Ed Bott's Media Central

I suspect that every couple faces this problem, to one degree or another. So I thought I’d throw it open for comments and suggestions.

I like my music. My wife likes hers. There’s some subset of tunes that we both enjoy equally, but it’s a classic Venn diagram.

Our entire music collection is digital (thanks to a marathon CD-ripping session in the fall of 2004). I tagged all those ripped files meticulously, and I’m equally careful when I download new tracks from eMusic or rip a new CD to add to the collection.

It’s a huge collection – more than 14,000 songs in all, in who knows how many albums. And we can play any track, any album, or any custom playlist throughout the house, thanks to Windows Media Center and a couple Media Center Extenders.

Now, Judy would be extraordinarily happy if she didn’t have to listen to another Grateful Dead song as long as she lives, so I listen to those songs in my office or when she’s away. And she knows that she and the cats can listen to Cher’s Greatest Hits and anything by the Pet Shop Boys only when I’m away. Preferably far away. On the other hand, that section in the middle is pretty big: We both like Bob Dylan, Shannon McNally, Steve Earle, Ry Cooder, k. d. lang, and Yonder Mountain String Band, to name just a few artists.

On a shared computer with separate user accounts, the solution is easy: Put my songs in my user profile, put Judy’s in her profile, and put everything else in the Shared Music folder.

Unfortunately, our Media Center setup doesn’t support multiple accounts, so there’s no “yours, mine, and ours” option. (If you have a Roku SoundBridge or a similar device, you have the same problem.) So how to filter the list? I have a few ideas I’ve thought of using, all of them a little on the kludgey side:

• We could repurpose the 5-star ratings system that Windows Media Player uses. My music could be rated 1 or 2 stars, hers 4 or 5, with anything rated 3 being “ours.” With a few well-named auto-playlists, it would be fairly easy to sort things out. But we’d lose the option to actually rank tracks by how well we like each one.
• We could invent some new genres. Instead of assigning conventional categories like Rock, Pop, Jazz, and Classical, we could tag my albums with a custom genre that includes my name and tag Judy’s with a complementary category. But the “ours” list would still include all those tracks.
• We could build custom playlists for every album in the collection and then edit the names of “his” and “hers” albums to include a prefix (ZZ and ZZZ, for instance) that sorts them to the end of the list. That wouldn’t be as complicated as it sounds, but it would be a hassle. And the trouble with using playlists is that you don’t get to see the album art when you browse.

I’m tempted to use the middle option. Re-tagging files with a new genre is a trivially easy drag-and-drop operation, and it makes it easy to filter the list in lots of ways.

Am I missing any options? How would you solve this problem?