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Muse is a music managment program for people with mp3 players

If you have an mp3 player that holds a small amount of music (like what you're going to be listening to today, or maybe for the next week) but not a large, hard drive based, player that will hold all of your music, then you often spend a lot of time loading different varieties of music on your mp3 player.

And if you're like me you have music in a variety of locations, some backed up on cdroms or dvdroms, some is still sitting on your hard drive in various directories and hasn't been burned yet.

if this sounds like you then muse is the program you will want to help you sync up your mp3 player

With muse, you build a collection of music split up into what are called "bins". A bin is a file which contains information about songs from one partiular location. Some bins are called "Live Bins" which means that when muse accesses them, muse will update them. This is helpful for hard drive locations, download directories, or anywhere where the music will be constantly changing.

You can put your discs into your cd-rom drive, and ask muse to catalog it into a bin file, you can also create bins of hard drive directories. then you can assemble groups of bins into a "collection".

Now when you load a collection you can browse all of your music and select with ease without thinking about where the music is physically stored. There is no need to swap discs just to consider the options of what you should listen to today.

Muse will keep track of how much space is available on your mp3 player and how much is needed for the songs you are about to copy, a percentage bar will show you how much room you have to work with and will change as songs are added or removed

Muse can also work with mp3 players that have an extra drive letter (ei: one for the internal flash memory, and another for a flash memory card), or muse can work with multiple mp3 players, flash thumb drives, etc... Each of these are considered by muse to be a "destination", each with a unique drive letter and available space, muse can work with as many of these as you can attach to your system

Also muse has a fairly intelligent randomizer which can select songs at random for you if you can't make up your mind. Or let's say you selected two or three albums and you have some space left on your mp3 player you can ask muse to fill up the rest with random stuff.

Muse can remember which songs where randomly chosen so that next time it can skip them and go for something new and fresh, at least until it's been awhile since you've listened to those songs.

Muse can also shift the play order of your songs by changing the index number which is at the start of the filename, and id3 tag, so that all you have to do is set your mp3 player to play songs in alphabetical order and it will play in the order you have it set at in muse.

Once you are ready to copy over your songs muse will asks you for your cd's and dvd's but will only ask for each one once, it copies the songs in order of what disc it's on, not what order it will be played in.

This page is just supposed to give you a brief overview of what muse is and how it works, for more detailed instructions check the help document. Load muse, click on the logo in the top-left corner and then click on "help topics" or just run the muse.hlp file from your muse directory

Muse is open-source and free of charge, if you wish to download it check out the projects page