on your computer?

im trying to think of a good system

12/8/2009 10:50:11 PM

I have every single file just named by the track #, like "Track 1.mp3" or "Track 12.mp3" and I have all the songs in the same folder. Got like 20,000 MP3's in the same folder. For example, "Track 5 - Copy 483.mp3" or "Track 9 - Copy 192.mp3"

12/8/2009 11:06:38 PM

You travel to the 2000s where you use the tags+search and you don't give a flying fuck how its organized on the file system.

12/8/2009 11:07:20 PM

^^sounds great

^ thats only good to look up specific songs

right now i made diferent folders, rock, rap, old school, hilary duff, etc

that way i can browse a folder and find songs i forgot about
say im in a mood for old school i can go to that folder, anyways thanks for nothing tww

12/8/2009 11:14:46 PM

I haven't had the time to go through and organize all mine, but http://musicbrainz.org/ is supposed to be very helpful.

12/8/2009 11:29:20 PM

A tediously manually alphabetized collection of everything, organized by letter of band's first letter or number. This was done four years ago.
Splitting genres out from this, right around now, sucks even more.

12/8/2009 11:31:17 PM

artist, then year

12/8/2009 11:33:36 PM

itunes. welcome to 2004.

12/8/2009 11:35:01 PM

^Yep, iTunes.

Just set it to automatically organize everything into the iTunes folder and it will put them into folders for Artist and then Album, naming the individual files with their track names and numbers.

Assuming, of course, that your ID3 tags are in order.

12/8/2009 11:58:00 PM

I'm old school and don't use ID3 tags; I strip them all out and name all the files "<artist> - <track#> - <title>.mp3" (except for compilations, which are <track#> - <artist> - <title>.mp3". Then my file structure is

Genre\
  --> Subgenre\ if applicable
    --> Artist\
      --> Year - Album\
        --> Disc #\ if applicable

12/9/2009 12:10:16 AM

I really have to ask - what is the advantage of 1) not using ID3 tags, and 2) not just allowing a program to manage your organization for you....
If you don't like iTunes, fine - winamp or Songbird or WMP or basically any media player in existence will take care of organization for you. It will create folder structures and rename everything, however you tell it to. Why not do it that way? And any "i'm super anal and I want to do it myself" excuse doesn't cut it, because computer programs are a lot less error prone than manual editing, not to mention faster.

12/9/2009 12:23:15 AM

itunes will FUCK UP your folder structure. For instance, if you have a rap album which "features" a lot of artists, itunes tends to make new folders for each different "artist", so your album gets all separated.

12/9/2009 12:41:16 AM

If you check the box to mark it as a compilation album, it won't do that.

12/9/2009 12:48:56 AM

^^or you can tag it as a compilation and it won't do that.


[Edited on December 9, 2009 at 12:49 AM. Reason : ^beat me]

12/9/2009 12:49:27 AM

^^^and who the fuck cares? Only OCD people. In people-without-a-personality-disorder-land, we simply go to the music player and view the songs by album.

Quote :

" right now i made diferent folders, rock, rap, old school, hilary duff, etc that way i can browse a folder and find songs i forgot about say im in a mood for old school i can go to that folder, anyways thanks for nothing tww"

Ever heard of a playlist? It even allows you to put a song in more than one playlist! So, you can put the same song in rock, old school, and hillary diff at the same time!! There are even smart playlists that search for different criteria or genius playlists that recommend shit. There's even a browse mode that's like browsing records in a store.

Stripping tags and organizing by folders is probably the most ass backwards thing I have heard about all week (I hope that was a joke).

[Edited on December 9, 2009 at 12:56 AM. Reason : .]

12/9/2009 12:56:00 AM

Quote :

"I really have to ask - what is the advantage of 1) not using ID3 tags, and 2) not just allowing a program to manage your organization for you.... If you don't like iTunes, fine - winamp or Songbird or WMP or basically any media player in existence will take care of organization for you. It will create folder structures and rename everything, however you tell it to. Why not do it that way? And any "i'm super anal and I want to do it myself" excuse doesn't cut it, because computer programs are a lot less error prone than manual editing, not to mention faster."

Faster, hell yes. But ID3 tags are a hell of a lot more error prone than manual editing... if you're going to be as anal about your own structure as I am, I'm not going to make mistakes doing it. I can't count how many times I've downloaded albums, even legally from a band's own record label webshop, and seen a hip-hop album labeled as Blues or some stupid shit like that. Relatively, it's not as much of an issue anymore as it was 10 years ago, but it happens a LOT; plus, a lot of times I just might not agree with an assessment of what genre is, or I'd rather have it labeled with a subgenre. You still see ID3 tags with no artist and titles of "Track 1," "Track 2"; I'm also anal and prefer for all the words to be capitalized unless the album art on the back of the CD cover systematically puts things in lower case or is otherwise weird about that.

I don't use playlists, don't care about viewing album art while listening, etc, so that isn't a factor; I just add what album I want to listen to, or I can shuffle an entire subdirectory, and that's fine by me. It's organized well enough that I can use my directory structure as a proxy for playlists according to how broadly-related I want a playlist to be.

I'm also irrational and stuck in the past, so I still use Winamp 2.9x. I don't like iTunes (tried it about a year after it first was ported to Windows, and it left a bad taste in my mouth, haven't revisited the newer versions). Before that, I didn't like Winamp 3.x and haven't bothered going back since to try 5.x or whatever release they're on. Winamp 2.9x doesn't display track numbers on the playlist if the files are tagged, which is something I like to see. I just have a system that works for me, and now that my music collection is sitting at somewhere near 200GB, it's too high of a barrier to change for me to adopt anything new. My hierarchy enables the full range of functionality that I desire.

Whenever I acquire new music, it doesn't take much marginal time at all to organize it. Maybe 20 extra seconds on average for a CD, and I have a batch file renaming program that I can use to generate the standardized file names. I'm ok with the sporadic marginal time as opposed to the massive fixed time investment it would take to tag everything properly (emphasis on properly) and verify it all at this point.

Different strokes for different folks; I don't recommend my system to others, but it works for me.

[Edited on December 9, 2009 at 1:14 AM. Reason : ]

12/9/2009 1:13:49 AM

not a single difference or "advantage" you listed there can't be taken care of either automatically, or manually but much faster (e.g. selecting all songs by an artist and simply changing the genre to whatever you want it, all at once) with a management program. Not to mention, if you don't use playlists and keep everythign organized only by artist, who gives a shit what genre it's listed with.


and you mention you basically have a high switching cost, because you've invested so much time in properly labeling everything. Well in that case, switching would actually be that much faster, because there are innumerable ID3 taggers that will generate tags for you based directly on folder/file name of your existing mp3s. But then, of course, you get the flexibility to use a manager or the file system to do whatever you want with your music

12/9/2009 1:28:02 AM

Quote :

"If you check the box to mark it as a compilation album, it won't do that."

I was not aware of this.

Quote :

"In people-without-a-personality-disorder-land, we simply go to the music player and view the songs by album."

Cock up your ass much? What if you're trying to burn a data CD and your "one" album is actually separated into several different folders? Some people use their computer to do shit without going through the fucking media player.

12/9/2009 1:32:23 AM

again, you can control whether it separates the albums in any modern music player.

12/9/2009 1:34:24 AM

I understand that now. skokiaan is just being a giant douche.

12/9/2009 1:36:00 AM

no, it's that your arguments literally make no logical sense.

I know and understand that people have different preferences and different opinions on various topics. But that doesn't mean that for certain tasks, there sometimes aren't definitively and demonstrably better ways of doing them than others.

12/9/2009 1:44:56 AM

Quote :

"What if you're trying to burn a data CD and your "one" album is actually separated into several different folders? "

I suppose you don't know that you can burn cds from a player, either?

Quote :

"Some people use their computer to do shit without going through the fucking media player."

Yes, dumb people.

Quote :

"skokiaan is just being a giant douche."

Better than being the dumbass defending some shit that is 10 years out of date and wholly inferior to everything else.

12/9/2009 1:49:46 AM

Quote :

"but http://musicbrainz.org/ is supposed to be very helpful."

I never said that manual editing is the way to go, and if you'll look at my first post in this thread, it should be obvious that I've never actually used musicbrainz, so if using musicbrainz gets lumped in to the manual editing category, I was still not arguing for it.

I was simply stating that in my experiences with itunes (I was not making any assumptions on any other players), it will fuck your folders up. Do y'all really have to be such pricks?

Quote :

"Better than being the dumbass defending some shit that is 10 years out of date and wholly inferior to everything else."

Please show me what I was defending that is 10 years out of date, because I don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

12/9/2009 1:58:26 AM

Quote :

"not a single difference or "advantage" you listed there can't be taken care of either automatically, or manually but much faster (e.g. selecting all songs by an artist and simply changing the genre to whatever you want it, all at once) with a management program. Not to mention, if you don't use playlists and keep everythign organized only by artist, who gives a shit what genre it's listed with. and you mention you basically have a high switching cost, because you've invested so much time in properly labeling everything. Well in that case, switching would actually be that much faster, because there are innumerable ID3 taggers that will generate tags for you based directly on folder/file name of your existing mp3s. But then, of course, you get the flexibility to use a manager or the file system to do whatever you want with your music"

I don't keep everything organized only by artist; refer to my previous post. But that's not particularly relevant to your case, I'm just clarifying.

I fully realize that there are other programs out there which do a "better" job or would give me more options, as well as do a better job of integrating with portable media players and whatnot. But if I do switch, I'll still have to maintain a new system of making sure the tags are correct; even with a fairly automated system, I'm anal enough about my music collection being properly organized (through whatever organization scheme I would adopt) that I would still be editing new tags and making sure the issues I mentioned about genres being mislabeled, etc., aren't occurring. With an automated program, I would be retagging in batch for each album; right now, I strip the tags out in batch and then rename the files in batch--not a lot of difference, honestly.

I've streamlined my own scheme enough that it's actually quite quick for me to do things manually. The marginal time savings of a more automated system would still not be much at all, and right now, I have all the functionality I want. I realize that there are probably apps out there to do things that would quickly become a must-have for me if I knew about them, but honestly, I'm ok being ignorant of them for now.

Music is a huge part of my life; I run a music website in my spare time that's successful enough to get occasional free promo albums sent to me. So if something revolutionary enough comes along that I really can't do without it, I'm sure it will be big enough that I'll hear about it somehow.

My job entails being super-rational all day long, so I actually derive some pleasure from managing my own music in an antiquated, irrational way; not only are there switching costs, I get utility from the act of not switching, as dumb as that sounds.

I guess I'm like the old businessman who still insists on reading the newspaper over a cup of coffee in the morning; if it was only about the news, he could get more targeted, relevant and interesting content by using a news aggregator online like Google News. But there's something to be said for the comfort of the ritual. It's strange, because in all other aspects of my life, I'm very anti-traditionalist, minimalist, and pro-efficiency. Perhaps I just derive so much comfort from music that this is the one place where I'm willing to cheerfully cling to something irrational.

[Edited on December 9, 2009 at 2:25 AM. Reason : ]

12/9/2009 2:23:13 AM

Is there a way to associate an album picture with a song other than using ID3 tags?

12/9/2009 2:32:09 AM

<music_folder>/<artist>/<ablum>/<track_title>
all files tagged as best as possible

12/9/2009 3:34:29 AM

I organize my music by the year that ive downloaded it.
I've found this way to be most ideal for me

12/9/2009 5:52:24 AM

i organize my mp3s autobiographically.

what? that sounds comforting you say? it is.

12/9/2009 7:33:12 AM

i used to fight iTunes and used my own scheme. As meticulous as I was, it makes more sense in this day and age to use iTunes (or the similar program of your choice). If you like your own file structure then you can keep it but still modify your music & ID3 tags within iTunes. I chose to let iTunes organize all my music so that I know it's all in one place and not sporadic across my computer.

Genius playlists have really started to make all the difference for me, as well as a few of my own.

12/9/2009 7:35:10 AM

Quote :

"If you like your own file structure then you can keep it but still modify your music & ID3 tags within iTunes."

I still do it the manual way with folders and whatnot but I still update ID tags so it'll work for itunes and scrobble on last.fm

I don't like change plus I don't really download a lot of new music anyways so it's not a big deal

12/9/2009 7:57:26 AM

with itunes

12/9/2009 8:50:44 AM

genre (but don't REALLY care about this anymore) > album (artist - album) > # - Artist - Song.mp3

All ID3 tags corrected and files renamed through a program like the godfather so it's all consistent and displays properly on any of the listening devices I use.

12/9/2009 9:05:37 AM

I use Windows Media Player in Windows 7 because of its speed and integration, but I also have Itunes so I can control my library with my iPod Touch and play my music on my home theater with airtunes

[Edited on December 9, 2009 at 9:34 AM. Reason : .]

12/9/2009 9:34:30 AM

Quote :

"i organize my mp3s autobiographically. what? that sounds comforting you say? it is."

Win.

12/9/2009 11:59:53 AM

I let iTunes do it.

I used to fight the power. I kept my hierarchy as Genre->Artist->Album->Track
But then I kind of realized that I very rarely actually needed to access the physical mp3s. Any time I want to play a song, I pull it up in iTunes. Any time I need to burn a CD, I burn it in iTunes. And what the hell else do I ever need to do with my music? As long as I can listen to it when I want to, then what the fuck does it matter how it's stored on my hard drive.

In the rare cases that I actually need to access the files (like to copy to a usb drive to transfer to another computer OMG THIEF!), I just find it in iTunes, right-click, "show in Finder", and carry on with my life. Hell, that's quicker and easier than actually scrolling through hundreds of artists within Finder itself. Not that it really matters anyway, though. iTunes's automatic sorting system is just as good as any other: Artist->Album->Track. If I feel like tracking down a song in the Finder, then I have no problem doing it. And I don't have to try to remember what year it was made in, what genre I tagged it as (Trans-Siberian Orchestra, for example. what the hell genre is that??), or whatever other hierarchy I decided on two years ago when I first imported the song.

And now with fancy schmancy Home Sharing in iTunes, I really just about never have to actually access the files.


And I really don't understand the argument about "ohhh sometimes when I download music all the tags are wrong!" So you delete the tags and physically redo each filename? Why don't you just fix the fucking tags?

12/9/2009 1:50:02 PM

I play the stuff in itunes or on my ipod, but the physical folder the music is actually in is just organized very simply: Music->Alphabetical Artist Name->Alphabetical Album Name->## Song Title

12/9/2009 1:56:53 PM

12/9/2009 2:18:29 PM

itunes


but on my harddrive, i also have

C:/
----My Documents
--------My Music
------------Band Name
-----------------Album (year)
---------------------Number - Song Title.mp3

Simple enough.

12/9/2009 3:14:32 PM

i sort every song by length of song, and couple it with size (in MB).

name a song.any song.

i'll tell you how much storage it takes up.

12/9/2009 4:30:58 PM

Yeah, but do you have any idea of the massive storage savings you could achieve by stripping out your ID3 tags?!

12/9/2009 8:32:28 PM

use MP3tag. it makes tag editing so quick and you can easily embed CUSTOM album art if you wish.

I don't let iTunes manage my filenames but I do edit the tags in itunes all the time.

grid view by artist and then sort albums chronologically ftw.

12/9/2009 11:05:36 PM

If it is a ridiculously prolific artist, or an artist for which I have an entire discography ... I like to rename the ID3 tags for album titles as

(year released) - (album title)

So what happens in iTunes browser is, say,

Quote :

" 1967 - Their Satanic Majesties Request 1968 - Beggars Banquet 1969 - Let it Bleed 1971 - Sticky Fingers 1972 - Exile on Main St. "

it really is kinda useful even if a band has some but not 10+ records (wilco, for example) ... that's the order THEY released it ... why not look at it that way?

[Edited on December 9, 2009 at 11:26 PM. Reason : quotefail]

12/9/2009 11:25:50 PM

I don't know how you guys organize by genre. that shit would drive me bonkers. genres are so diverse that its almost impossible to label them correctly and efficiently

12/10/2009 12:23:11 AM

^^ yikes. just sort by the year then filter by the band name or pick the band name in column browser. trying to "out smart" the tags is a mistake.

12/10/2009 2:46:28 AM

Quote :

"Genre\ --> Subgenre\ if applicable --> Artist\ --> Year - Album\ --> Disc #\ if applicable"

this was more or less my questions, the majority of my files are already tagged, i just want a good way to access them

right now its mostly

Genre\artist - song

if an artist has many songs i'll put it in its own folder, that way playing a whole genre is easy
now the question is what type of genres do you use

12/10/2009 11:27:30 PM

How you would want to set that up is pretty subjective. Like I said, I use my genre and subgenre folders as a way to create "natural" playlists, so the important thing is for you to define your genres in whatever way groups your music thematically in a way that's pleasing to you.

If playlisting is your goal, then "genres" should be classified in a way such that if you have two artists that you would never be in the mood to hear together, they should be in different genres. If two groups are close enough in sound that you might want them to show up together sometimes but not always, maybe that's an indication that defining a subgenre would be worthwhile.

The goal isn't perfect classification so that some snobby music critic on Pitchfork can find your shit and agree with how it's filed; the goal is classification so that you can find your shit.

12/10/2009 11:45:58 PM

Every album gets its own folder. The folder's name is of the format: Last, First - Album Name

The mp3s' filenames consist only of the song title, with the first letter of each word capitalized.

I strip out all tag info using MediaMonkey and enter then artist, album title, date, genre, and track # myself. Also encode a 250 x 250 jpeg of the album cover to each track (with MediaMonkey).

For all my downloaded individual songs for which I do not have the album, but instead downloaded as a one-off, I have a single folder simply called "Miscellaneous," and a simple "album cover" with black text that says "Other Songs." For those, the track numbers are set to blank and the album tag reads "Other Songs."

Everything gets a genre - either Pop, Rock, Folk, Modern, or Other.

Each folder (album) contains a playlist with the tracks.

As most of my library consists of Springsteen concert bootlegs, I cannot put everything in one folder, or else I'd have ~120 some "Born To Run.mp3" in the same directory which obviously will not work. Each show is treated as its own album, and I create my own album cover art for them.

I stick to .flac wherever possible, and if not, mp3s shall not be less than 320 kbps.

12/10/2009 11:54:18 PM

woah woah woah

woahwowow

Wyloch has music that isn't Bruce Springsteen?

12/11/2009 12:14:39 AM

^ I do! Believe it or not, I do. At least 5% of all my music is not Springsteen.

12/11/2009 12:28:30 AM

D:/Music
____/Live
________- individual songs
________/Artist YYYY-MM-DD (for full concerts)
____/General
________- random songs of "white music" from college days
____/HipHopR&B
________- random songs of "black music" from college days
____/Library (this is all from ripped CD's and Amazon/Zune purchases)
________/Artist
____________/Album
____________01 - Title.mp3
____/Playlists
____/Podcasts

I use Zune software for managing my music and podcasts, but generally play music on my stereo through the 360 extender (since my PC is in my office upstairs). I have lots of auto-playlists for easily listening to music purchased recently and new stuff (This Week, In Last Month, In Last 6 Months, Unrated Rock, Unrated HipHop, 2008 Favorites, 90's Favorites, etc.), It just saves me from ever having to manually select songs, no matter my mood.

[Edited on December 11, 2009 at 2:01 AM. Reason : .]

12/11/2009 2:00:24 AM