Favorite Media Management Software

This is intentionally a short post. Here are my current favorite software programs for media management: Foobar2000, IrfanView, VLC and Handbrake.

Music

In the cloud, I use Google Music. Locally, I go to Foobar2000 for ripping audio CDs and getting my MP3s ready for uploading to Google Music. I like Foobar2000 because it is lightweight yet full featured at the same time: something very rare. What else have I tried before making this choice? iTunes, Sony MediaGo, Microsoft Groove, Windows Media Player, MediaMonkey, PowerDVD16, Kodi, Exact Audio Copy and others. People have been complaining about how bloated iTunes is for years, and it's still bloated. Ultimately, Foobar2000 is the choice on HydrogenAudio, and that is a good endorsement. I rip my audio CDs to MP3, where Foobar2000 requires you to install the LAME MP3 encoder separately due to licensing issues, but that is a fairly easy task.

Photos

In the cloud, I use Google Photos. Locally, I use InfranView. It's been around forever and has been reliably popular. It does what I need it to do to get my photos ready for the cloud. Like Foobar2000, it's lightweight yet fully featured. I've tried numerous photo management tools like Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Photos, Adobe Elements, Corel PaintShop Pro, Sony PlayMemories. One of my biggest gripes with some photo management programs is the inability to handle videos. I've taken a lot of home movies using various cameras, resulting in a variety of video formats, and home video files usually end up with little or no metadata. Some photo management programs cannot see them, or they assign them an arbitrary date taken.

Videos

In the cloud, I'm using Google Photos, YouTube and Google Drive. Locally, I use VLC for playback and Handbrake for conversion. I've acquired a lot of AVCHD *.m2ts files, and through experience I have found that Handbrake does the best job converting them. Occasionally, I'll use XmediaRecode because it has fantastic GPU hardware acceleration leveraging Nvidia's Nvenc, and I'm surprised at how little is written about this on the web. It's crazy fast! I have bought encoding software and have always been disappointed, because they are never as good as the free alternatives (e.g. Cyberlink MediaEspresso was terrible). Converting videos to Mp4 before uploading to the cloud makes upload times faster, but I've found that it is not always necessary, since if it's going through a Google service, then Google will convert it for you.