Music: Starting from scratrch with MixZing Pro...

[Psychokitty]

OK, so my third biggest use of my Droid is as an MP3 player. I have roughly 9 GB of music on it. I'm using (and enjoying) MixZing (paid).
A couple of problems so far, not necessarily anything to do with the app;
Years ago I made the Gawd-awful mistake of eagerly ripping my entire CD collection onto my brand new XP OSed laptop ...-in WMP format!. I knew absolutely nothing at that time, and didn't even have an MP3 player.
Well, now I have a rather tremendous chunk of music that is comprised mostly of this collection and about 33% from fragments downloaded off of file sharing programs. These "fragments" are usually in MP3 format, but some idiot has usually altered the tag info, mis-spelling authors, mis-assigning albums, etc, making the tag info nearly useless.
All of this makes for one hell of a mess of a music library for MixZing to try to comb through. It won't even display album art for me, but I don't know if it's because most of the music is WMP or because much of the music has screwed up tag data!

So I'm starting over, complete, from scratch. I'm dragging out that big ole box of CDs, and I'm going to burn them on my PC, and build my Droid library correctly, from the ground up.

Give me some advice! (Please.)
Should every artist have it's own folder? For example, should I copy my Niel Young CD into a folder named "Neil Young", or should I just put it into the same folder as all the other albums?
I'm ripping everything as MP3 this time, but what bit rate should I use?
How do I make album art easy for MixZing to find?

Thanks, all.

 

[MicroNix]

At first I put everything into one folder and didn't separate by artist. With 9GB of music, things will scroll much better through directories if you put them into folders based on artist and album.

I've also done everything in VBR which averages around 160 and produces a quality rip at a decent size. Never had a problem playing them anywhere either where it be an iPod, Droid, mp3 CD in a mp3 capable car, etc. I also found Easy CD-DA Extractor to be a quality tool for ripping with tag editing, embedded album art, etc.

Good luck. I've made the same mistake way back when before having to re-rip everything again. And the fragment mp3s, same boat and *still* going through them to edit and weed out the garbage.

 

[mobrienjr]

I personally suggest going with 256 or higher. The difference in quality is amazing. The downside is each song has a higher MB, but if you dock it to your car stereo, or etc. you will hear the difference.

I also create folders for each artist, then have sub folders w/ the specific album or cd.

 

[MicroNix]

I personally suggest going with 256 or higher. The difference in quality is amazing. The downside is each song has a higher MB, but if you dock it to your car stereo, or etc. you will hear the difference.

I haven't seen much of a difference above 256. However, I have seen a difference between VBR and fixed rates. If you jack the VBR settings to what would equal around 256 fixed, you'll normally get a slightly smaller size file but the encoding will add extra where it needs it and reduce the rate where it doesn't for a pretty awesome sounding end result. You also have to balance available space and how much you want to pack into it. A lot of people who have encoded at 320 always want a sync that backs the rate down when syncing to their portable devices. Kind of a waste if you ask me because now you have to wait for a conversion for every file every time you sync it somewhere.

My best advice is to play with the settings. Sample them everywhere you will be playing them (home, car, earbuds, etc.) and then make the decision what you like best. Not everyone can hear the differences (or care for that matter)! Then look at an average filesize and see if it is outrageous or within the bounds you'd like to see.