I use WMP as well, as it's got several ways to catalogue them, either by track name, artist name, genre, but I usually just stick with the artist list as more often than not I'm looking for a certain song by a certain artist.

Several ways to catalogue them .. Which of the popular media players that handles media libraries don't do this? I haven't tried them all, but I guess different ways to access your music is something "they" would all think of.

It was fun to read this discussion, I discovered a lot of various options to solve the problem of organizing. I had it too and used to keep all my audio files in separate folders, but as the collection grew my directories were getting more and more messy. So I began to look for a software to handle this and iTunes was a solution. Lately I’ve found another program, Musicnizer, it looks very promising and does what I need. I’m testing it now. Helps pretty much

Foobar can organize files according to %tags% which is really handy :)

Personally, I don't organize them into any subfolders (singers, album, genre, etc.).
I just throw them in under 1 folder, all of them. whether they're songs from way past 70's or from a boy band or whether it is classic or modern or slow song or disco music. the reason is that when i play music, either on my pc or in my cellphone, i want to do a play shuffle. it's like not knowing what's the next song that's gonna play. unlike if you're gonna put them under 1 folder let's say per singer, all the time you know you're listening under one singer. so that's my answer, i never really organize my music folder. i just throw in whatever i have on a single one.

Any decent player worth it's bits will have a shuffle function that will play your files like that for you. That way, you can organize your files so that you know what's where and you can listen to your music shuffle-style.

I usually tag everything perfectly in my media player (iTunes, WMP, RP, etc.), but could care less about how the source file is tagged.

What do you mean? That you store each file's tag info (artist, album title, track title etc) in a program database file instead of writing it to the file?

That's a pretty silly thing to do because then you'd lose all your info going from one program to another unless there's a database import function.

I primarily use iTunes. I tag everything within the program as I don't plan on using the files in any other program. But your point is heeded, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

by album

then all the albums, under the act

Get album >> drop folder of album into Music

I mean sometimes I'll go the extra step and make a folder for the artist/band and drop all the album folders of said artist into its folder, but other than that, I am lazy.

masturbationally.

Reading the latest posts in this thread, I think some people are missing the point.

Try reading the first post!

I think the main advantage of using specialized software before just “putting in right folder” is the interface and the ability to choose and playback wanted song instantly.
As The Virgin said:
Even in this case the program can read ID3 tags and sort such a mess by Artist or Album or other criteria.
Besides this, as for me, information about album or artist is important, so I chose the program, that downloads it and shows while playback. Unfortunately, such “intelligent” software is rather rare.

I wonder has anybody tried to test Musicnizer and to add an album to the database by the barcode? It is claimed on their website that it works with a web camera. I don’t have one and I’d like to know whether it recognizes albums fine.

My friend gave me his webcam for a couple of days, so I’ve been playing with it. Tried “barcode scanning” function, works fine. Sometimes you need to put an effort to make it scan, but normally it goes without a problem.
But now it's another question: how to disable downloading of so many pictures. I have a traffic limit and can’t find this setting…

My folders adhere to this format:

D:\My Documents\My Music\Captain Dan And The Scurvy Crew\Rimes of the Hip Hop Mariners\05. Captain Dan And The Scurvy Crew - It's All About the Booty.mp3

Soundtracks, Classical music, OCRemix stuff, my "Assorted" folder (Individual tracks where I don't want or can't find the full album) and a large Psytrance Collection I have, they all have their own folders, so the format there runs like this:

D:\My Documents\My Music\Soundtracks\Baccano\Baccano! Original Soundtrack - Spiral Melodies\13. Yoshimori Makoto - Abikyoukan no Kurutta Butai.mp3

All downloads get their tags checked and updated, and any extra tags that the ripper has added get removed. I don't do anything about album art because I don't have a use for it. I never use it for reference, I don't have a convenient method of finding it, and I'm not going through 280GB of music manually adding album covers into the relevant folders just so I can ignore it entirely. Some of my music has it in the folders, some of it has it in the metadata, none of it is there through my intervention.

Also, I manually add Disc Number and Total Discs to all my music, even 1 disc albums have those fields filled in. If an album has multiple discs, I put each disc in its own folder and update the metadata to append "[Disc x]" to the album name. I also change the filename format from "05. Captain Dan And The Scurvy Crew - It's All About the Booty.mp3" to "1.05. Captain Dan And The Scurvy Crew - It's All About the Booty.mp3"

The reason I do that last thing is because it ensures that when I just use library view to add my whole music collection, it appears with the discs in order, rather than having both discs in a single folder, which results in BOTH first tracks appearing, then both second tracks, etc, one after the other. Obviously thats a pain if the album is a double disc and you want to listen start to finish, like War Of The Worlds.

Captain Dan is sick.... Yahrrrr :P

Wow, a proper on-topic post on file organization .. Thanks GB :D

One thing I don't like is putting information in places where it's not supposed to be. For example, you put disc number in album title. In my collection, the total amount of discs and the number of any particular discs is stored in it's own tag. My sorting script makes sure they appear in order.

My collection is bigger than yours and I'm happy that I have album art for just about everything in there that I could find it for. Often, I have grabbed it manually, but I've also had scripts that downloaded it for me. With foobar, that's easy - and so is sorting your music by any tag you like - but what media player is it you use?

That’s why I began my search for automatic organizer software. Didn’t want to make it all manually so I found a way for a lazy one :) I retrieved all needed covers and info with Musicnizer in one click and wished everything in my life could be so easy

Although it's not exactly file organization, the biggest tagging headache for me has definetly been genres. I now use discogs genres & styles and any album in that database follows that system, but sometimes I get an album which is not entered into discogs and then I have to try and figure it out myself of course.

To organize one's music files by genre seems like a particularly bad idea to me, at least if you want consistency.

Organize it by Folders of genres, and subgenres inside of them

I use foobar, but I'm not into script writing so I use it basically with plugins and only basic customisation.

Also, I only put Disc Number in the Album title so that the folders are organised correctly both in and out of Foobar. Its not, strictly speaking, the wrong info in my eyes, just because I can't count the number of multiple disc albums I have where the gracenote or FreeDB tags have put that exact same piece of info in the same place!

I just use iTunes and leave organisation to the software. The only time I find it sucks is in relation to compilations but I tend not to go for them anyway.

I disagree as I just feel the name of Pink Floyd's The Wall f.ex is "The Wall" and not "The Wall Disc 1". That's not what it says on the cover. In my opinion, regardless of which disc you are listening to, you are still listening to the album titled "The Wall". In foobar, Disc number and Total Discs have dedicated metainfo tags where that info is supposed to go. If a database stores that sort of info in the album title, that's pretty awful I think and very unprofessional as it's clearly information that could (should) have its own place. It could also be that it is your tagger which appends that info to the album title.

On discogs (which I often use), Album Title and Disc Number are separate bits of info and my tagger puts the info in separate tags.

Luckily, as a foobar user, you can easily remap those parts of your albums titles to the disc number tags should you want to in the future. Oh, and you should get into the scripting part. It's really quite easy!

edit :

Some time ago, I started using two separate date tags. I consider date to be the original release date for the album, when it was first released. Then I also use a custom tag called Release Year which is intended for later releases of that album, f.ex remasters. So, a 40th anniversary edition of an album may have 1971 as it's date and 2011 as it's release year.

For folders, I currently keep the info like this :

1971 - In the Land of Grey and Pink [Studio Album, 2011 Rerelease]

I cannot stand it when my itunes separates discs.

In Musicnizer I found the solution of this problem in the special tab that allows you to create additional "Disc" entry for an album and add tracks from the second CD there.