Hi LA,
You're in the right place. I have around 40,000 songs as well and Media Center is the only sensible choice for that many songs. I've been using it for several years now and I still check out other apps to compare but nothing else comes close on features and speed.
I try to keep my songs well organized but so far my collection is not as well tagged as you are describing. MC can handle it, I just haven't had the time to add all that information. That said, I do have a couple of tips based on my experience.
1. Get JRiver Media Center 11. It's the best tool for this job.
MC 10 is much more stable, but 11 is much faster for large libraries.
2. Don't upgrade to every new version of MC 11. Start with the current version
and then upgrade only if you need it to fix a bug. It can be frustrating
when you're fine tuning your setup and normal alpha version bugs and
enhancements interfere with your plans.
2. Get a second hard drive (or two) to back up your music. 300GB should do it
if you have around 40,000 high-quality MP3's.
3. Backup your music before you start on this project.
4. Backup your MC library data often, File/Library/Backup Library.
I've only needed my library backup once for smartlists that got erased
but better safe than sorry.
5. After importing, use smartlists to identify duplicates and then
eliminate them.
6. Get the plugins from KingSparta and @l@n/Alan. (more below)
They're in the official listings, but I usually check the plugin forum
for the lastest updates.
7. Be prepared for a lot of work. Organizing this much music is still a
relatively new thing in computer software. The problems and user needs
are not well understood yet. Very few people have this much music so
all the music library software is biased towards smaller collections
of singles. For example, I don't know of any serious music library that
has 'album' as a unique type which can have attributes of its own.
'Album' is just an attribute of a song so you end up tagging all songs
with all album data.
MC is the best but you'll still be doing lot's of workarounds to get your
library where you want it. Understand that, make the commitment to MC
and you'll almost always be able to make it do what you want.
Hope that helps,
BG
Some more tips:
---------------
Genres:
I try to use very basic genres in the genre field, rock, classical,
blues, jazz, folk, speech, podcast,etc. Then I add songs to playlists to
classify them as vocal, instrumental, fast, children's, holiday, indie,
electronic, workout, punk, african, etc.
This works very well for me. I can create arbitrary song attributes like
'Thanksgiving' and not clutter my genre list. I think others may be using
custom fields and view schemesto accomplish similar things.
Artist/Band Info:
Find atagger in the plugins forum, embrace it, love it.
It is your friend. The developer, @l@n/Alan, is friendly and
remarkably helpful.
Cover Art and much more:
KingSparta is true royalty, can't say enough about him.
Find his plugins and give them a try. He's the most prolific plugin
developer and his plugins supercharge Media Center.