Opinion: Best way to Organize 11000 Mp3

[Roust]

Alright, so epic things I've done this year;

1. Got back together with my Wife
2. Moved to a great new house.
3. Ripped 20 years worth of CDs onto a 1TB external drive.
4. Switched the four household computers to Ubuntu.

Things are great, life is good. So here's the thing; the family is having a major debate over the best way to organize and sort all those songs. I prefer to just have them in a giant folder and let the application deal with sorting by title, artist, genre, etc. But this is cumbersome and leads to alot of load time and looooong searches for files sometimes.

My wife wants to sort them by alphabet, as in a folder for A, folder for B, etc.

Most applications that sort music want to do so by artist -> album.

Opinions please, brilliant ideas will receive e-hugs.

=D

[tgalati4]

Perhaps you can rank-order the major music players for how fast they search. For instance:

Rhythmbox is faster than Banshee which is faster than Exaile which is faster than Listen, etc. There are a lot of players to choose from. The purpose of a database is so that you don't have to worry about how the music is initially organized.

Certainly happier than:

"I ditched the wife, I got kicked out of the house, and I'm sticking with Windows. At least I got my CD's."

[wewantutopia]

My library of 9500ish tracks is organized in folders by band. then in the respective band folder a separate folder for album and in that folder the tracks labeled artist - album - track - title. I use Amarok 1.4 using SQLite for database and searches are surprisingly quick

[zekopeko]

Things are great, life is good. So here's the thing; the family is having a major debate over the best way to organize and sort all those songs. I prefer to just have them in a giant folder and let the application deal with sorting by title, artist, genre, etc. But this is cumbersome and leads to alot of load time and looooong searches for files sometimes.

My wife wants to sort them by alphabet, as in a folder for A, folder for B, etc.

Most applications that sort music want to do so by artist -> album.

Opinions please, brilliant ideas will receive e-hugs.

=D

Go with the Artist Album way. The whole point of a modern music player is to organize your music and allow easy searching. Most music players are sufficiently fast for search-as-you-type so there should really be no problem. My 3 year old ipod with a dual 80(?) Mhz ARM cpu is pretty fast when I need to search for something.

[julio_cortez]

I'd go for the ./artist/album/tracknumber-title method for songs belonging to an album you have ripped.

If you have downloaded tracks via itunes or a similar service, however (so you don't have the entire album) I'd go for the ./artist/title way of organizing them.

At least, that's what I'm doing with my music files collection ;)

[NightwishFan]

Not sure if EasyTag would help, but it is in the repos.

[szymon_g]

I usually keep my MP3 in this order: $HOME/music/artist_name/year_album_title_and_its_language_version(if it exists in more than 1 version)/track_number_and_name_of_the_song.mp3

so- it would be like that
$Home/music/Closterkeller/1992_blue_EN/09_the_dead_zone.mp3

[Roust]

Thanks for all the replies folks, it seems that the Artist/Album system is the preferred method.

I think I'm going to go ahead and get that done, maybe tweak a little and skip the album level. Just give each artist their own folder.

The vast majority of these songs are ripped from disc with consistent tagging and name formatting, it should be a snap to get an application to handle the sorting. Only a small percentage will get left out at the end to be manually moved/renamed.

Btw, first day on the forums, seems like a great community. Expect to see me around alot as my work allows for quite a bit of idle time on the computer

[The Real Dave]

Personally I use Artist/Album, but I've only ~3000 songs.

A mate of mine uses Genre/Arist/Album, but he's a DJ, and it's more practical for him.

[5BallJuggler]

My 20,000+ files are arranged by Artist/Album/Song, the only problems are:

1. which artist sang that song?
2. which album was that song on?
3. what do i listen too next?

if answer to previous 3 questions is "I dont know" then default to type and listen to "Pink Floyd" or "The Flaming Lips"

but essentially it's what works for you, this is the best way I found.