Best way to organize Music on harddrive? (1 Viewer)

[tomtom21000]

I´ve invested 100+ hours now to broaden my music collection and tag them properly.
But I am unsure on how I should finally store them on the harddrive.

At the moment I have +/- 5,000 songs.
I concentrated on the tags Artist, Album, Title, track, year and embedded cover-art. Paid little attention to genre so far.

I have ripped a couple of my full album CD´s.
But also a lot of my own best of compilations. I have tried to tag them all back to the original album on which the song first appeared.

The result is, that the album view is of little relevance for me, because for most albums in the list, there are only one or two songs of the album.

The database views like artist, title, year are very good.

-----------------
Now, if I sort on HD like artist - title this would be great on one the hand, because one problem i am getting to now, is duplicates.
But this would do basically the same as the (database) artist view, which i configured artist A-Z - title (without album).

Drawback is, that if I want to listen to chart titles from 2006, this is not possible this way. If I want some techno, the same.
-> I use scrobble a lot which solves this.
-> I could go through all the genre tags

And should I sort the full albums this way, too?

Or arrange them like 60´s, 70´s, 80´s, ...

Or Oldies, Rock. Charts ...

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What´s your tip for arranging the songs?
What´s your tip on avoiding duplicates (Tag-program)

tomtom

 

[roosterx]

At first i arranged them as just alternative, and pop + scandinavian, but as my mp3 collection grew i found this quite messy, so now i use:
1960s/groupname/[Album Release Year] album
and same for 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000

But at times i just have some songs from one artist - not whole albums, then i just have simple folders at mp3 root, like Euro Dance, Hip Hop etc

 

[_man_]

Hi there,

I got aprox. 10K music WavPack files.

All of them are organised by albums, this way:

%genre%\%artist% - %year% - %album%\%tracknumber% - %Title%
whrere %genre% is limited to Pop-Rock, Jazz-World or Classical.

And that's it. If you want to make special compilations etc. you should then use the database with filters or some playlists.

Just my two cents

 

[knutinh]

Due to historical and practical reasons:
top-level:
lossy singles
lossy albums
lossless albums

Next level:
Artists A-F
Artists G-L
...

Next level:
#Artist

Next level
#Album

filename:
#track_no - #Artist - #title

example:
music\lossy albums\Artist A-F\2 unlimited\hits unlimited\01 - 2 Unlimited - Do What's Good For Me.mp3

This way I have sensible filenames that can be manually interpreted and will typically sort in track order.

I typically do no use the file structure for everyday songselection, I rather have playlists or search for specific songs.

-k

 

[BugsBunny]

Hi,

I need my files to be compatible on my HTPC, on CD-Rs for my car radio and other MP3 players.

Maybe it's a good starting point to think about media types and how the mp3s should be stored there. Something like roosterx uses may be very good for HTPC use but may cause more work if you want to put mp3s/ mp3 CDs on other media.

I've a lot of MP3 files (most ripped from my own CDs)
The naming convention for my MP3s is the following:
%Track %Artist - %Tracktitle
The files of a CD I put into a folder %Artist - %CDTitle
If the CD is a soundtrack/mix/various artists the folder name is %CDTitle only
I use some misc. folders as well

My car mp3 player only reads Id3V1 so all files need useful tags for Id3V1 as well. I don't like the name simply to be cut off on a 'random position' because it doesn't fit into id3v1.
I use Mp3tag v2.36 and Renatager to tag my files. If one or more tags of a file do not fit into id3v1 it get's a full id3v2 tag as well and the id3v1 is manually edited to something useful then.

Because I store the files on CD as well the max. length of the filename + extension must be 64 to not run into problems (filenames that are longer than 60 are cut off on CD). Renatager shows filenames/dirnames that are too long in red - I manually edit them.

On my HTPC I made 10 dirs with some kind of genre names (alternative, jazz, world, singles, rock&pop, download ...) where I store the CDs

I leave the genre tag empty because the genres of Id3V1 don't meet my needs.

I use the comment tag to store info about the origin of the file/quality options of the mp3 encoder.

I do not store album art inside an mp3 file. It's a waste of space and often means redundancy. The car mp3 player can't read album art just like other mp3 players.
So I use a folder.jpg for the album art in each folder. If I need the files on another medium I simply delete the jpg.

With my car mp3 player I can access 12 folders that have (01 02 03 ...) in the beginning of the folder name with buttons. If I want eg. certain 8 MP3 CDs on a CD-R I simply copy them to temp folder, put numbers in the front and burn the CD-R.

I think the organisation of the mp3 collection should depend on the type of media I want to put the MP3s onto. (HTPC only / other mp3 players).

I use almost only the folder view in Media Portal. If this view is used much, then you have to think about a useful organisation. If too much CDs are in one folder, it's not easy to navigate through them and the same happens if you use too much subfolders to store your mp3s.

My organisation of my mp3s evolved during time (stated with a RioVolt 100). It adapted to the types of media I use (genre folders). Maybe I will divide some categories in future if they grow too big. But the naming convention (folder/file) I use is the same since the beginning and I am quite happy with it.

But for sure there is no 'best way' that fit's everyone's need.

 

[zag2me]

Again for historical reasons I have 3 types of rips on my hard drive.

\Lossy\genre\album name

\Lossless\verified\genre\album name

\Lossless\unverified\genre\album name

Mp3's go in the first, flac files go in the 2nd, then flac files with .log files go in the last.

As time goes by the mp3 directory gets smaller and smaller as its replaced with verified lossless rips.