Question on folder structuring

[Yesfan70]

Hey all,

I thought I would ask this before I got too carried away. Right now I have about 380 albums out of about 1600 ripped to my hard drive. The basic folder structure I'm using is:

artist/album/no. track - artist.flac
(ex: Yes/Fragile/01 Roundabout - Yes.flac)

When I rip various artist albums like blues collections or soundtracks, I do my best to remember to set the folder structure different (something I have really grown to love with dB Poweramp) to get the same result. So now, I'm thinking about going through my ripped collection and changing to where it looks like this:

artist - album/no. track - artist.flac
(ex: Yes - Fragile/01 Roundabout - Yes.flac)

For years I have had an "inventory list" on MS Word of every CD I own. I would like to set up the hard drive list to be a mirror version of the MS Word list. My question is how much harder will it be for Slim server to scan to a specific album if I do it this way?

Also, does anyone know how to get windows explorer to ignore "a, an, and the" when naming folders? I have a feeling the only way is to leave those articles off (which I went back and did).

The perfect setup, for me anyways, would have it all arranged alphabetically by artist, then albums by their release date. That the way I have my CD collection.

[ceejay]

There is some discussion here: http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cg...deToOrganising

Slimserver doesn't care very much how you organise or name folders, except that making sure you have one folder = one CD is a good idea. Having a very large number of folders within one folder (which if I read your mail correctly you may be heading towards) might put an unnecessary strain on the OS, though.

Once it has scanned your collection SS is really only concerned about its database structure, which is independent of the file system.

For your Windows Explorer problem: personally I'd leave off the "a, the", etc from the folder name but get it right in the Artist or Album tags.

HTH
Ceejay

[Yesfan70]

Thanks. I'll check out the link when I get home.

Right now, I have all my (for example) Yes albums under one Yes folder. I might just go back an treat each CD as a separate folder. As far as keeping up with my CD collection, I think this would be easier to do since there would be no sub folders.

[moley6knipe]

My £0.02 and a nice tip for making a Word doc

Here's my £0.02.

I rip my single-artist CDs...
F:\music\artist\album\track no-track name.filetype
...so F:\music\Wings\Wild Life\01-Mumbo.mp3

...and compilations...
F:\music\compilations\album\track no-track name.filetype
...so F:\music\compilations\1998 The Album\01-Here We Go.mp3

As ceejay suggests I leave articles off the folder names, i.e. ignore "a", "the" etc. SilmServer seems happiest with Compilations arranged in the above folder structure.

There's a neat way to get a nicely formatted Word doc of your folder structure; seems easier to get Word to match your folders rather than the other way round. In Win XP...

1 click Start > Run > cmd to open a DOS window
2 navigate to your music directory (if you're not familiar with DOS commands then typing Y: switches to another drive [replace Y with letter of choice], cd xxx changes to another directory [replace xxx with directory of choice], and cd\ takes you to root of current drive)
3 type tree /a > x.doc (where x is whatever filename you want to pick)
4 open your music directory, you'll find a file called x.doc (or whatever). Open it and you'll see a text version of your directory structure
5 then I wrote a simple macro to automatically format this to something more pleasing to the eye.

I'll try and remember to post back with an example and the macro text when I get home.