Now that you have all your MP3s tagged, you need to have a database to make it easy to find any song in your collection. Once again, there are hundreds of programs specifically designed to catalog your music collection. You can find both freeware and commercial products. You don’t have to use a program specifically for MP3s – any search program can find files for you – but MP3 cataloguers have special functions for organizing your music collection and creating playlists.

MediaMonkey is a popular software title which manages your entire music collection including MP3s, CDs, and other popular formats like OGG, WMA and FLAC. It has a built-in player and has functions for building playlists, ripping CDs, finding CD information from internet, and automatic volume adjustment. You can use MediaMonkey or other similar programs to search for a song by title, artist, year, album or almost any other criteria including bitrate, length, or file format.

Even with DRM, however, all audio and video streams can be recorded. The simplest way to record streaming audio is to attach a recorder to output jack of your soundcard. Any recording device – portable MP3 player, cassette deck, MiniDisc etc. can be used. The problem with this method is that you have to convert digital stream into analog, and there will be some loss in sound quality.

If you wish to keep audio stream in digital domain, you need special software to capture it. Most audio capture software works by emulating a sound card. You feed output of emulated sound card to a file, and as audio is streamed to your computer it is captured to file. Any kind of audio stream can be captured this way no matter whether it is played with Windows Media Player, Real Player, Quicktime, or any other audio streamer.