracks to genres twice?

I am sure this will seem a really stupid non-understanding of things but any help would be much appreciated!

[Lowlander]

1) Yes

2) Yes

3) By default any changes made to the files tags are saved to the files themselves too. This means that if you copy the files after adding Genre that the new computer will also see the new Genre.

If the 2 computers are on the same network you can also share files from one to the other using MediaMonkey: https://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index. ... ervers/4.0

[Uplander]

Many thanks for this helpful guidance Lowlander - much appreciated.

[freedomfries323]

There is another more direct approach to achieve what you want. You can create playlists. A playlist is a list of tracks, indexed in the order of your choosing, that you can queue up for playing, and it will play all those tracks. You can create a playlist from tracks located in different directories on your computer, which is convenient. You can export those playlists to use on another computer, as long as the music files themselves are in an identical folder structure on the other computer.

The reason behind this requirement is that the playlists are just text files that point the music player program to where the song resides on your hard drive. So it looks at the file path in the playlist. Of course, it might be just as easy to create another playlist from scratch on your second computer, that is specific to that computer. I recommend reading into the help files on playlist creation, and how to use them in MM. IT's pretty basic and will meet your needs...

Of course you can create tags for every track in your library, and MM will allow you to sort your music from these tags, and even create playlists from it. This may require you to spend more time organizing your music than you like. Which is why I mentioned playlists.

THEN, when you feel more comfortable, there is an autoplaylist system. It lets you create a playlist that dynamically updates itself based on parameters you assign it. For instance, I built an auto playlist to list all the music that I drop in a specific folder on my disk. This is useful for me as I create folders that I used as music bins by genre. It may seem excessive, but I actually created these bins because they are used by other music software I use to DJwith. MM is helping me classify my music library. Autoplaylists are probably too complicated for you at the moment, but I thought you should know of what Media Monkey can do.

MM is not easier to use than iTunes, by any means, but for your needs it might actually be more straightforward. Hope this helps.