I spend a huge chunk of my spare time collecting music. Much of that time I spend hunting for rarities, oddities, and OOP material on the Soulseek network, but I'm also addicted to massively customizing foobar2000 as my music manager and player of choice.


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.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~{__ Reference __}~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.

• MusicBrainz -- An open content music database. The ultimate music metadata warehouse.


• Discogs -- RYM's chief rival and a vast and thorough database in its own right.


• Last.fm -- Great resource for tracking your listening habits (see: Audioscrobbler) as well as socializing.


• allmusic (aka All Music Guide) -- A good source for pro reviews and ratings.


• The Covers Project -- A database dedicated to the art of the cover song. Surprisingly vast.


• Encyclopaedia Mettalum -- Arguably the net's best resource for metal discographies and reviews.


• JaME World -- A quality database for Japanese music, i.e. j-rock, j-pop, j-metal, etc.


• MusicMoz -- An open directory of all things music.


• freeDB -- A decent metadata database for CDs. (Like Gracenote without all the licensing/copyright drama.)

• foobar2000 -- An extremely customizable audio player and quite possibly the best ever created. Endlessly configurable, due in no small part to a brilliant plugin library.


• MusicBrainz Picard -- A superb MP3 tagging app that draws from MusicBrainz's huge metadatabase. Also known for its use of audio fingerprinting technology.


• Soulseek -- A legendary music sharing app and one of the only ones still standing.


• Exact Audio Copy -- Arguably the best CD ripper or "audiograbber" out there. Highly reliable and powerful.


• Audacity -- A free, easy-to-use multi-track audio editor. If you like to play with your music this is a handy tool.


• Mp3tag -- Another MP3 tagging app that makes a great pair with Picard due to its unique and powerful features.


• iZotope Ozone -- For those of you who love to mess with your player's equalizer, try what the pros use for the ultimate in sound shaping.


• LAME -- The premier MP3 codec. Tastes great with Exact Audio Copy.


• FLAC -- Free Lossless Audio Codec; arguably the best means of losslessly ripping audio.

• Bandcamp -- My go-to site for previewing artists/albums and researching release dates, track listings, etc.


• Soundcloud -- Great for getting samples of what artists are currently up to.


• Spotify -- The Pandora killer. Have complete control over your stream with minimal ads.


• Pandora -- The original streamer and still a nice way to create your own personalized radio stations.