Music Management Software 2009 ??

I don't understand the need for 'audiophile' software; seems to me like if you just want to organize music, that has nothing really to do with sound fidelity.

There are a variety of software you could try. One that I highly recommend, as it is customizable, uses a low memory footprint, and expandable in features with plug-ins is foobar2000. Of course, you want to properly tag all your files after you rip them from the CD, and there are a variety of tags you could use to organize by whatever category you want.

Personally, I have laptop hooked up to a DAC for a headphone setup. I stream my files from my NAS (network attached storage) stored in lossless FLAC with foobar200. There's a plug-in called foo_uPnP that even allows me, say, at work, to transcode the FLAC on-the-fly to mp3 files for internet streaming. There's another plug-in that allows me to use ASIO drivers for bit-perfect playback. And another one allows artist biographies, lyrics, and relevant info to be streamed from lastfm.com when I play a song. You get the idea...

I should add: A lot of software are advertising this feature where they automatically update your tags by an online database. While this is initially handy, every software that I've used that has done this has messed up at some point, and going back to fix these tags retrospectively has been more trouble than it was worth.

The best software that I've used for tagging is MP3Tag (it works for FLAC too, despite the title). It allows tags convert to filename, filename to tags, and more importantly:

1. Text file to tags. If you have an excel spreadsheet, you could export that as a csv and define/map the fields. This allows you to update multiple files at once, instead of typing them in one by one.

2. Scripts. These allow you to, say, capitalize the first letter or a word, and a variety of string manipulations.

I haven't had any experience with Catraxx or Media Monkey; in my opinion, choosing a music management software depends primarily on if you like the layout, assuming free software like MP3Tag could handle the tagging. If a comprehensive, all-in-one, solution is what you're looking for, then there needs to be more trial and error, since what the feature set list doesn't tell you is how the workflow would match your habits.