Automatic Slim

The options given are kind of vague, as they leave out many options. For example, I organize my CD collection rather broadly by genre. (My vinyls are in a box, horribly unorganized. They will eventually be replaced by CDs.) There's 4 sections:

metal/classic rock/grunge
jazz/blues
classical/ambient
miscellaneous

Within those broad sections, I sort by artist alphabetically. However, I don't organize the albums further. The advantage is that I can find roughly similar sounds easily, yet still retain the advantages of alphabetical organization.

However, I almost never use the original CD. I make a physical backup and a digital backup after purchase and use those.

On my PC, I have several ways to organize my collection in I-Tunes. There's by genre and artist, of course. I love using Smart Playlists. Using Smart Playlists, I can keep Agalloch, Reverend Bizarre, and Judas Priest in separate metal subgenres, yet conglomerate them into just 'metal'. Same with jazz subgenres. I also use Smart Playlists to organize by time period as well.

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"I say I can't but I really mean I won't."

sidewinder

That's a good idea...mine are by genre for the most part but then I try to group them by label or sub-genre and it's gotten too confusing in the last 10 years, and as my tastes expand. I like your idea. Once I get more space (who knows when that will be) I'll consider this method. I'm sure it'll still be tricky trying to classify things. Might just go full alphabetical...who knows. Maybe my current system isn't so bad, I just need space to clean it up.

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last.fm | my collection on RYM | vinyl instagram @allthatyouseeandhear
I'd love to see your signature/links too, but the huge and obnoxious ones have caused me to block all signatures.

Automatic Slim

I've tried straight alphabetical order by album, but it becomes unwieldy, because I can never remember the name of some albums. I try to keep some semblance of order to my physical collection, even though I rarely use it. It's really not necessary if one digitizes the albums, I suppose.

One question for those who have their music in alphabetical folders: when I've tried this, I-Tunes removes the albums and labels them by artist after I import them. How do you prevent that? Or should I just ditch I-Tunes?

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"I say I can't but I really mean I won't."

Roemilca

For the actual albums, I just put them in order by genre, and I works pretty well because it flows from one genre to the next so well.
For example:
Despised Icon->Suicide Silence->Chelsea Grin->Bring Me The Horizon->The Devil Wears Prada->Chiodos->A Day To Remember->Four Year Strong
And so on and so forth.

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Roemilca

I'd ditch iTunes. It's too problematic, has a high chance of crashing and corrupting your entire music library, etc. WinAmp's probably the best media program I know of.

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Molecules

alphabetical CDs, digital stuff i have tried to split into genre playlists accurately, if you just listen to stuff off the main iTunes 'music' list too much gets lost in the shuffle. I am afraid to update iTunes because i think it destroys the old settings and i would be back to square one.

tried winamp several times and it pisses me off

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[SIZE="1"]Eff em
tumble her

FETCHER.

it doesnt destroy the old settings, i just updated mines, unless the 64-bit version is different than the 32-bit version i would do it !
and CDs are now sitting alphabetically, digital files are done on itunes by genre or artist

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Automatic Slim

Actually, you can export your playlists from I-Tunes and then import them again. This is useful when moving things to another computer, but not necessary if upgrading the version. Still, I've heard of problems with the latest version.

I like to divide my collection into subgenres and them set up Smart Playlists to combine these subgenres into a genre or other category. For example, I have 22 metal subgenres (Go ahead. Laugh!) in the main window, but I can make a Smart Playlist which will combine all those, plus Hard Rock into a single playlist without affecting the basic classification system. I also created a Smart Playlist to lump all the subgenres with extreme vocals, as well as an Unplayed playlist, which shows the tracks I've not listened to yet. I like this because I can both lump and split the music into various categories -- whichever works better for a particular usage.

I don't care for Winamp either. Media Monkey is better than I-Tunes, except that its version of Smart Playlists is far less useful than in I-Tunes.

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"I say I can't but I really mean I won't."

sidewinder

I would never even think of alphabetizing by album name...makes no sense to me that multiple albums by the same artist would not be grouped together.

And I think this is the kind of thinking that got me to organize stuff the way I do...I wanted side project CDs to sit next to the bands they were an off-shoot of, and bands that otherwise shared members were often of the same genre, sometimes on the same label and I wanted those together, and so it developed into categorization by genre.

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last.fm | my collection on RYM | vinyl instagram @allthatyouseeandhear
I'd love to see your signature/links too, but the huge and obnoxious ones have caused me to block all signatures.

Arya Stark

Lately, I haven't been keeping up with the music organization. I have like... three songs by the same artist. I was trying to listen to an album today while I was working out and I kept hearing the same songs played at least twice.

It was horrible.

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