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Cov(enant)
August 24th, 2008, 05:08 PM
I have collected so many mp3 files that I would like to sort out the big mess on my HDD now.
I wonder what you think would be a nice way to sort them possibly.
For example ...

1. A to Z ...

Alanis Morissette
Alphaville
Amy Whinehouse
.
.
.
Spargo
Steve Wonder
Tanya Stephens
ect

2. By genre ...

Pop
Raggae
Meditation
Hip Hop
Jazz
Blues
Soundtracks
R & B
Instrumental
World

3. By country / language ...

English
Africa
Japan
France
Spain
Italy
German
Indonesia
Philippins
Miscellaneous

Besides this, when I look for a modern program that helps with indexing / tagging ... google comes up with something called "file / mp3 sorter" on many different websites .... that's a little strange.
Has anyone any experience with this one ?

Thanks in advance.

Ub1476
August 24th, 2008, 05:15 PM
If it's really, really large I would probably do by genre.. EasyTAG is a good program for setting tags.

Depressed Man
August 24th, 2008, 05:17 PM
I do my collection by A-Z.

And for certain areas that easily fit together like rap or asian artists I lump them so it's..

Rap > Artist Name
Asian Artists > Boa

I generally don't do collections by genres since bands usually have several genres they are in (which makes it hard to organize).

voteforpedro36
August 24th, 2008, 05:19 PM
Mine is in ~/Music/$ARTIST/$ALBUM. It works well enough, seeing as how I don't have tons of genres anyway, and not that much music (688 songs). if you have more, Genre may work.

fwojciec
August 24th, 2008, 05:31 PM
Music/Genre/Artist/Album/CD#

My collection is full albums only though. I find genres necessary, since I have something like 120GB worth of music in my collection...

EasyTAG is a good recommendation as far as tagging programs go.

Warpnow
August 24th, 2008, 05:34 PM
Mine is in ~/Music/$ARTIST/$ALBUM. It works well enough, seeing as how I don't have tons of genres anyway, and not that much music (688 songs). if you have more, Genre may work.

Mine is the same.

But its irrelevent. I never play them outside of Rythmbox.

mips
August 24th, 2008, 05:42 PM
Artists-Album-Song

I would not bother about genre as it is not always that easy to classify songs this way, they could fit more than one genre.

fwojciec
August 24th, 2008, 05:47 PM
I would not bother about genre as it is not always that easy to classify songs this way, they could fit more than one genre.

You just have to use few, uhm, generic genres. I had to, for example, make a "Rock, Pop" genre, since I couldn't always distinguish which was which. So now my Sepultura albums sit right next to Sade :)

mips
August 24th, 2008, 06:29 PM
You just have to use few, uhm, generic genres. I had to, for example, make a "Rock, Pop" genre, since I couldn't always distinguish which was which. So now my Sepultura albums sit right next to Sade :)

I might loose some sleep over specifying the right genre, so I'd rather just leave it out ;)

grossaffe
August 24th, 2008, 06:33 PM
I organize mine by Artist and Album. Just have a bunch of artist folders in my music folder, and then a bunch of album folders within those. place songs in the correct album and everything is nice and arranged.

Ghliofris
August 24th, 2008, 06:36 PM
I go by Genres, era, artist, then album. Country, rock, metal, foreign, R&B, Rap. Then 50s, 60s 70s, 80s, 90s, 00. Then artist, then album.

Wolki
August 24th, 2008, 06:41 PM
Rap > Artist Name
Asian Artists > Boa

Just out of curiosity, where do you keep your Asian rap?

Anyway, I sort my stuff alphabetcally in several directories, either Albums / Artist / Album, Single Tracks / Artist / Tracks, Compilations / Album, or Unsorted / Mess. :)

bras
August 24th, 2008, 06:41 PM
http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/8307/musicqq0.th.png (http://img229.imageshack.us/my.php?image=musicqq0.png)

I use this structure for my Mp3s. Together with foobar2000 and playlists .

picpak
August 24th, 2008, 06:51 PM
Initial/Artist/Album/Artist - Title.mp3

Maybe not the cleanest solution, but I like it. :)

vishzilla
August 24th, 2008, 06:54 PM
I sort Artist/Album/Track

You can always look up by Genre with the help of the Music Player

init1
August 24th, 2008, 08:19 PM
Actually, I don't organize my music at all. The files are placed into folders by the date that I found them. Thus, my mp3 folder looks like this:


$ ls mp3/
6-28 6-29 7-14 7-16 7-17 7-18 7-19 7-20 7-22 7-23 7-24 7-26 7-27 7-30 7-31 7-32

Doesn't matter though since I only listen to the songs on my iPod, which organizes them automatically. When I'm using my laptop, I just use internet radio.

RiceMonster
August 24th, 2008, 08:23 PM
I have mine organized like Genre > Artist > Album. I'm considering doing a huge clean up and deleting all the stuff I don't listen to, then doing A-Z Artist > Album. That'll be less folders to navigate through.

If you have > 4000 songs, you might benefit from doing it from genre. I have almost 7000 now.

rune0077
August 24th, 2008, 08:27 PM
Letter (A-Z)>Artist>Album>Title

That's how Amarok sorts it. I'm to lazy to do it myself, so I just drop the music files in the music folder, and then uses Amarok's "manage files" command, and it moves them into the right folders all by itself.

RiceMonster
August 24th, 2008, 08:52 PM
The genre folder where annoying me, so right now I'm in the process of organizing my music like /A-Z/Artist/Album/Track. Shouldn't take too long.

Depressed Man
August 24th, 2008, 09:11 PM
Just out of curiosity, where do you keep your Asian rap?

Anyway, I sort my stuff alphabetcally in several directories, either Albums / Artist / Album, Single Tracks / Artist / Tracks, Compilations / Album, or Unsorted / Mess. :)

I set it up so Asian supercedes rap. So Asian rap (say Jay Chou has some rap songs [I think]) would just go into Asian. Though Asian meaning actually from Asia. Not artists that are Asian-American or such. Besides few of the songs in that folder are english anyways so it makes it easier to stick them together. :)

jomiolto
August 24th, 2008, 09:13 PM
Artists and albums A-Z. I've never liked sorting by genres because they are way too vague, and one album might belong to several genres -- heck, I don't even know into which genre to classify half the music I listen to :)

Besides artists and albums, I also sort my music by its source. I've got separate directories for music I've ripped from CDs, music from Jamendo, music from kahvi.org, tracked music (mostly demoscene related), etc. CD rips I actually store in two different directories, one for lossless FLAC rips and another for mp3s.

billgoldberg
August 24th, 2008, 09:15 PM
Use genre.

In the genre folders, sort from a-z.

ghindo
August 24th, 2008, 10:58 PM
Mine is in ~/Music/$ARTIST/$ALBUM. It works well enough, seeing as how I don't have tons of genres anyway, and not that much music (688 songs). if you have more, Genre may work.This is how I do it, and I have 6000+ songs. The music files themselves are named by [Track Number] - [Artist] - [Track Title]

Genre is so subjective and tricky that I usually don't even bother tagging or sorting by genre.

tbroderick
August 24th, 2008, 11:04 PM
M/Marvin Gaye/1971- What's Going On/01 - What's Going On.ogg

Initial/Artist/Year - Album/Track# - Title

I like music players that browse by folder and I like my albums to be sorted by year rather then alphabetically to show the progression of an artist.

rune0077
August 24th, 2008, 11:40 PM
I like music players that browse by folder and I like my albums to be sorted by year rather then alphabetically to show the progression of an artist.

Or regression, as is so often the case :)

rogerdean
July 8th, 2010, 10:16 AM
Does anyone have a suggestion for a solid app to organise my folders according to the metadata? Right now I use Songbird for this, and it does it nicely, but it's no longer developed for linux and I need an alternative...
Cheers

aeiah
July 8th, 2010, 12:03 PM
artist/album/track

its the only way to go since genre is ambiguous and years disrupt the flow when you want to listen to a band that spans a decade. (although as a poster above mentioned, artist/year/album/track can be good)

genres are only useful for organising music within music library applications that treat them as tags, ie, so you can have multiple genres per artist.

are there any applications that will organise music the way photos can be organised in f-spot, incidentally? ie, tags have parents and children - if i select 'rock' then everything in punk and metal also get added, because these are subgenres (or children) of the rock tag.

Paqman
July 8th, 2010, 12:24 PM
Don't worry too much about folder hierarchy, it doesn't matter. Just tag them properly. Easytag is pretty good. Once they're tagged and indexed by your player you can sort and search them on the fly.

bomanizer
November 16th, 2010, 08:54 PM
Don't worry too much about folder hierarchy, it doesn't matter. Just tag them properly. Easytag is pretty good. Once they're tagged and indexed by your player you can sort and search them on the fly.

+1, forget about folders and focus on tagging.
I use Musicbrainz Picard: http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardDownload

It's in the repos.

Cheers!

czr114
November 16th, 2010, 08:58 PM
Artist/Album/[standard track name]

ctrl+f makes for easy location. No need for superfluous bucketing.

speedofdark
November 16th, 2010, 09:01 PM
If you have one genre just order by artist, otherwise genre > artist....can't go wrong there.

ctrlmd
November 16th, 2010, 09:28 PM
i organize my library as
Language \ Artist \ albums \ tracks