MediaMonkey forum

Dear Media Monkey users:

I am working at a small campus/community radio station in Canada. I have been hired by the station to research and implement a software package to manage our music library.

In the past we had been using "CD Trustee", but that was only a cataloging of titles with our library numbers. What we are looking for is something that we can catalog the actual music files off of the CD's, tag with our library number, and tag with a disparate variety of genres. Our focus at the station is on local and Canadian independent music, so one of our main considerations is the ease of entering disc information manually if the particular indie artists' disc does not have metadata encrypted to the disc itself. We also need a system that allows us to enable our DJ's to access the music files on a computer that will most likely NOT be in the broadcasting booth. Tall order? I hope not!

I'm not sure if anyone on here is using Music Monkey for this capacity, but if you are I would love to hear about your experiences with it. Even if you don't use it in this capacity but you have comments/suggestions/advice/stories, please feel free to respond or send me an email at the station. My email address is : steph@cfmh.ca. Thanks for your time!

Steph

Do you mean you want to catalog CD's not ripped to your PC or ripped to your PC? It seems the latter.

MediaMonkey can manage files anywhere (a NAS may be a good setup for you) be it on an internal, external or networked drive. For most file formats metadata is saved to the files (makes it easier to use files from multiple locations) with WAV (better go with FLAC) being the big exception: http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.p ... erties/4.0

You can manually edit files at will, including multiple value support for tags like Genre and have the use of five custom fields for non-traditional metadata (like library number).

Hi,
Like Lowlander said it is very possible, but depends on how you want that your Catalog be eg. CDs or CD RIPs with pointers to original CDs,...?

My main reason for using MMW was to catalog CDs (in 2002) and I have also done complete CD -> File conversions for several Radio stations .

I can be at your disposal if needed.

Hey guys:

Thanks for your responses!

Lowlander: Yes, we would like to catalog CD's that will be ripped to the PC, you are correct. The data will be stored on a networked computer system ideally, as well. Basically, the CD's are to be ripped on a central computer and then other PC's in the station should have access to the music files (and associated information).

Looking forward to hearing from you again...

Steph

As MediaMonkey saves metadata to the files this shouldn't be an issue (each PC just needs to rescan for changes which Folder Monitoring (Gold feature) can do automatically). You can share the database, but this isn't recommended due to SQLite limitations: http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/inde ... nvironment

Depending on your needs you could have a central PC with MediaMonkey and have the other PCs access it through DLNA. This won't allow for editing, but will allow for viewing files, shared Playlists and the playing of files.

Some thing that might help you to know how MediaMonkey works is how I use it. I run the computer as a fully automated jukebox with script from peke to change the Playlists by the windows task scheduler and i have it playing music through mmw 20 hrs a day. I use a small fm transmitter to send to the stereos in my house. Fully automated radio station that picks song files at random according to the genre, also with a script to automatically rate the song by play counts, all of the scripts are made for mmw and are available in this forum or at the download page on this site. But the only thing I have to do with it is add the songs from lp via USB turn table, and ripped cd's I don't use the virtual cd feature of mmw. But I have mmw auto organize the files over 5 hd's. It is easy to add the cd's data in to mmw if no cd text shows up just select the cd drive in the mmw directory showing the inserted disc then in the window list area type in the needed information. Each song can be adjusted in its own properties panel if necessary.
Remember very important that you handle all of the editing for the music through mmw, or the resulting mess up will be a pain to fix, this is because mmw needs to update his own database and cannot if you do the editing outside of his control.