James Steele

I use Winamp, but I think you're going to have this problem with all media players, 30,000 items is a hell of alot.

It also means you've probably downloaded or copied most of that stuff, I doubt you have 1000 cd's at home.

Maybe you should consider breaking your collection up into 10 or so sections. I have 3000 mp3's and they load reasonable quickly...

Hi Sam,

Thanks for your comments. I won't claim to not have any media that I do not own, however between my DVD collection and CD collection I am approaching a 1000 CD's/DVD's.

None the less, I do appreciate your comments.

Well I am off to start creating some playlists.

P.S. A large number of the media I have are sound bytes/clips from the Video editing company I run on the side. Of course these will be the first to be weeded out from the playlist that I use on a daily basis.

Well, you're probably an exception if you do own that much. Thats a big investment!!!! Do you have a room for all the media? lol, my 150 CD collection takes up enough room on the wall...

Even I have a couple of random tracks that I don't own... I jsut get annoyed when I see people who claim to have 50 GIgs of stuff, of which they probably don't even own 1 gig of.

1 Word. "Winamp"

Hi Sam,

I have USB 2.0 External Drives that I am always hooked up to. That's where I keep most of my media. Lots of room although I am due to clean things up a bit.

I haven't found one that makes me happy. I use WMP, because I get the same mediocre experience at home and at work.

I just want to play my CDs and be able to see the track names without the whole desk shaking (IBM desktop)

I don't install software from Real on my computers.

The only people I know who seem to be happy with the player they use are those who use Win Amp.

Having ripped a ton of my cd's (> 1500) and I have been purchasing more then 98% of my music online for the past year I'm around 40,000 tracks and the only app that I found handles them all is iTunes. I've got several smart playlists setup along with regular playlists.

My one complaint is the lack of location referencing in any of the media players. I have a bunch of my music kept on DVD's and when I import them into my library it references the drive letter, I'd much prefer it to reference the title of the disc instead so I can get a message box that says "Please insert disc label: whatever". When dealing with large collections you can't really expect all of it to be on one disc that is always connected.

LOL! Thanks Andrew. I'll give WinAmp a test drive. Its been a while since I have used it.

I really like J. River Media Center(http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/) I've found it to be really good for my collection of media (not just music, pictures and movies, too). Costs some money but there's a free demo.

Thanks Dustin. I will have a look.

Winamp for music (the latest version 5.xxx is a return to glory). VLC Media Player for video.

I'm using WinAmp (5) at all pc's at home.
If you have to rip a lot of other disc's, you could also give the pro version a try.
Easy ripping. Don't know how it handles LP's, if anyone has an idea ...