I'm not too fussed now that I've found something that works. I have two optical drives on my main desktop which is some help, but I still have to manually load each disk and remove the last one whatever I use.
have you tried foobar as a music player? a lot of people seem to swear by that. I think it's one of those ones that is quite powerful in terms of configuration, so it might be a bit wild at first but hopefully you can set it up to make it simple for MrsA.
What's your own media player of choice, Milko Bar Kid?
I stumped up for dBPoweramp - best money I've spent on software. If the price hasn't sky rocketed, I'd recommend trying it again. We've got somewhere in the region of 2000 cds and it's the quickest ripper I found - 1 cd will take less than 2 minutes to rip as FLAC. There's some inbuilt clevers which can fill in any gaps or read errors that scratches cause. It also comes with a batch converter, which was damn useful for converting the lossless files to mp3 so I could stick the entire collection on my phone.
Really. That surprises me. Complete opposite of my experience, else I wouldn't have recommended it. Simple, idiot-proof, bullet-proof. IME.
What version of Windows did you try it on?
> it totally and completely refused to even see them let alone organise and play them as a library of music
If you've got the tracks listed in Inbox, select all, right click, Send To > Music Library.
Whilst not directed at me, I find that an interesting question because I've not thought about how I play music in a long time. My answer historically would have been Winamp followed by VLC, then maybe Kodi/XBMC on the TV.
Nowadays I don't listen to an awful lot, but it is usually limited to Spotify or Google Play music. Either via my phone to a Chromecast Audio device, or using the browser on a computer. I can't remember the last time I played back anything from my large MP3 collection. If anything I just use them to transfer to my iPod for long flights.
I keep toying with the idea of making some sort of dedicated music listening room, but then quickly realise that I don't listen to enough to justify that. Whilst it might push me to listen to more, it probably won't and it'll go unused.
I think you've identified the issue right there.
I asked this question today in my (young, at least by comparison (manthorp) ) office, and the default answer was Spotify.
It partly ages me: I like to 'have' the music, in a a legacy echo of owning vinyl, or cassettes, or CDs. But it's also about rarities: I have rips from bootlegs, home recorded stuff, Jimmed obscurities etc. that the licit brands just don't - can't - have on their books.
Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to be quite so blunt. Why is the concept of an inbox suitable for somebody who wants to play music? I appreciate that it made sense for somebody who was kind enough and clever enough to write the software for anybody for free. Good luck to him, he did it all alone and a load of people love it to death. I just found the whole experience clunky, unintuitive and not fun.
Nevertheless, I look at so much praise online and elsewhere and I probably will give it one more try to see whether the issues were my ignorance, some configuration issue, or something else.