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?
6 comments ↓
If you primarily use devices/apps that allow you to do a file-system browse instead of/in addition to a metadata browse (like the Squeezebox), it’s obvious and trivial.
If not, I think the genre hack is the way to go.
(I’m lucky enough not to have to do this: I listen almost exclusively to classical music, and my wife to pop/rock, so an unhacked genre tag works just as well for us.)
While your implementation seems to be based around Media Center, I’ve been dealing with this under iTunes. Like you we have multiple users with different tastes, a massive shared library, which is shared out to a few computers via CIFS (for those that need to sync iPod’s) and shared out to all computers using the built-in iTunes sharing.
My answer was to use the “Grouping” field in iTunes for this.
I’m sure WMP/MCE has a similar field you could re-purpose.
I’ve been using Grouping as follows:
KEY1=THIS ; KEY2=THAT ; USER=Sally
KEY1=THIS ; KEY2=THAT ; USER=Joe
KEY1=THIS ; KEY2=THAT ; USER=Sally|Joe
You’ll note I have multiple uses for this field. For example I have a “SRC=” key that I use to reference where the music came from… mostly refers to the EAC version, or if it came from a URL etc. I usually also have a tag for whether or not EAC/AccurateRip status was ok. Another for whether or not the music is explicit and so on.
Then you get to my USER= field where I tag with the owner of the CD. In the case where multiple users own the CD, I just slap them together with a pipe.
Now maybe this is a little different from you in that I care about “Owner” and you maybe are more concerned with “This is music that USER likes” … but it could be used in this way just as easily.
Once you’ve tagged, using this in Playlists is easy of course.
In our house, all the music is on a network drive and I’m the one that does the organizing. My husband only listens to albums so I can use the ratings for myself and he just browses by albums. However, if hell ever freezes over and he was to change his ways, it’s a simple thing to add a secondary rating field in my music management software (J. River Media Center) so we could have a his and hers rating system, no problem. Does Windows Media Player not allow you to create custom tagging fields?
This really depends on how you listen to your music. but in the case of extenders or media connect devices, its as simple as making his and her folders and then changing user permissions. don’t want wmc device 1 to see it, remove it from their permissions. same with extenders. Or you can go over each folder depending on how its set.. can be handy for those overlapping music.
although I never tried it with mce to know if it will do that from an extender account, I know for sure it will work with a windows media connect device. my daughters music is isolated to the player in her room. Thats from the simple windows media connect interface, you can change permissions and what each device can see (including xbox’s)
My current solution is to use two different media manager apps. I use Windows Media Player (WMP) to manage the main library. For my wife’s content I use MusicMatch (MM). This works well for me because WMP and MM use different ID3 tags to store the ratings. MM also has the benefit of creating a playlist that can easily be sent to her mp3 player, whereas WMP’s sync feature always botches the job. For my mp3 player I create a WMP playlist based on ratings, then use AV Media copy (http://www.avsoft.nl/mediacopy/) to copy the tracks to my old Archos Studio 10.
I just downloaded WMP11 and plan to explore it for any benefits.
Get a divorce!
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