Best way to handle big music collection?

[Christian Jaeger]

Hi

I'm a long time Linux user myself (Debian mostly), and trying to help a
singer and previous Windows user to use Ubuntu. He's happy with Ubuntu so
far but handling his rather big music collection is really an important
part of his computer usage, and I'm clearly at a loss on how to best deal
with it.

I personally like to use the bare filesystem and simple tools as much as
possible, at least as opposed to programs that tie you in or are buggy.
But, at his scale and considering the issues I'm clearly not convinced
anymore that this is a good approach.

1. he's not an advanced computer user. Things like having to be careful not
to remove the file suffix, or, where does the album title go as opposed to
the song title, or, why would it need numbers in the file names to preserve
the track ordering, or, why have the info also in meta tags, are
understandably confusing for him. There are too many places to check/keep
in mind.
2. even as a power user, once you start tagging files, it becomes an issue
to keep those in sync with the file names.
3. good search. (BTW doesn't the default ubuntu file manager allow me to
search for patterns, like "foo*.mp" instead of "foo mp3"?)
4. multiple ways for categorization. Could be achieved with symlinks if it
weren't for the issue with renames of the target breaking them.
5. synching: having part of the songs on laptop (to take with him), all of
them on desktop and on a backup (hopefully not spread out across multiple
disks); git-annex might take care of this, but how is complexity of
handling? (Haven't tried it myself) Nowadays online synching is all the
rage, but that may not cut it for the size of the collection (part of it
being uncompressed).
6. speaking of which, keeping a relation between uncompressed and
compressed versions of the same file.

But I've seen too many flaky programs that are unable to handle changes in
the underlying file structure, make porting of part of the collection to
another computer impossible, or are buggy[*], so I'm hoping that someone
who went through all of this can save me some of the trouble.

Still, programs that assume things like that they get full control over the
files, that all files are in one place, that they can write to some

What does your setup look like? Someone in IRC has suggested to look into
Amarok with Strigi (on Kubuntu). Other suggestions?

Should we switch to Kubuntu now that he got somewhat used to default
Ubuntu? I've been using Gnome and now Xfce4 for myself and am not
particularly happy about quite a lot in the Unity interface (I'm finding
that finding open windows cumbersome, the meta key being captured by it
interfering with the shell, and more). But still.

Thanks,
Christian.

[*] he's got a sizeable number of files in his collection with file
contents replaced with zero bytes (same number of bytes as original file,
but all of them being byte 0); we still don't know how this happened. First
suspect would be one of the ID tagging programs.
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