AudioFiler – My Search is {over/just begun}*

• delete as appropriate

I was cruising around the ID3.org site looking for a .NET ID3 tag API, when I came upon AudioFiler. AudioFiler is a great application, and one I’ve been searching for for years. Perhaps I should explain. I started creating and collecting MP3s back in about 1997, and since then my collection has grown a little. Back then there was a cool tool called TrackManager, by Nick de Jong. It was the perfect collection browser, it allowed filtration and multidimensional views. It allowed you to keep collections in multiple places (i.e. CDROMs) and then merge their contents to let you know where to find something your after. All in all it was a great application. It was ugly as hell, but that didn’t bother me that much because it started up Winamp when you wanted to play something so it didn’t matter.

The problem was that it started to get a bit flaky when your collection got above 500 songs (which happened pretty quickly) so I had to abandon it. Since then I have tried to use the media managers from a thousand different players including iTunes and just found that they didn’t help when I tried to visualise the whole collection from different angles. At last AudioFiler provides a search engine comparable to TrackManager. It’s Ugly, and it invokes Winamp, but I think it may be just what I need. Perhaps now I’ll rediscover all that stuff I know I’ve got but can never find. Anyone for some Riot Grrl?