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[Daydream]

They released High Fidelity on Blu-ray. That's one of the movies I go to get inspired. About life. Or maybe it's that script's quality that makes you feel like you can quote half the lines in the movie. If not more.

However today is about something else. I got stuck to "I'm afraid I'll go berserk, throw the "Country Artists Male A-K" rack out onto the streets, go off to work in a Virgin Megastore and never come back".
That's kind of like what I feel right about now, about the music around me. Plus you can't find a Virgin Megastore anymore unless you go to France or something.

I have some 17000 tracks. Probably not big by any stretch of imagination, but enough to play for some 50 days non-stop.

I can't find the music I like.

It's in there somewhere, I know it; I stumble upon it every now and then, by chance: "Whoa, great track, haven't listen to it in ages". Wait. Why didn't I listen to it in ages?

Because organizing all this is insane. Don't agree? Let's see.

I guess I'm supposed to rate my music. Well, here goes the first problem. How should I rate my music? Listen again to my 17000 tracks and rate them one by one? I'd rather learn Japanese. Learn to write Japanese. So in my case it all resumes to aggressive bulk tagging "I know these songs are good/not good/approximately good/3 fries from a happy meal good". I don't know what to do with the concert versions and the remix versions and I don't know what other crazy versions. They're there cause they were on the CDs/Maxis/downloads, but I don't wanna listen to them when filtering by rating, but to the original tracks. There's a forever waiting list to be tagged. Thinking again to take the entire music collection and throwing it in the street.

So I didn't get to solve that problem when I'm faced with the next one. What scale should I use. Well MC has a 5 star scale. Some users wanted more, a 1 to 10 scale, and fractional star rating. When it comes to the real daily usage I don't give a flying monkey even on a 5 star scale. In my mind there are only 3 categories. Trash, never to listen to again (that would equate to 1 & 2 stars). Middle of the road stuff, I don't plan to throw it away, maybe because of some special occasion I'll like one of these tracks. And stuff that I do want to listen to at all times (4 and 5 stars; the difference between 4 and 5 is totally abracadabra, "it's something that I really like and it was/is a worldwide hit" as opposed to something that I just really like and it's just me).

Ok so I double fail when it comes to ratings. I can't do it in a feasible, practical manner that would represent my liking/disliking and not require a lifetime to accomplish.

On I go. How do you put your Genre, Styles and Moods in? Yeah, yeah, I lived in the times when scrapping AMG was an option so I have some music tagged. But having only some part of it tagged it's almost just as bad as not having it at all. 'Cause you're not sure of anything. And that elusive track that I really like, exactly that, it won't have tags and I will miss it on a smartlist because of that. Again, music collection - the street.
Maybe you think Last.fm scrobbing, tagging, whatnot? Huh. Do you wanna end up with genres the likes of 'Driving angry in my Porsche'? Sorry but that doesn't capture what should I listen to when I'm driving angry in my BMW (the only constant is that I'm driving angry, because of all the idiots on the streets that got their permit the day they got their car; driving school should be mandatory. For a month. Other topic) So I don't wanna end up with 10000 genres for 17000 tracks if you get what I'm saying. And the cars mentioned are fictional.

Would it be possible to organize something similar to AMG? Who knows. The thing is they have a finite (fixed?) list for all these. There's 21 genres, 102 sub-genres, 995 styles and 288 moods. And that's it and everybody goes home with the same list. But even if we have it probably it's good to wash our collective heads with it 'cause who tags moods by track? Or is somebody gonna argue that usually entire albums are made with a single mood, all tracks? Good luck with that; probably it's symphonic or Bulgarian or whatever music (sorry, still under the influence of the above mentioned movie).

Oh and then the year. Cause that would be a dead giveaway, hey disco ended kind of here, or let's make a playlist that makes me look like I live this side of R&B invading everything, and not in 1992. Tough, cause there's the Greatest Hits of the 70's, 80's, 90's the blabla years, who were just released yesterday so they get tagged with the current year and good luck figuring out each track on them, when it was originally released (if you feel so inclined to define custom fields for 'Original release year').

Bottom line I don't know how you guys do the things above (tagging, organizing) 'cause I see no end in sight.


There's more. Yeah, I should've put chapters in this. I used to be passionate about music. Well, not quite like born out of a boombox passionate, but I was a regular in record stores. I knew stuff. I used to make tapes, you name it. I was happy with the 15 tracks on a tape, but I can't be now with 17000 tracks, 3 computers and 4 mobile gadgets, with MC on top of them. But we're supposedly doing better, right? How? Probably something snapped in the back of my head and I lost the count, possible my marbles with the same occasion.

If above I said I can't find the music I like in my collection, guess what I can't find the music I like out there either. I think I just OD on the whole 'digital everywhere' that makes you stream music in bit buckets like it's a constant noise-to-the-brain. I wanna pick stuff and I can't pick anymore. The automated playlists of whatever service don't work for me. 'Cause you tell them what you like and they keep you in the same general area, not only of music that I know, but that I already own (lost in the vast mass of things where I can't find anything). I end up picking stuff off movies' soundtracks in theaters - whoa great track, get the OST, sweet. Wait. Why didn't I know about this artist/band? I used to know everything that was good, what they released, what they didn't, the collaborations, the rare tracks, the works. Now I can't even find out a band throws a mini-concert in NYC but with 3 hours in advance. I'm off my game big time.

I can't say I was ever able to arrange my collection autobiographically, but it was close. I could remember from where I bought every CD. And every DVD. Or if it was given to me as a gift and by whom. By the time I reached 500 the sources changed and now they're all a sea of bits on a 24 TB array.

How do you live with your music? I'm free-falling. Parachutes, anybody? No, not the Coldplay CD. I got that one. Somewhere... around here... don't know where.

[JimH]

High Fidelity is a great movie.  The rest of what you said is total garbage.

Just kidding.  I know the feeling.  There's something here I'm not hearing.

The idea of building an AMG like database is interesting.

I think year is incredibly important.  If your first date was in 1960, that's your year, but if it wasn't until 1990, music from the 60's won't mean much to you.  My dad loved Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.  I hated it.

We once ran an experimental music service (music01) that was only open to around 100 of our users.  Each user exposed their library and anyone could play from it.  You could search for music and play it from their libraries, or download their libraries and look through them.  I found a couple of users who had similar tastes and listened to their favorites.  I learned a lot, found a lot of new music.  Being able to match your favorites against those from other users would be nice. 

This subject is something we've been talking about lately, as we've revisited Play Doctor.

[glynor]

My dad loved Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.  I hated it.

I guess.

And I mostly agree.  But music changed in the late-50s/early-60s.  Rock and Roll appeared on the scene and created a bright line in the age range of musical tastes.  I'd venture to say that Hip Hop did something similar in the 80s, though to a lesser degree.

I like my dad's music, but I like modern stuff too.  I'd say that's much more common among the "children of the baby boomers" than what was common (your described situation) amongst the baby boomers themselves.  But that is as much of a before/after rock thing than a generalized "don't like my parents' music" thing, IMHO.

All, in all, though... I agree Year is important.  And it is also one thing that is a huge pain to tag manually (for an existing ripped library), and a small percentage of mine have this info.

PS.  Except for ABBA.  If your parents (or you) were a big ABBA fan, well then...  I'm sorry for you (or your kids).

[glynor]

Bottom line I don't know how you guys do the things above (tagging, organizing) 'cause I see no end in sight.

Fairly half-assed, and yes...  It never ends.

Generally, the things I "love" have much better tags than the "crap in the middle".

I think Ratings are a much too personal of a thing to have it looked up.  However, I completely agree that some sort of mechanism in YADB to automatically (in the background or something) look up metadata for tracks.  It would have to be more flexible than the current auto-metadata lookup system for video.

However... JRiver has a LOT of customers with massive libraries.  A lot of these are probably pretty well tagged.  JRiver is in a unique position to build a much more flexible "TMDB for music" in an automated fashion than many other companies would be able to do, simply because of the kind of users likely to have 40,000 tracks (cough...OCD...cough).

I'd like to be able to select an album of tracks that I ripped myself, with only basic "Artist, Album, Track Number, Name" tags, and have it pull things like Artist Bios, Mood, Year, Release Date, Lyrics, etc.  I'd want an easy way to "sanity check" these results, but I'd also need a way to easily apply them in large batches.  But, I also have a big swath of obsessively tagged Pink Floyd tracks that include every possible imaginable detail.  I'd be happy if this was somehow automatically ingested into the database.  The "crowd" could handle (if the "sanity check" tool made it easy to participate) keeping the data somewhat clean, by promoting (choosing) good data from the database, and demoting (skipping/marking-as-crap) bad data.

If it was somehow magically based on Shazam-like music fingerprinting (iTunes Match-ish?) then that would be even sweeter.

[HTPC4ME]

If it was somehow magically based on Shazam-like music fingerprinting (iTunes Match-ish?) then that would be even sweeter.

Paul T from jaikoz  may be interested in helping out:)
http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/
i'd pay jriver extra for jaikoz/musicbrainz built into jriver.

[rick.ca]

Cataloguing (or collecting meta data or building a database or whatever you want to call it) a music collection is no different than cataloguing anything else. It helps to understand there is no 'right' way to do it. What matters is the effort required to built and maintain it, and how effectively the result serves your needs. So whether just starting or making some change (e.g., to make it easier to find the things you want to find), it's important to consider...

• What, exactly, is the data to be added, and where will it come from?
  
  • Is there a source where the data is available for most of your music?
  • Is the data consistent, accurate and complete?
  • Can the data be added automatically? Semi-automatically (e.g., importing a list)?
  • If the data is not 'complete', is it so for some subset of the collection? If so, is it possible to get the data for that subset and ignore it for the rest?
  • If the data must be complete for the library to function properly, how difficult is it to find data for that missing from the primary source?
  • What are the costs and benefits of using premium services (whether that be licensing other software, or subscribing directly to some data service) to obtain the necessary data?
  
  
• How will the data be used?
  
  • Actually thinking through different uses (categories, groupings, special-purpose views, searches, etc.) will help clarify necessary data definitions, particularly how 'precise' they need to be.
  • Sometimes similar data from a different source will be easy to obtain and more appropriate to the purpose.
  • Avoid forcing data to some use it's not well suited for. It could be a simpler piece of data, even if it must be added manually, would be much more effective for categorizing than list items like Styles, Moods, etc.
  • Conversely, such list items can be very useful as a descriptor of an artist's work, album or track. If so, that would suggest displaying it, rather than attempting to rely on it for categorization.
  • When data use and definition are in harmony, the data will generally be easier to maintain. Inconsistencies will be readily apparent and often easy to correct (e.g., invalid dates identified by sorting or grouping).

The two questions, of course, are arbitrary in that they cannot be considered in isolation from one another—or outside the context of the library as a whole. But if they're not easily answered, there will be problems. And that includes things that seem obvious and for which the structure of the program and/or convention makes it seem there is no choice in the matter (e.g., What, exactly, is an 'Artist'? What are the ramifications of different answers to that question?).

I can't suggest how anyone should answer these questions. I can illustrate some of the principles by describing how I handle ratings. First, I find a 5-point scale more than enough. Even then, I found the idea of rating thousand of tracks overwhelming. Especially when I couldn't imagine my ratings being consistent or particularly meaningful. So what I needed was a rating that, even if I didn't always agree with it, it would be more consistent and meaningful than anything I could do. I found this in the Allmovie album rating. My routine became this: On initial tagging all tracks are assigned ({album rating} - 0.5) rounded down (e.g., 5 and 4.5 become 4). Each track that's an Allmusic 'pick' (or whatever they call it) then gets an extra star. Sometimes I'll modify that on listening to the album, but most of the time I don't really care. Whether I do or not, the result is meaningful to me and serve its purpose.

I've never relied on YADB or anything like it (i.e., a user-built database). I don't imagine they would meet my need for accuracy and consistency. I often wonder why JRiver is unable to offer premium services like Rovi's. I guess it's because they're only offered as lump-sum fees JRiver would be at risk in recovering. But when I consider how many MC users would likely welcome the opportunity to pay for such a service (just based on the time and aggravation it would save), I have to wonder what's wrong with Rovi's business model (as in, "hello, why won't you take our money?").

[Temeryx]

I ran across this just a few days ago http://theaudiodb.com/

I believe it started up just a short while ago, and it was created by a guy (zag) who was a big part of creating thetvdb.com and themoviedb.org.  Could be very promising. 

[vagskal]

I think year is incredibly important.

Would now be a good time to ask for MC support for the original release date tags (TORY/TDOR and ORIGYEAR or something for Vorbis comments)?

I usually listen to full albums, but sometimes I listen to a playlist with only tracks released in one particular year. Other than that I use AMG style data to build a playlist sometimes combined with year data, i.e. only Southern Soul released in the 60's. The AMG style data are usually good although a bit detailed perhaps. DbPoweramp imports the data upon ripping.

I do not rate tracks/albums. I use AMG ratings to see which albums of one artist are the best since I find I usually agree with those ratings. And 5 star ratings as an indicator of a potentially good album to check out.

I use best of lists to find good albums, like Virgin 1000, RSM top 500 albums. I have tags for lists like that, so I can make a combined list with only albums choosen by multiple sources (top top albums). The ability to have dummy albums in MC like a wish list would be useful.

[struct]

I have never quite understood why MC has never helped us to get metadata?  If money, why not just offer it as a premium?  Too many options, just another feature we are never happy with because we all want a different service?  Maybe it is not worth competing with existing products?

I am having reasonable success with musicbrainz and the lastfm plugin to get a lot of metadata that allows me to view the music is categories/ways I wouldn't dream of otherwise (e.g. occasion = twilight, raining, etc).  I would think that if MC were to do this natively, it could better handle which fields to put this information and then leverage it to drive the Doctor and then to integrate additional information and links in views (e.g. armed with the lastfm artist id, similar artist links could be integrated into the display).

Whether Rovi, lastfm or others, having additional and consistent metadata driven by the MC brains would be bound to be interesting, and thus worth a premium.  Consider right now that many pay nearly as much for dbpoweramp and all it does is rip and pull in metadata.  I would much rather give this to MC and have the data come in cleanly with some useful views.

2cents worth
Craig

[csimon]

Is it possible to analyse our metadata too much?  Searching for some tagging nirvana.

I'm still trying to achieve what I've been able to do for years in my vinyl collection.  Sort by album artists, but maybe lumped together in an arbitrary way (Adam Ant, and Adam And the Ants all together in the same place, albums sorted alphabetically, and separate compartments for albums, singles, 12" singles, live albums, compilations).  Yes, MC allows me to do that, but not many media servers will (album, track artist, & genre anyone, possibly the most useless choices for searching criteria) and it requires a lot of tagging and it's still difficult to get any client to browse by album cover (Plugplayer anyone?, generic DLNA media players that don't know the difference between music and videos).

Genre has been a useful addition in the digital world, I've never been able to browse my collection by Genre before.

But apart from that, even though my music collection is quite large, I still know basically what's in it,  I just need to be able to find it quickly when I'm in the mood for it.

I haven't got into a fuzzy "I'm sort of in the mood for something but don't quite know what, hmm is it like this, or is it like that, should I look in a thesaurus?" type of thing. I don't know how I'd go about trying to quantify that or try to tag or catalogue my collection in order to cater for that sort of feeling.

My nirvana is just about being able to browse my collection as easily as walking over to my vinyl boxes or CD rack and visually scanning them, without having to scroll to the next page or press up and down arrows to go from one album to the next, or having to wait for a title that is greater than 30 characters to scroll into view.  I've never felt the need to be able to search by mood or contributing artist or studio that produced the album or whatever.

[MrHaugen]

I don't think there's a one fit all solution, but it should be possible to make a system that could work much better than todays system. Several years ago I started the task of rating my then 15 000 tracks (now up to 20 000). I had a goal of 200+ each day. Usually I just skipped to 3-6 positions in the track to see if I remembered it or if I thought it sounded cool or not. I rated them like this:

1 - Intros and other crap - To mark things that should never be listened to. In some cases filtered away from play lists
2 - Music that I do NOT like - Others might still select it if they like the artist
3 - Music that I do not care about - Might be the favorite track of a not highly liked artist
4 - Music I might like to hear in the future. My explore category.
5 - Good music
6 - Instant hits and classics

Hence my years long fight of introducing the half star rating system like in iTunes, so I could get rid of my 6 number system custom fields.

In addition to rating tracks, I also started rating artists and albums with relational fields. Artists was fast. I just rated my all time favorites 6 and downwards from that. Album ratings was based on a perception of how good the album was. It got a 6 if most of the tracks was really good, even though it could have a 2-3 really low ratings. Now, I will probably look into getting the average sum of the albums instead. But after the track ratings are done, this is really fast to do anyway.

After the rating tagging was done, I started researching genres. I found the originating genres, how was sub genres of what main genre category, and I wrote it all down how it was connected. Sure, this is also based on personal opinions, and there's no consensus on what genre each artists or album belongs to. But I tried my best. I ended up with about 15 genres and 120 sub genres. Those Genre and Sub Genres is applied on a pr album basis. I did not have the stomach for another track based tagging.

The result was very good. I could create a lot of cool smartlists based on my exploratory mood. I could specify the genre and add 4 star ratings and discover new music. I could add the Electronica sub genre with only 5-6 ratings with low BPM values for a consistent low beat Electronic playlist with smooth easy listening tunes and so forth.


After I had tagged my musig with ratings and genres, each album added was pretty trivial. Ratings are based on personal taste. So I think it will be almost impossible to have a system for this. But genre are more static. I started thinking of what COULD be agreed upon and put in system. What I missed mostly with my system, was a way to say that "Today I'm very psyched. I want very high energy music while I do some preparations for a party". Or "I'm feeling a bit down now, let me hear some easy listening nuts while I'm browsing the web on my couch". Or the "I'm going for a jogging workout. I need some fast cool music with beats". Such things are called moods or styles. Some sites have plenty of such tags. The problem having to much of them is that nobody will agree on what mood or style a track should be categorized with.

That evening I started a project in Visual Studio. I created a VB plug-in, web service and a database for styles and moods. It was a bit to ambitious for a person with IT bachelor degree with little programming knowledge. The project got to a halt (I just had a lot on my plate, and now it might be to late to pick it up again), but the goal was a good one imo. Something similar might be done by JRiver, so all of us can benefit from such a system. Here's the link to my grounded beta project: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=42293.0

What I tried to do was to set a few basic Moods, Styles and similar tags, which the users could tag their own tracks and store in custom fields. The server part (not developed yet) of the plug-in together with the database was supposed to gather the uploads from the users. The server application should work on a schedule to scan for similar Artists and Track names, and then check for similarities in tags. A couple of examples: If 4 users marked it as "Funky" and 1 person tagged it as "Relaxing", it would be marked as "Funky". Similar for Speed or Bass tags. It would be set to the highest number of votes, or set to a middle value, if there was a lot of disagreement. When enough persons upload data for the same tunes, it would eventually be possible to download tracks with some pretty accurate tags. IF enough people used it. There are so many audiophiles using JRiver MC, so I think that should be possible.

Is this the perfect system for such a task? No, probably not. But the idea is in my opinion rather good. If JRiver was to create something similar, with a bit limited values (not in the hundreds like some of those crazy web sites), it would be possible for users to get reliable tag data for their music, and help others getting more out of their music collection. What we need is a programmer to jump to the task, a database, and some moods, styles and other tags we could all agree on covering most of it, without it being to much.


Thanks for reading my wall of text

[InflatableMouse]

Half-star ratings is one of the most wanted features I think.

My system:
1 - intro's, speech, or otherwise complete crap not even my dog would want to listen to. Not that I have a dog but you get the drift .
2 - something I'd probably skip if I noticed it playing but oke for background listening.
3 - just good music.
4 - really good music.
5 - goosebumps.

I don't rate artists or albums (wish it would do that automatically based on track ratings) but I try to rate songs when I'm listening on the pc. Problem is I tend to get lost in what I'm doing and then 3 or 4 songs later I realise I've not been rating the songs and can't remember how good the songs were that I listened to (unless its something very familiar but those are already rated. I try to listen to the less familiar stuff too and rate it).

Other than ratings I think I've pretty much completed tagging my collection. I look at the album cover, official web sites, Musicbrainz, Allmusic.com and wiki pages if I am unsure about how to spell something, like an album title or even artist/band names. For instance, people tend to spell "Neil Young and THE Crazy Horse", it's actually spelled without "THE". I exclusively use the original release date or the recording date for bootlegs for albums, never the re-release date or remastering date. I might put it in the comments or something, but I'm often too lazy for that. For MFSL releases I try to put that into the comments. I've scanned all the cover arts which couldn't be found on the internet or which were too low quality, all covers are complete. I don't bother with booklets or insides, just covers. Genres are pretty much complete as well, although I've never been happy with it. Ideally I would want to give a song its own genre if it doesn't match the rest of the album. So many albums contain a mix of genres but for the sake of time and convenience, I've settled with generalizing it. Honestly I'm not happy with it and rarely use genres for playlist because I know it's not perfect.

One thing I'm considering is filling mood and themes manually. Too much work though which is why I keep putting it off.

Tagging is really an ongoing thing which you're never done with. There's still sometimes things I could correct or improve, cover arts that aren't perfect or tags that are not properly capitalized. I capitalize each word, except when the artist/band obviously and deliberately changed capitalization, for isntance when all titles are properly capitalized except for one song or one word, or when one track is randomly cApiTaLiZeD.

I've never bothered with lyrics, country, copyright, producer. Often I don't use composer, conductor or orchestra on classical because it's already mentioned in the title and/or name. If it's not I often can't be bothered to fill it in.

[MrHaugen]

Paul T from jaikoz  may be interested in helping out:)
http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/
i'd pay jriver extra for jaikoz/musicbrainz built into jriver.

That sounds interesting. If this system works well, and the tagging is actually useful, it would be very nice to add support for this service. Perhaps an interaction with the application, or a direct interaction with the web services which could only be done with a valid license from Jaikoz? It's certainly simpler than creating something new. The only thing that worries me is that most of those music services have so many different tags, that it's rendered practically useless for building playlists.

[pcstockton]

tag as you go.  it's the only way.

-Patrick

[rjm]

In my case I gave careful thought to a tag design keeping it as simple as possible. Then I put my head down and worked hard for several months to tag my music. Now that it is done maintaining it is easy and browsing is a joy.

Here is a suggestion that eliminates all the hard work. In the search box type -[Led Zeppelin]. Then select all the files and delete them. You are done.

[Jaguu]

In my case I gave careful thought to a tag design keeping it as simple as possible. Then I put my head down and worked hard for several months to tag my music.

Yes, did the same back in 2001-2003. My music collection is very small, about 300 album, 6000 tracks, mostly classical. Nowadays, I hardly buy anything new. But my image collection is huge  57'000 images, 46'000 of those are artworks painted by about 200 artists exhibited in over 1000 galleries or held in private collections all over the world, about 90% properly tagged.  There are even artworks where the original paintings no longer exist as they have been destroyed in war times.  Tagging all those images was the real hard work!

I always wondered how you guys can maintain such huge collections and listen to all those tracks. On the other hand I have albums or tracks I listened to over a hundred times.

I think in the early 2000 King Sparta had by far the largest collection. Maybe he is still the record holder.

[broncodan]

Daydream!  You totally summed up how I feel about my collection.

It is 98k+ and I know there is a lot of great stuff there (and some garbage).  I used a great tool designed by someone here (track year lookup) - an excel spreadsheet that gets original year from Discogs - it took me a while as Discogs will ban you for too many hits but I finally got original track years for most of my songs.  It was easy for most of the albums as those had the correct year but this was invaluable for those various artist's albums, etc.

I then utilized the same excel spreadsheet to compare data from my library to the Whitburn spreadsheet (google it) which provided me with some chart data.  I then re-imported that data into my library into a custom column and then used that as a guideline to rate the majority of my tracks - e.g. - 1 or 2 on chart = 5 stars, 3 - 5 4 stars, etc.   This has at least given me a basis for some smartlist and at least got me an initial baseline rating.  I can't say enough about how the TRACK YEAR LOOKUP has helped me with comparing data and getting it back into my library.

Then of course I rate other songs that I like or hear or raise/lower the ratings as I see fit. 

I really want moods/themes and there are several posts about this and I looked at them all but determined that I didn't want a bunch of garbage tags in my library - so have put this off.  I also looked at the Moody program and the Moodagent program - the moodagent program is based on some science but deals with colors - so not sure how exactly that works but it is a plugin for winamp but haven't used.

Another thing that I think would be great is the ability to share playlists - as I often find as I listen to my friends music that they have selected music that it is similar to my tastes but they are picking different songs.  There is a program (Listfix) that will take a playlist - search your files and update the playlist with the correct path so then you can use that playlist on your machine.  I haven't played around with it much but it seems like it works. It would be a great idea or something to incorporate this feature into MC.  e.g. - import a shared playlist (or smartlist for that matter) from another JRiver user, run a compare and update feature that updates the playlists with your library and update as necessary.   

I feel your pain and like to see what other people are doing - seems like most people use this for Video/tv but I mainly use it for music...

[crisnee]

broncodan, thanks so much for mentioning listfix, just what I needed.

[rjm]

Just installed Songza on my iPad which is an app for enjoying other people's playlists. It seems to be very popular in the iOS world.

Your idea of building listfix into MC could be a really nice feature for the JRiver community.

[vairulez]

what could also be great if we can share playlist is to have a system that would show the songs we don't have if we have let's say at least 30% of the songs that are in the playlist. Or a system that would say "users who listened to this song also listen to ...". This could help discover new artists.