How do you organize your music files?
 

Heya guys!

I'm just a little bit curious about how people catalogue their music on their harddrives. Feel free to mention your media player of choice.

This is how I do it :

Music\<Artist First Letter>\<Artist>\<decade>s\<Year> - <Album> [<album-info>]\<tracknr>. <songname>

So for an mp3 song from Dio's first album, it's path would be :

Music\D\Dio\1980s\1983 - Holy Diver [Studio album, debut]\02. Holy Diver.mp3


I'm also quite meticulous about ID-tags. It might seem a little excessive (I don't know - is it?), but as a music collection gets large, I feel it's better to overdo properness than not do it right. I would hate to one day have to re-organize 150+ gigs of music because I didn't do it proper before the collection became that large. I'll admit that I do spend quite a lot of time organizing my stuff, though. I don't know of any programs that will do this for me, although I'm fairly certain one should exist .. Any tips?

Also, my player of choice is Winamp. No, I don't have an iPod. ;)

So - How do you do it?

edit :

2008 is a while ago .. I now use Foobar :thumb:

I used to have the music in the appropriate artist folder I created (all of it being in my mp3 player, of course), but apparently there was a limit on how many folders I could make. So now every song I download I just dump into the mp3 player after making sure the track's info is right.

All my digital files are on my external hard drive which is usually plugged into my main desktop. I used to unplug it and plug it into any of my laptops or other desktops but lately I've been streaming them to any of my comps, either at home or at work.

I am very meticulous about tagging and album art. Every album has the correct info. Fortunately I use MediaMonkey which makes it a lot easier and quicker. If you like WinAmp you'll like that, it uses the same player but expands on everything else.

My file paths are pretty much the same as toretorden, except on my F: drive

I have two versions of my collection. One is on a stationary computer while another version is on an external .. The reason is, I live in a bit different locations so I bring a laptop and the external whenever I'm out of HQ - which could be for months at a time. When I get back to my stationary, I "re-sync" my collection of course ..

And that way, should one HD blow up, I still have my music. ;)

I have a second drive in my laptop that's reserved for music and backed up on an external. All of it is arranged by player,(iTunes or WMP) (iTunes music is is all in one folder since it is so easy to navigate) genre, sub-genre, artist, live/studio (if I have both) then album.

I don't.

If you exclude iTunes. But all of my files and folders are a big mess.

This is how I name my files. Download a program called Tag & Rename - it's absolutely godly for this sort of thing.

<Band/Artist> \ <Year> <Album> \ <Track #> - <Track Name>

Doesn't your music program let you tag easily anyway?

WMP can tag automatically but I don't know how time consuming it is. And I can't auto-tag with WMP since I don't add music to my library as I have too much and causes it to run slowly. Either way, I have my own meticulous tagging mannerisms so I prefer to do it myself.

I don't organize. I probably should sometime, but I'm lazy.

I'm actually thinking about how to go about this, since I'm getting ready to buy a hard drive big enough to hold my entire music collection and still have plenty of space left over.

I was probably just going to sort everything alphabetically, then according to live, official studio, and non-live rarities/b-sides/etc.

I don't organize. I just have folder with a bunch of oddball songs, or albums I haven't made folders for, and then I just have a bunch of folders with the name of the album (And inside are the songs) or whatever.

By dumping them all in one file and then spending half an hour looking for them.

There's a file organizer plugin for winamp. It doesn't have support for a decade variable, though, which is something I would like.

If you want it, it's called "Media Library Organizer". The filename is "ml_org.dll". A google search should give quick results.

As the name suggests, it gives you the option to right-click and organize stuff in your media library according to rules defined by you.

I have folders with the artist's name.
And then the album title.

I let iTunes do it for me...

Thought I'd revive this thread and hope to gain some potential answers to an age old conundrum.

What do you guys out there do with your compilations and soundtrack albums?

My aim for organizing files is that some essential information about the album is contained in the folders which of course is part of a file's filename and so is searcheable and filterable from Winamp. For example I like the file name to contain what decade the music is from, if it's a studio/live/compilation album and - if it's a compilation album - if it's a mixed artists compilation.

For best of albums and such, I do this :

\Music\M\Madonna\!Compilations\1990 - The Immaculate Collection [Greatest Hits album, 1980s - 1990s]\01 - Everybody.mp3

However, sometimes a compilation album is a multiple artists album - like "Golden Oldies". Those I organize outside of the A, B, C, D folders. Instead, I've made a mixed artist compilations folder.

\Music\!Mixed Artists Compilations\The Best Prog Rock Album In The World ...Ever! [album, 1960s - 1970s] (2003)\CD1\Genesis - Dancing With The Moonlit Knight.mp3

Or, an example with the the musicbanter comps (where I haven't yet bothered figuring out what decades the music is from) :

\Music\!Mixed Artists Compilations\Musicbanter [Internet Bootlegs]\Musicbanter December 2009 - Night Driving\01. Ragnarök - Fabriksfunky.mp3

However, there are also soundtracks and scores which are sometimes multiple artists as well. I didn't want to lump those in with stuff like "That 70's", so I treat soundtracks and scores as if they were an artist outside the regular A, B, C, D folders.

\Music\!Soundtracks & Scores\1930s\1939 - The Wizard Of Oz [Movie, Musical, 1995 rerelease]\04 - Over the rainbow.mp3
\Music\!Soundtracks & Scores\1970s\1977 - Saturday Night Fever [Movie, Mixed Artists]\01 - Stayin' Alive.mp3

Saturday Night Fever is of course a Mixed Artist Compilation and that information is now placed in the [additional info block]. If I have a compilation album with film music from different movies, I do it like this :

\Music\!Soundtracks & Scores\!Compilations\2003 - Classic Disney- 60 Years of Musical Magic [Movies, Mixed Artists]\CD1\01 - Brad Kane - Whole New World [Aladdin].mp3

(Note that I don't actually care very much what the actual filenames of the files themselves are .. Well, as long as they contain the song title, that's the most important. For example, they don't need to contain artist and album because that information would be redundant as those are already in the folder names.)

This all works rather well for me. It's what I've ended up with after some amount of trial and error so it wasn't always like this. It makes it very easy to set up filters for mixed artist compilation albums, movie soundtracks, musicals or all of them together with their own view properties in Winamp (f.ex organized by albums first, not artist). However, I'd like to see what others have come up with. :)

I use Mediamonkey as my mediaplayer. Highly reccomended, a great way of organizing a huge record collection.

Do you mean it has a feature that auto-sorts your files and that it's good?

Or do you mean that it has a nice and tidy media library? Cause if it's the latter, you're off topic. This is a thread about how your files are organized, not your media library. ;)

ahm... I might be off topic, or not. But still; I don't bother about how my files are organized, I let Mediamonkey do the work for me (it has this auto-tag function, works perfect for me)

my normal pattern is to organize albums like this, within folders named after the corresponding artist (showing the first few entries from my Björk folder)

http://imgkk.com/i/gjp_XX.jpg

compilations go in a Various Artists folder
soundtracks go in a Soundtracks folder

i also make generous use of tags, and of the incredible flexibililty of foobar.

for compilations i fill %album artist% with just Various Artists, and i fill %artist% with the track's artists.

soundtracks are done similarily, but %album artist% is set Soundtrack simply so that all my soundtracks show up in the same place. then for the %release type% tag, i put either Soundtrack or Score.

in foobar, mixed-artist albums show up like this:

http://imgkk.com/i/2UeJaW.jpg

when i throw music on my ipod however, i replace %artist% with %album artist% to avoid apple's horrible implementation of compilation albums.

here is a screenshot of the end result:

http://imgkk.com/t/nO7smD.png

Thanks noise :)

I thought about doing it the way you've done it some time ago, but I thought renaming Artists to Various Artists and so on was somewhat unsatisfactory.

Here is a screenie showing my Winamp, currently browsing the mixed artist compilation album "Kanon im kanon".

On the left hand side, you can see the filters. The active filter in the screenie is "Mixed Artist Compilations", so only those albums albums show up and they're organized by album first instead of artist, thus eliminating the need to rename artists to Various Artist.

Although Winamp does everything I want, I've just installed Foobar2000 because I think it looks pretty sweet. Hopefully, I can get the same kind of functionality out of it. :p:

foobar has a steep learning curve. the screenshot i posted is the result of several months of customization and adjusting to get things just right. but the beauty of the program is that it is so flexible that with a little effort, it can become your perfect music player :D

if you need any help with it at all, feel free to PM me.

anyway back to organizing. i only rename Artist to Various Artist for my ipod. otherwise i have two separate tags - Album Artist and Artist. that lets me keep track artists intact for compilations and soundtracks.

so for a normal album - say, a Massive Attack album, Artist is set to Massive Attack, and i just ignore the Album Artist tag.

but for a soundtrack, the Album Artist is set to Soundtrack so that all my soundtracks show up in the same place on my filter. then each track gets its own Artist tag. ultimately, it is the Album tag that holds everything together.

i also use Genre and Style tags, along with Rating, to provide more layers to work with when building autoplaylists.

Google Earth.

http://i46.tinypic.com/2550saf.jpg

Zooming in on a geographical location reveals more artists. I enjoy geography but my main motivation for this style of organization was my love for world music. It's quite fun to get a little info on where your music is coming from, you learn a lot about the area of the world and for me gives me greater insight into the music. You can also use the flight simulator to fly to your favorite music... i've got on some "african expeditions" that way - haha. Posting a full tutorial video soon.

i have a folder titled "music", in that folder are folders labeled with various genre names "soul, funk, blues, etc etc", and in those are folders labeled with artist names who fit the corresponding genre. in each artist's folder there is everything i have by them.

Sorting stuff by genre I think has been my greatest sorting challenge so far :p:

The reason is of course there's no consensus on genres and new ones are invented every day. Also the conventional tags don't support genres in the way I'd like them to. I think any music file should support multiple genre tags so that you can for example tag them with super genres and sub genres, f.ex Jazz and Bebop.

Weird that the guys who designed ID3 tags don't seem to have thought of that ..

Shouldn't Michael Jackson's pin be in Indiana?

I haven't cataloged everything yet but I'm planning on putting The Jackson 5 in Indiana and Michael as a solo artist in LA because the majority of his albums he released while living and working in California.

It really shouldn't matter. It's your music collection, thus, your categorization.
If you think something borders between Breakcore and IDM, go with your gut. It's your call.

Personally I find genre sorting is the most natural and easiest way for me.
I don't understand why people sort by date, or alphabetically.
That would become unnecessarily confusing for me. When I listen to music, I do it on a mood-by-mood basis, and the easiest way to relate mood to music is first through genre for me.

So for me, it's simple:

File structure:
D:\Music\all genres I have\all artists I have\All albums from artist I have\All songs from album I have

When I obtain new music, I edit the genre tags individually for each song. When I make playlists, I have absolutely no problems. It's a workflow that works for me.

My Harddrives are in order of sorting of programs, Videos, Music, pictures and junk :). Then I have music under artist then their albums. Compilations just get an artist slot.

I am have 2 TB drives both have the same files just in case something may happen.

MY ID tag on some of my music is jacked up.... I think it happened when my old computer crashed and I lost alot of music and had to add what I had on my IPOD back into the computer with some hack software, because I was slack to upload the cds again.

I wanting to look for a decent MP3 tag software so I can manual fix alot of it... but just haven't got around to finding one

Itunes is my sorting device I guess....

Mediamonkey's auto-tag feature works great.

I can see how organization by genre is useful, but I would definetly do that in the media library/player setting up filters for tags and stuff. I would not do it by folders. Alphabetical makes more sense there. It should be possible for someone who comes over and wants to copy some music to find out just where the files they're looking for are located in your system I think.

I have run into a major obstacle, actually .. The damn filters which I don't know how to write!

I have Columns UI, but it only has genre, artist and album filters. I'd like a filter for artist first letters too, like W gives you Ween, Willie Nelson and so on. :/

edit :

The reason I need better filters/query functions is really because if I have a column on the left hand showing artists, it becomes rather big. For example I have 243 artists starting with just the letter S. For that reason, it makes sense to have a way you can click the letter S, then get those 243 artists in the next column so .. First Letter / Artist / Albums would be good.

I have to say, though, so far Winamp seems way easier and so far more practical for large libraries. In the screenshots I've seen, I've yet to see anything quite as handy as Winamps smart filters which I use a lot (f.ex to only see music only from films, from musicals, specific decades, genres, whatever). It's the other stuff which seems cooler. :(

oh, trust me, once you get foobar set up the way you want it, you'll never go back. it offers a lot more flexibility than winamp.

for a letter filter, use this:

$left($swapprefix(%album artist%),1)

the $swapprefix bit move (the, a) to the end so that "the cure" is filed under "c" as "cure, the". might also want to use that in your artist filter. the rest just grabs the left-most character of what remains.

if you don't want the prefixes swapped, then just use:

$left(%album artist%,1)

i can also help you set up a custom script to swap prefixes from the Norwegian language if you want :D

if you like accessing your library a lot of different ways, you might consider skipping the filters component and using the Library Tree component instead. it offers a tree view with three primary nodes - library, autoplaylists, and playlists. within the library node, you can set up any number of custom nodes, with as many levels as you like. for example, you an make one "letter - artist - year - album - track", or "decade - year - artist - album - track"

of course, you can do this with filters too, but you end up getting a lot of tabs which can clutter the UI.

and by the way - foobar supports multivalue tags. so you can throw as many entries as you like in %genre%, and the track will show up under all of them. you just have to tell it to split multivalue entries manually, that's the only catch. in the properties dialog, select the field, right-click, choose "split values", and enter go from there.

you can also use whatever custom tags you want. anything at all. i have a %style% tag which is basically a sub-genre. so in the "genre" tab of my filters pane, there are three filters: genre, style, and artist.

i also have custom tags like %skip% which i use to tag things like non-music tracks, single-track live bootlegs, blank tracks, interviews, and other things i don't want to hear when i throw things on shuffle. i use it with the foo_skip component.

another tag is %live%, which just gives me a simple visual marker in my playlist for all live albums/tracks.

yet another is %country%, which is responsible for the flag images you see in my screenshot.

foobar can do just about anything :D

Yes, awesome! Thanks man :D

Keep an eye on that inbox ;)

What I read on google... This sounds perfect.

Sucks now I am going to have 3 media players on my computer... Zune, Itunes and mediamonkey.

I remember messing around with mediamonkey a year ago or so.... Because I wanted a player that I could use for Home theater on my spare computer. I uninstalled it but I cant remember why.... I just realized this plays Flac as well. thats a big bonus.

How is Mediamonkey on memory? Zune is a memory eater, with Itunes right behind it.

Sorry I hope I am not taking away from the threads subject. But I guess MP3 ID is sort of under the subject.

Cadrian, why do you "need" 3 players?

I never actually liked MediaMonkey and think of it as overrated. :/

When I used it, it didn't seem like a good solution for a large library, let's say f.ex over 30 000 songs. I realize that's a lot, but media libraries tend to grow over time and these days, HD space isn't quite the problem it used to be ..

Winamp has a search bar smack dab in the middle of your field of vision and a very easy way to set up filters and so on to sort out the stuff you want from the stuff you don't want with a mouse click. Very handy! Foobar is versatile and so is basically able to do the same with a bit of tweaking and can also be made to do other things.

I think you have to think about what you need from a program. If you have a huge library, get Winamp or foobar if you think you can manage it.

Got a Ipod and a Zune.... I think I am about to get rid of the zune, and upgrade my IPOD to the 160gb with my tax return. I got the Zune... but the my brother shares my Media libary and he has a IPOD so I have Itunes as well.

I just got suggested Mediamonkey for correcting MP3 IDS and such, havent added my libary to yet because I know its going to take like 2 days for it to complete.



Do you guys who use Winamp and Foobar not use MP3 Players? Or how does that work?

well media monkey (and foobar for that matter) can sync with your ipod. no need for itunes. especially if you lose your zune.

i don't have much experience with media monkey, but i can say that scanning a 160gb library into foobar only takes a couple of minutes...

Damn I can get rid of ITUNES? Shows how much I have looked, I didnt know there was other software that you could sync with your IPOD. I figured apple would have that on lock so I never bothered to look.

Now I guess I gotta decide between Foobar or media Monkey... My Libary consists of 70k in songs almost 400gb not 160gb, just the 160gb seemed the biggest I could get at this momment.

Here is a big factor between media monkey or foobar can i import my current playlist from itunes from either of them?

BTW from the Foobar thread.... It looks like alot of scripting.