Looking for best way to organize music files??

[musicman]

I have about 9500 music files on my computer and was wondering if anyone could give me some help on the best way to organize and file them! All help is appreciated!

Thanks,
Musicman

[ceejay]

Start here? http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cg...deToOrganising

For the really indepth discussions on this topic, search the forums at hydrogenaudio.org

HTH...

Ceejay

[joncourage]

Not sure there really is one best way, it depends on the way you're wired personally, what your preferences will be.

I find I like to have a main "music" folder under my main "data" folder, and then I organize:

artist\album\file (format: "track. title")

I keep folders for miscellaneous stuff by genre ("rock - misc", "blues - misc", "jazz - misc", "other - misc", etc) and I keep compilations in these folders as well, by album name.

I keep a separate folder at the same level as Music for MP3s (for easy synching of portable devices).

This scheme works for me, and is logical for how my particular noggin is wired. I also find it makes finding things easy, and also helps in keeping tag info pretty consistent and easily created or changed, since I can manipulate tags based on file names (incl folder structure) or vice verse.

[pfarrell]

On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 11:25 -0800, musicman wrote:
> I have about 9500 music files on my computer and was wondering if anyone
> could give me some help on the best way to organize and file them! All
> help is appreciated!

I really think this is a personal decision.
There are really two subquestions to consider:
1) what is the best organization of the tunes on your disks?
2) what is the best way to access them?

It depends a lot of what kinds of music you have
and how you want to listen to it.

I defaulted to storing all my tunes in a structure
that looks like
/songs/genre/artist/album/ with each of the tracks
in separate files in the directory (as flac files).
This is OK, but begs the question what genre
is right.

The obvious problem is that lots of music crosses
genres. So is it jazz? or pop? or something else?

The obvious solution, IMHO, is to not worry about
the physical storage, and do all the complex stuff
in the Relational DBMS that the SS 6.* software
uses. But doing this requires that the
developers change their approach to the database.
Right now, it is regenerated from the tags in the tunes
frequently. To use my approach, you have to
treat the database content as valuable, so
that external cross references are not lost.

The good part of having the physical storage in
/songs/genre/artist/album/
is that the files are fairly small and easy to move
around. Having some sort of tree structure is
important.

--
Pat Farrell
http://www.pfarrell.com

[bernt]

Genre/Artist/Album/track-Title.flac

Using Allmusic to get the Genre and other tags with The Godfather.
The Godfather does also an excellent job to organize your files.
Here is a nice getting started guide.
http://users.otenet.gr/~jtcliper/tgf.../01/index.html

[ajmitchell]

Hiya. If you are talking about naming the files themselves, eg. ID3 tags, theres a lot of stuff on the net about it. I find the auto-namers a little too daring for me, I prefer to modify what Freeddb etc gives me. As for filing on your hard disk....I would just turn it all over to the professionals.

I was very skeptical about using itunes....my main interest was great quality music at home not an ipod on the go after all. However, at first I tried to keep about 3k organized myself....mainly by genre...with one folder per genre. After a while this becomes too limited, because some genres like soundtracks include all types of music.

As my collection grew to 6k (BTW I only keep songs I like and I mostly rip myself in 256 or 320) I gave itunes 6 another shot. From here I have never looked back. I took a hard gulp as I handed over filing entirely to itunes (in my music) - but this allowed me to find about 1000 duplicate songs. The greatest feature of itunes is playlists. Because itunes records when you last played the song, how many times you listened and how good you think it is you can create very interesting combinations (see //SmartPlaylists.com). Want to know who your favourite album is based on your airplay or ratings? Easy upload your itunes library to the iTunes Registry (http://www.itunesregistry.com/). This will even identify dupplicates by playing time....very clever. That another 100 duplicates gone!

For me the power of playlists is quite amazing....and is likely to improve further with future releases (see also http://playlistmag.com/)