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EDIT: See the updated version of this post here

I have owned an iPod for several years now and love it. It’s a beautifully designed device that has never failed me. However, I find it frustrating to have to use my wife’s Mac to manage my music and since the disk on that Mac was becoming increasingly full, it’s become more of a hassle. Also, I’m an open standards guy and I can’t stand software that ties me to a specific OS or application (thanks iTunes). Though I think that the folks over at Apple are doing great work, I don’t want to be married to their OS and applications (and I would never even think of running Windows). There is also the issue of DRM. I could sit here all day and blog about the sucktitude that is DRM but that’s been covered elsewhere.

Since my iPod’s battery seems to be wearing thin, I thought I may take a look at other options that would allow me to manage everything from the brand new opensuse laptop with tons of available disk space. After much deliberation, I decided to purchase the iAudio 7 from Cowon. Though all the critics seem to agree that it the interface on the iAudio 7 needs work, it supports MP3, OGG, WMA,, ASF, FLAC, WAV, MPEG4, has an FM radio, line in and microphone. Being the open standards guy I am, I was thrilled to see OGG support. The other huge benefit it had was listing Linux as a supported OS. I was also interested in the iRiver products, which many Linux users claimed to have gotten to work, but I didn’t want to have to spend lots of time and energy mickey mousing together like I did with my laptop.

Importing

As I’m waiting for my new Digital Audio Player (DAP) to arrive, I thought I’d be proactive and start importing and organizing my music on my laptop. Because of our friend DRM, the easiest way to do this was to rip it off CD (On a side note, after the way digital music has taken over the industry it’s pretty ironic that I’m going to go back to buying actual CD’s until someone can offer me DRM free digital downloads). This was a reasonable way to do it for me as I must still use CD’s in my car so I already had the CD’s burned. My goals were simple:

• Import my music to my ‘music’ directory in the format: /artist/album/track – title.ogg
• Apply id3 labels

As easy as it sounds, it was a huge pain in the arse. First I tried using sound juicer to extract the data. This went well for the first few albums as I was able to just click the ‘extract’ button to pull the CD into my specified directory format and it even ended up with the id3 tags.

However, not all of my CD’s were recognized by sound juicer, which was interesting seeing as how I burned them all the same way from iTunes. I was left with supplying the artist and album data to sound juicer which created the proper directories, but left the songs in 01 – track01.ogg format. Amarok solved some of the problems by allowing me to use musicbrainz to look up the tracks and apply the id3 tags. It did not however rename the files. I also tried kaudiocreator but I couldn’t get it working with CDDB so I gave up.

Enter easytag. Easytag gives me four things I needed:

• Checks for misnamed directory/track names throughout your entire collection and fixes them
• Checks for missing id3 tags
• Performs song/album/artist lookup
• Allows you to manually search for an album and drag the tags onto specific tracks

That last bullet is huge. The Killers album Sams Town was not recognized by default for some reason. I was able to highlight the list of generic track names, perform a search for “Sams Town” which it found, highlight all the songs and hit OK. Low and behold, the tags were placed on the files, I told easytag to rename them and I was done. So my final accepted ripping procedure of excellence is now:

1. Rip tracks with sound juicer, don’t worry if song names/tags are
2. Scan collection with easytag and fix filenames/id3 tags as needed

For the actual “management” part, I prefer to use Amarok which gives you tools similar to iTunes for listening, creating playlists, etc. One thing it does better than iTunes is recognize new music without having to “import” it. You just point Amarok to a directory and it will find everything in it. It even updates on the fly so if you add a new album or song you don’t have to rescan your collection.

As for the iAudio 7, I don’t have it yet. The idea will be to just drag and drop my music directory from the OS or just use synchroback to sync the player with my music directory.

Pros and Cons

The pros and cons of using this method over iTunes on PC or Mac:

Pros:

• Not tied to a specific OS or application
• No DRM – play your music on whatever supported devices and computers you want
• You have your choice of file formats to store your music in, lossy or lossless

Cons:

• Until it’s easy to get DRM free music, downloading music will be difficult
• The process of buying a CD and having the two step process to digitize and manage it is an expensive one in terms of time (and most likely a slight monetary increase as well)

Conclusion

To me, and probably a lot of other Linux users the ability to manage music independent of OS is huge. I don’t think that a process like this is all that horrible though some of it will rest in the hands of what DAP you use. I’m hoping that giving up the iPod for a slightly less sexy device won’t be a horrible switch. The added flexibility (and general good feeling) of using an open standard to store music is also a big deal to me. There is evidence that non-DRM music is starting to catch on and hopefully it does, until then I’ll be trying to find storage for all my CD cases and cover art.