Hey, guys! and I figured I’d extend the convo here. He gave me some good ideas, and i’m curious to see how
So after over half a decade of neglect, I finally decided to get my music files in order again. I’m in a far different place than I was back then. I used to have my files organized solely for p2p and trading purposes, but i’m no longer involved in all of that so i’m trying to think of some new ways to organize my files best. I was talking with @Jigsaw a bit about this earlier, and he gave me some good ideas, so it got me curious to see how other people were organizing their files, too.
So, how do you all organize your files? Do you do it all manually or do you let an app like itunes manage your collection? Do you organize it by genre? By artist? Date? Country? How do you name your folders? Be as detailed as you’d like! Hell, post screens even!
I use iTunes and I let iTunes sort my library. Manually dragging and dropping folders in Windows Explorer is outdated. If your audio player isn’t managing your library for you, I feel bad for you. If, perchance, this is the main blocker behind maintaining a local collection, then allow me to shill iTunes for a few seconds.
I don’t use many Apple products, but I do think they have the local music manager (almost) perfected. There was a time when iTunes was slow and bloated, but Apple refactored a lot of features into their own services and fixed the performance issues. More importantly, iTunes will manage your library if you tell it to. iTunes sorts music by Artist, then by Album. Songs are numbered “01 Track Name”. It also creates a folder called “Automatically Add To iTunes” in the Music folder, and when you drag music into that, iTunes does the rest. This isn’t something I’ve thought about in over a decade.
So obviously I pinned this in Windows Explorer and drag whatever I download into it. Call it a day. The only extra step I have to take is to convert FLAC to ALAC, because iTunes doesn’t support FLAC and that’s it’s biggest shortcoming IMO. But I can live with ALAC.
Few limitations I found with this approach:
Tracks that begin with a dot cause issues. Look out for tracks that begin “…like this”. You might have to alter the name to get rid of the dots for iTunes to see it.
Sometimes iTunes sees different metadata than what is presented in another player. I haven’t had this issue in a while but worth noting.
Artists with the same name need to be distinguished. Haven’t had this problem often, but I use the Unicode variants to separate them.
Compilations go into their own folder! This has some implications for if you are searching them up on IOS, because they aren’t where you would expect them to be.
MUSIC
→ (Fidelity & VK v. non-VK)
→ → (Artist Name)
→ → → ( [XXXX.XX.XX] Album Name] )
→ → → → (0X Track Name)
Just to go through the whole process (not entirely necessary):
I extract with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to FLAC (or a bunch of WAV files out of impatience) if it starts as physical media and follow up with MP3Tag for providing the metadata. If the band is at least somewhat well known outside of vk, a program like Musicbrainz Picard will auto-populate the metadata based on what they have in their database. I figure the vast majority of Japanese indie stuff will not be in the MusicBrainz database. If the release in question is visual kei, there is vk.gy MP3tag integration that’s been available for a while that uses their database, otherwise you’ll have to populate the metadata/album covers manually. I try to include the song name, artist name, album name, year, genre, track number, disc number, and album cover. For plain CD-R delivery, I just leave out the album cover.
…
That is what would be ideal, but I have a good chunk of folders with just the album name and Track_X.wav that I really need to sort though . Also, a bit guilty, but I’ve basically been purging my library of stuff that’s already accessible on streaming services with an ACTUALLY complete discog. I’ve been moving towards minimizing my local library to the essentials.
That is all I need in structure. It is the most usable for me when browsing via DAP and foobar. I don’t care for sub-genres and not all my files are tagged anyway. It is the least amount of work trying to find and sort whenever I try out music players in different DAPs.
I tried iTunes before they done took everything and put a copy in different corners of my PC lol. Also sorted in some weird way. But this was way back, I don’t know what it’s like now.
I haven’t changed the way I organise my music in like 15+ years, but the way I do it is pretty similar to colorfuljinsei! I don’t sort by fidelity, but I sort by genre first (jpop, visual kei, metal), then the rest pretty much follows the same. Though I do tend to throw the few jrock bands I have in with vk, and there’s some not-quite-metal in the metal folder but eh, it’s close enough for me lol
Some of my muuuuch older files are formatted like “Artist - 【Album】 01 Track Title” but that’s definitely a remnant from the trading days lol
I also use EAC for my physical copies, and MP3Tag for when I need to tag a bunch of things (but usually I manually tag in EAC as I go). Meanwhile in my music players of choice (foobar or poweramp), I just sort by artist and pick who I feel like listening to at the time.
And I guess I’m the opposite of Zeus too, cause I prefer to manually manage my library and absolutely hate iTunes
For all the artists I like I have the best quality files possible (if possible .wav). And I rename each album/single begin with the year it was release, for example ’ 2005_Coll:Set ’ (d’espairsray). In this way, when I open ’ D’espairsray ’ file on my hard drive, I have all their discography in the right order in front of me.
Literally i have zero organisation, i just remember the name of it an search it up
or i remember the place where it was.
And yeah, i do loose shit like that XDDD
Different times have called for different measures I guess.
Back when I started downloading (and easily on-hand file sharing was in more rudimentary stages), everything was just loose files within a folder called “Music”. With the discovery of whole albums being shared and especially with torrent files, that changed.
My current system that I have on my ancient PC looks like this: a “Japanese”, an “International” and a “Hungarian” folder. Within those are folders for bands, and within the band folders the releases are listed in a “(YYYY.MM.DD) release title” format (sometimes it’s just the year, not the whole release date). After a while I thought about having a backup so I bought an external HD.
On the external HD it’s ultimately very similar, in that there are band folders with release folders within, but instead of grouping them into country/region folders, I went for a loose genre distinction approach based on what type of music I have the most of (so for example “black metal” and “death metal” are separate folders, but I have a lumped-together “hip-hop, r’n’b, funk” folder cuz I don’t listen to as many artists from those individual genres).
Filetype-wise, I strive for good quality but at a reasonable size. So lossless formats are out of the question. I usually go for 320 kbps mp3 when I can, but a high-quality VBR mp3 is also perfectly okay, as well as AAC (this is probably the best in terms of quality + economic filesize, but I’m so used to 320 kbps mp3 that I almost always automatically settle for that, lol).
Nowadays I’m thinking of getting a backup for the backup, just in case… My 2TB space on the external HD is close to being full.
I drag a release in, hit “Lookup”. If it’s not in the MBZ database - often the case for rare VK - I add it quickly (takes just 1-2 minutes if importing from Discogs). Once added I send the newly added entry to Picard, drag my files onto it, and after checking everything over I can simply click “Save” which automatically tags/renames/moves everything the way I want it. It grabs and saves cover art too.
Music in my actual “library” (that is, separate from seeding torrent files, Soulseek, miscellaneous hoards, etc.) currently follows this hierarchy:
/Category/Genre/Artist/(yyyy.mm.dd) (type) Album Name [ext] {cat#}/1 - Track Title.ext
Every album has ARTIST, ALBUMARTIST, ALBUM, TITLE, GENRE, DATE, TRACKNUMBER, TRACKTOTAL, DISCNUMBER, and DISCTOTAL tags at bare minimum. Omnibus/VA releases go into a Various Artists artist folder with ALBUMARTIST tag set to Various Artists.
A cover.jpg is required for every album. I take this to the extreme, spending hours perspective warping auction photos of rare CD’s just so they’re usable enough in the library. Besides the cover, anything constituting a scan goes into a “Scans” subfolder alongside the album tracks.
In order to ensure adherence to my library schema, I have more custom scripts to walk through all directories and confirm everything’s in order. Obviously even still it’s still a lot of work, but I greatly enjoy that grind and the payoff of being able to find whatever I want whenever I want is very rewarding.
My journey with collecting digital music files began roughly 20 years ago with Winamp. Back then I seldom downloaded a full album, it was more like individual tracks and I simply put them in one big folder, named them (inconsistently) and used Winamp’s search function to find what I wanted to listen to.
Around 2008 I got my first Macbook, moved all of my music to iTunes and started using the tagging features for the first time. By then I had amassed a decent collection of japanese music and went through the painstaking process of trying to tag everything properly. I’d used iTunes on my Macbook for a couple of years until I switched to a Windows laptop in 2012 and migrated everything to the godawful Windows version of iTunes.
The biggest step towards a satisfying tagging system and neat file and folder structure came in 2016 when I finally switched to a customized version of foobar2000 which is THE best application for music listening and music library maintenance imo.
Fast forward to today and this is my setup and process:
I use ROON for music listening on both my desktop setup and living room HIFI system. The ROON core runs on an i7 Intel NUC which acts as a music server.
I still use foobar2000 for tagging and transferring music files to the server. This is the file naming system and folder structure I prefer:
In foobar I obviously only use categories I find helpful or essential. For albums with multiple artists, like V.A.s, I also use the “album artist” category.
A couple of years back I started replacing as much of my collection with lossless rips as I could and I’m pretty happy with where I’m at right now:
A lot of the M4A files are lossless as well (ALAC) but as a VK fan there’ll always be that filthy residue of 25 year old rips of some demo tapes you’ll never get rid of
That entire music folder contains probably around 15% western music but I mostly stream anything that’s not VK because it’s just easier.
In ROON I often use the built-in search tools to filter for example: VK from 1991-1994.
its a little bit exhausting to organise everything for years.
However, I find it very simple inside the music folders like this for exemple:
Of course i have my madness to try to found HD cover art from every release. I love edit tags and all the metadata from the files correctly. From Kanji to Romaji for exemple.
Currently Im changing my entire mp3 collection to ALAC and AAC. There no sense to me have mp3 files, basically when i have almost everything from Apple and of course AAC is much better in terms of quality.
When I want to listen to a specific band, I just add it to my cloud to listen to on my iPhone. Of course I have nowadays several backups of everything, both in external HD and in the cloud.
Manually and simply. I have two folders, one for Japanese music, and one for everything else (the Japanese folder is still the bigger one). In those, it’s just an alphabetical list of folders for bands, but within the bands, everything is dated so I know the chronological order.
Music
→ Band
→→ YYYY - Album (for Western bands) / YYYY.MM.DD - Album (for Japanese bands)
→→→ NN. Song
I do all the tagging and sorting manually because I can’t stand anything being mistagged or so. I guess that’s the last.fm curse.
For tagging I use mp3tag:
→ Open the files in mp3tag
→→ Select all files, right-click “Remove tag” (with settings set to remove ID3v1 and APE, and to write ID3v2.4 UTF-8)
→→→ Save, right-click “Extended tag” and remove all tags except for ALBUM, ALBUMARTIST, ARTIST, TITLE, TRACK and YEAR.
The rest has no real order to it:
→→→→ Save, click “Auto-numbering Wizard”, auto-number the songs.
→→→→→ Save, check Discogs etc. for the actual tracklist and amend track titles if necessary.
→→→→→→ Save and click “Tag - Filename” with the format string $num(%track%,2). %title%.
→→→→→→→ Save and correct the year if necessary, put it as YYYY.MM.DD if it’s a Japanese band.
→→→→→→→→ Save and correct the thumbnail if necessary.
And then I move the folder to the correct artist in Music, open AIMP, click “Add files” and “Update”, so it scans the music folder again and the new files are added to AIMP.
Done
Oh and if for some reason I only have FLAC, I turn them into mp3 320kbps with xMedia Recode first, because I literally cannot hear the difference with my destroyed ear drums and bad audio setup anyway.
. Also, a bit guilty, but I’ve basically been purging my library of stuff that’s already accessible on streaming services with an ACTUALLY complete discog. I’ve been moving towards minimizing my local library to the essentials.
