First time on the forum. I searched around a bit but couldn't seem to find what I was looking for. I purchased a Sansa Clip Zip and 32gb microSD to replace a dead 80gb ipod classic. I never liked iTunes. The program has always been a resource hog and I have a ton of classical music and trying to get it all tagged properly in iTunes was an exercise in monumental frustration. I like that Rockbox plays gapless and supports flac and such. So far I've always just ripped my classical cds to mp3s knowing that I was using the player in my car to play over the car stereo or from some crappy PC speakers at work, so I was never too concerned about overall quality of the song encoding, knowing that my playback was going to be less than stellar to begin with. Now that I can play gapless and use lossless formats I'm seriously considering re-burning my cds using flac. Now, I know with Rockbox, you can just drag and drop music files onto the drive in your player. However, I am wondering what music player most people use on their PCs to catalog files and such. Right now, I still have iTunes but will be uninstalling it shortly. I also have the Windows Media Player version 11, but until now I've never had occasion to use it. I've been poking around online looking for a good player that allows tagging more like what I would need for my classical cds. I do listen to other music as well, where the "normal" tagging is fine. However, I'd like a player that allows me to tag things something like this:
Composer: Borodin, Alexander
Artist: Loris Tjeknavorian, National Philharmonic Orchestra
Album: Symphony No. 2 Polovtsian Dances
Composition: Symphony No. 2
Movement 1: Allegro
Movement 2: Scherzo: Prestissimo; Allegretto
etc.
Or this way:
Artist: BBC Philharmonic, Stephen Kovacevich & Gunther Herbig
Album: Beethoven, Schubert
Track 1: Schubert; Symphony No. 8 'Unfinished,' Allegro moderato
Track 2: Schubert; Symphony No. 8 'Unfinished,' Andante con moto
Track 3: Beethoven; Symphony No. 3 'Eroica,' Allegro con brio
etc.
Now, I'm assuming since you can just drag and drop into Rockbox on the Sansa Clip Zip, whatever media player is on the PC is immaterial, correct? I'm still reading through the manual but it seems like whatever player I choose will dictate just how I can organize and tag tracks. Will, the Rockbox firmware recognize something similar to either of the organizational schemes above, as far as tagging goes? Finally, does anyone have any suggestions for a stand-alone player as a replacement for Windows Media and/or iTunes? I've been seriously considering recording all of my cds in lossless and storing them on hard drives as another method of organizing my music, so a player that plays nice with classical music would definitely be a plus.