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A while ago I blogged about the long process of managing my music on my laptop (opensuse 10.3 with KDE). I’ve been able to trim it down a bit so I thought I’d post my findings in the hope that someone else saves some time and effort. My requirements are simple:

• Somewhat painless CD ripping for importing my existing iTunes collection
• Easy management on my laptop (playlist, sort options, id3 tagging, etc)
• Synchronization with my Cowon iAudio 7

CD Ripping

I’m become a fan of  Amarok for my music management. Somehow, Amarok lacks that nice iTunes “do it all” feature set. I understand Amarok CAN rip cd’s using KIO, but I didn’t get a chance to try it. There are really two stages for ripping:

1. Rip to disk
2. ID3 Tags

The app I found most agreeable was Sound Juicer. For the most part, when I insert a CD, it finds the CD artist, album, title, track, etc in CDDB and imports the tracks in the format I specify (~/music/<artist>/<album>/<track# – title>.ogg).

Music Management

90% of the time, the CD’s are detected and it’s an easy fix. The other 10% Sound Juicer fails to find the data for the CD. This is also an issue with every CD that is made up of mixed albums. For these you will need to import as ‘Unknown Artist’, ‘Unknown Title’ (or something of your choosing). After ripping, Amarok can take care of the tagging and organization.

Right-clicking on the ‘Unknown Artist’, ‘Unknown Album’ album in the collections pane will give you the option to ‘Edit’ the tracks. For each track, if you manually type in the Artist, Album or Name and hit the ‘fill in tags using musicbrainz’ button, it will grab the info for the track in no time. I’ve never had it fail.

Of course, even though you’ve filled in the tags, the content on your filesystem is still in ~/music/Unknown Artist/Unknown Album/01 – Track1.ogg format. This fix is simple. Go to the ‘Files’ pane in Amarok and right click the ‘Unknown Artist’ directory. Click ‘Organize Files’ and your music will be reorganized into the correct directory structure.

After you are done ripping and tagging, you can enjoy Amarok for music management as it’s one of the most feature rich and intuitive applications for Linux today.

Synchronization

Here is where Amarok has failed me. The only way I’ve found to ‘sync’ my DAP with my collection is:

1. Go to the playlists pane in Amarok, dig down until you find the playlist that corresponds to your entire collection, right click and ‘synchronize’ with your DAP (assuming it’s already mounted).
2. Go to the ‘devices’ pane and use the transfer mechanism to transfer your collection to the DAP.
3. Lather, rinse, repeat. Always repeat.

You need to repeat because several tracks will fail to copy. Hopefully not everyone has this problem but it sucks when you do. If you keep ‘transferring’, it will usually cure itself eventually. However, when you have possibly thousands of tracks to sync, this method sucks.

What I ended up doing was using rsync:

rsync –size-only -r –progress ~/music /media/iAudio\ 7/music

This takes care of the sync and I am a happy camper. It took 3 apps and a lot of trial and error to do it but I’m finally painlessly managing my digital music on Linux. With the advent of non-DRM music (see Amazon’s music store), I think we will see Linux becoming more popular for music management.