How do you organize your music?

[Meson]

Do you worry about the name of the file? <artist - album - # - title> maybe? No spaces?

Do you make folders by artist and album? Or just a giant lib (possibly sorting by tags)?

(What media player do you use while we're at it?)

[banjobacon]

~/Music/artist/album/## - title

I've considered putting the year in front of the album (year - album), but haven't done it yet.

[fuscia]

i don't even label my cds.

[ndefontenay]

Just one big library with song titles, artist name, album and music style.

Then I would order by one or another and liste orderly. Sometimes for a change, I would choose the random button.

I fancy Banshee pretty much. It's a project which I think is worth to support.

[louis_nichols]

I leave the organizing of my music to the media player, which is amarok. The powerful yet friendly media library is the main reason I use this player and not another. I must say, I've tried maybe all players out there (at least, all I found out about).

As for the files and folders, I have no single rule there. Some of my music is located in folders by artist, other is in chronological folders (like 2006/11_november, 2006/12_december and so on). Then there is a part of music that is just orphaned in various folders on the filesystem. No real rule there. The trick is, with a player that has a smart media library, that doesn't matter at all. You just point it to all folders that contain music and it will take care of the rest.

[aysiu]

I like to lump them all in one folder with
artist - track - title as the naming schema.

[~LoKe]

~/Music/Artist/Album/Track

[Henry Rayker]

I start out with one huge folder. All my music goes in there, but I'm REALLY anal about how everything is named. It must be in artist - trackname.ext (I use spaces for this kind of thing...Windows habit). Now, once I have enough of one specific artist in this folder, they get a sub-folder, the new naming scheme in this folder is just trackname.ext. If I have entire albums, the album will get a folder within the artist's folder, and the naming scheme becomes ## - trackname.ext.

For listening to music, I really don't do that much on my laptop. I stream music from my laptop to my xbox when I feel like listening to music ( <3<3<3 XBMC ) On my windows box (don't worry, it'll be converted...eventually) I use QPlayer for music playback...

[NewOldTimer]

Another vote for Amarok...My music is the only thing I'm a finky about...Grouped by genre{rock,oldies,country etc.} sub-divided by artist and finally artist/title/time. I'm pushing 30Gigs{and counting}...and for the wondering...80-90% legally obtained.

[Kujen]

Genre/artist/album. It's what I've used for years, even though I don't need to anymore since I've been using amarok for quite a long time.

[maniacmusician]

I organize it pretty well. Each Artist has their own folder, with just the Artist name. Under each artist name, I have seperate folders for each album, which I name like "Year - Album." Each Album folder obviously contains all the songs from that album, which use the naming scheme "Track Number - Song title.extension". I usually stick a picture of the album cover in the same folder as well.

On top of that, I make sure all my music is nicely tagged so I can keep track of it. It's important when you have a lot. I tag everything from Artist/Album fields to year of release to Record Label. I even put reviews of the album (usually from allmusic.com) in the "comments" label for the album. Oh, I also add the picture of the album cover to the tags.

But that's it.

[spockrock]

Genre/Artist - Album/Track - title.*

with the album cover as well...

[DJ_Peng]

I agree with several who posted here, going with Artist/Album (year)/## - Title. Not everything has the year in the folder name, but eventually everything will, thanks to Wikipedia and a few other sources I use. There are a number of artists I only have a few tracks by rather than a whole album and for those tracks I tend to go with Misc. Artists/Artist - ## [if known] - Title. If I know the album it's from I'll use Easy Tag to make sure it's in the file tags.

[mcduck]

~/Music/<file type>/Artist/Album/track - Title.

I keep Flac-, Mp3- and Ogg-files separated, make sure that _all_ my music is organized and named properly and then add album covers into folders. I handle file naming and tags with Cowbell and the rest is done by hand. Album art is mostly copied from Sonata's cache and if it doesn't find something I find it myself.

I've to figure genres for all my music but I gave up. Good music just doesn't always fit easily into any strict genres :D

I also once in my Windows days made the mistake of letting iTunes manage my music. It took me over a year to recover from the damage it made to my nicely organized collection.. ](*,)

[tigerpants]

Two folders: Internet Downloads for music I've just downloaded from blogs and an overall uber music folder with everything in it. I have no set filing system, i just chuck everything into amarok and let it sort out the tags. Anything tagged badly I correct. Life's too short to spend time worrying about sorting filenames out. Like Fuscia, I have problems even labelling CDs.

The great thing about having a pile of stuff is, its all in there somewhere.

[manmower]

/artist - album [date]/tracknumber - artist - title

[BWF89]

Mine goes

Music folder > DVD # (for easy backing up on a dvd) > Band name > Album name > Track name

[yabbadabbadont]

My music lives in it's own partition, /media/music/{flac,ogg,mod,mp3}/Artist/Album/Track_Title

I replace spaces with underscores and track is always 2 digits. Actually, the mod files generally don't have an Album, so they are stored by Source then Artist.

[antenna]

I name them 'Artist - Title' and put them all in one rather large directory. I have my player set to display filenames only, preferrring not to use id3 tags at all, I have no use for them.

[Spr0k3t]

Directory methodology:

/music/artist/album/Artist - ## - Title (Comment).(mp3|ogg)

Since I really enjoy listening to different genre rather than specific artists or songs....

makelink

/music/genre/Artist - ## - Title (Comment).(mp3|ogg)

And, if I come across a file of type WMA

~/.Trash/

Since I only keep complete backup albums, I had to move my collection to it's own /dev/music/

If the song does not have tags associated with them, I make sure to add them or remove eronous data.

[hoagie]

/Music/Artsit/Album/*.mp3/flac

I like flac as my default extension but my ipod doesn't support it.

[Spr0k3t]

Two folders: Internet Downloads for music I've just downloaded from blogs and an overall uber music folder with everything in it. I have no set filing system, i just chuck everything into amarok and let it sort out the tags. Anything tagged badly I correct. Life's too short to spend time worrying about sorting filenames out. Like Fuscia, I have problems even labelling CDs.

The great thing about having a pile of stuff is, its all in there somewhere.

Ex Falso for correcting the filenames once you have the tags set correctly. I did over 500 songs in just a few minutes... All of them were named in 8.3 filenames and corrected as needed.

[tigerpants]

Ex Falso for correcting the filenames once you have the tags set correctly. I did over 500 songs in just a few minutes... All of them were named in 8.3 filenames and corrected as needed.

Actually, thats a nice tip! Thanks.

[hizaguchi]

I just dump everything into ~/Media/Music and sort it out with ID3 tags.

[raffytaffy]

kbps / genere / artist / albums..

so like 320kbps section 192kbps section 128 kbps section and sub categories branching of.:popcorn:

[shrimphead]

~/Music/artist/album/## - title

^this.

and I use exaile :)

[Sunflower1970]

I organize it pretty well. Each Artist has their own folder, with just the Artist name. Under each artist name, I have seperate folders for each album, which I name like "Year - Album." Each Album folder obviously contains all the songs from that album, which use the naming scheme "Track Number - Song title.extension". I usually stick a picture of the album cover in the same folder as well.

On top of that, I make sure all my music is nicely tagged so I can keep track of it. It's important when you have a lot. I tag everything from Artist/Album fields to year of release to Record Label. I even put reviews of the album (usually from allmusic.com) in the "comments" label for the album. Oh, I also add the picture of the album cover to the tags.

But that's it.

I do my organization pretty much the same way. Makes it easy to find if I need to find something :)

[Donnut]

To me, the names don't matter, I just sort it all out with IDE3 tags. BACK UP PLAYLISTS!!!

[qalimas]

Music/Artist Name/Album Name(/CD(volume) #)/[##] Track Name (Artist - Album).ext

I'm very anal about my music organization, I use EasyTag to set all my file names properly, and I own no single tracks, if I own one song, I own all the other songs from the CD as well.

[userundefine]

I use Easytag.

~/audio/music/$artist/$album/$disc # (if multiple discs)/$tracknum - $tracktitle.flac

Easytag makes this so quick. Reads and creates structure from id3 tags.

[FuturePilot]

I don't sort mine by Artist/Album or anything like that. I have my own unique way of doing it. It's hard to explain:lolflag:

[Mateo]

Do you worry about the name of the file? <artist - album - # - title> maybe? No spaces?

no, don't care.


Do you make folders by artist and album? Or just a giant lib (possibly sorting by tags)?

yep, use folders like that.


(What media player do you use while we're at it?)

rhythmbox.

[tbroderick]

/media/hdb1/Music/Artist/Album/Tracknumber - Title.ogg

All my music is ogg vorbis. I've got around 90 GB all quality 4. I'm not big in high quality rips cause most of my rips are just backups. cmus is my player of choice and I use tagger or lltag to edit my tags and rename. All are console apps. lltag can lookup through CDDB.

A screenshot (http://img124.imageshack.us/img124/7596/cmusiq7.png) of tagger (http://onion.dynserv.net/~timo/tagger.html), lltag (http://home.gna.org/lltag/) and cmus (http://onion.dynserv.net/~timo/cmus.html) (tree view) in action.

[ckaya]

I put all of them in one folder with the filename structure: "artist - title.mp3"

I use tagging just for artist, title and replaygain. Other fields are left empty.
(Filename and tags are always in lowercase.)

I use Audio Tag Tool & Rythmbox, sometimes Quod Libet.

[grte]

~/media/music/genre/artist/album/##_title.ext

Using mpd.

[IYY]

A folder hierarchy: language > artist > album > track# - title.mp3

[muguwmp67]

/media/mp3/- <artist first letter> -/Artist/Album/## - title.mp3

I have a mp3tag script that will organize it this way for me.

How do people handle CD compilations? I haven't found an elegant way to deal with 'various artists' yet.

[tbodine]

Um, ~/Music/Artist/songs.ogg/mp3
That's it :]
And I use Rythmbox for transferring to iPod but XMMS to play my music.

[stokedfish]

Well, this is very subjective.

I gave up organizing my collection in genres, instead I have 15 "themes" now:


fish@fishbook:/media/stoked/Possessdby/Audio$ ls

A Drug Assisted Illusion Fumbling Towards Ecstasy Shimmering Walls Of Sound
A Search For History Knowledge Is Everything Spread Your Wings And Fly
As Time Grooves On Load Up On Guns The Maddening Laughter
Bass Infected Funk Rapidly Moving Images Underneath The Fading Sun
Behind Closed Eyelids Sailing To Byzantium Vanishing Horizons
My "themes" are not traditional genre folders - it's more based on, uhh, moods. Nobody understands my system except me. Well, all of those directories hint to sth special/symbolic for the music in it, but that's for you to figure out! :D

Other than that:

- /audio/theme/artist/album/Tracknumber - Band - Title.mp3
- album is not just the album name but includes the label/year and looks like this:


fish@fishbook:/media/stoked/Possessdby/Audio/Load Up On Guns/Nirvana$ ls

Nirvana - 1989 - Bleach (Sub Pop) Nirvana - 1992 - Lithium (Geffen)
Nirvana - 1991 - Nevermind (Geffen) Nirvana - 1993 - All Apologies (Geffen)
Nirvana - 1991 - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Geffen) Nirvana - 1993 - Heart-Shaped Box (Geffen)
Nirvana - 1992 - Come As You Are (Geffen) Nirvana - 1993 - In Utero (Geffen)
Nirvana - 1992 - Hormoaning (Geffen) Nirvana - 1994 - MTV Unplugged in New York (Geffen)
Nirvana - 1992 - In Bloom (Geffen) Nirvana - 1996 - From the Muddy Banks of the Whiskah (Geffen)
Nirvana - 1992 - Incesticide (Geffen) Nirvana - 2002 - Nirvana (Geffen)
--> when I browse my albums in a filebrowser, they show up in chronological order!

- all directories contain a cover.jpg in 300x300 pixels
- all directories contain a review.txt with my personal thoughts of the album
- everything is 100% tagged, with embedded id3 covers and all that fancy stuff...

You might wonder why the review.txt's? Well, that's why:

http://dachboden-wg.de/ftp/pics/fish/amarok_context1.png

Personal review on the left when I play an album! ;)

(Amarok conTEXT script)

Also, in Jinzora my reviews will show up as album descriptions, still working on that though.

In this case, a pretty "unusal" kind of "review" made entirely up of quotes from the movie, haha... o.O

[Spr0k3t]

/media/mp3/- <artist first letter> -/Artist/Album/## - title.mp3

I have a mp3tag script that will organize it this way for me.

How do people handle CD compilations? I haven't found an elegant way to deal with 'various artists' yet.

This is a common problem with good D&B compilations or any soundtrack offerings. For this I created an /Albums/ directory and then the album name from there. Each song is then makelinked to the artists root folders. So I may have two different versions of the same song from different albums. Generally when this is the case, I just makelink the song from the artists album into the compilation directory.

Convoluted, but it works well. Compilations are the very reason why I started creating links.

[Spr0k3t]

Well, this is very subjective.

I gave up organizing my collection in genres, instead I have 15 "themes" now:

...

In this case, a pretty "unusal" kind of "review" made entirely up of quotes from the movie, haha... o.O

Wow! I thought I was anal about my music. "That's a pretty sweet bike you got there"

Not trying to be mean, just a cool idea of how you have it... Kudos!

[ButteBlues]

/documents/music/ARTIST/ALBUM/## - ARTIST - TRACK.EXT

[stokedfish]

Wow! I thought I was anal about my music. "That's a pretty sweet bike you got there"

Not trying to be mean, just a cool idea of how you have it... Kudos!
Aww, haha...I didn't take it as an offense, no worries - I know I'm a bit freaky when it comes to music... o.O

3 screenshots attached, my small (but perfectly tagged) collection in Jinzora... <3

(yes, I do indeed use my "themes" in the genre tag) :)