How Do You Organize Your Music?

[Pandabear 414]

Like the title says, how does everyone go about it? Right now I have 4 hard drives. 2 internal and 2 external hooked up. I mainly keep what I listen to on the 2 internal drives i have and use the other 2 external as backups.

 

As far as organizing goes, I keep all my music in 1 main folder with all the according albums following for each drive. I go artists/band name followed by the tittle of the album. I tried to include dates at one point in the folder name but it was too much work, made things messy and I realized I don't really care about date.  I have shortcuts on my desktop to access all those main music folders so I can store or bring up any album relatively quickly.  I recently also made a new folder where I keep all my lossy files.

 

For actually listening to the hundreds of gigabytes worth of songs I have amassed over the years, I usually stick to itunes. Not my favorite platform and I haven't updated it because the newer versions tend to have lots of bugs. I think I used foo bar for awhile but i forget why i stopped using it. Now i mostly use winamp. It's a pain opening and closing itunes with the huge amount of songs i have, and it's a resource hog. That's why I stick to winamp. I do audio production and sometimes I just want to listen to something inbetween sessions and itunes just takes too long and takes up ram i need. 

 

 

[Dark Kinma 960]

simplicity and efficiency :

 

One Folder for all japanese music => under this files, it's organize by band/artist name => under it's it's organize by date (ex : 1999..05.26 Cage )

Picture :

 

I always ranks after each download/ripping, to be never exceeded !

[JukaForever 758]

Since my mood is what determines the genre I listen to and since I don't always agree to the genre tagged in the files:

 

all sources

-> all music

    -> genre folders

        -> artists

    -> temp folders (new music to listen to)

        -> random files

 

I don't bother with backups, at least not yet as my drive isn't at 80% capacity. I only use one drive to store my music, any other temp folders are from my internal hardrive.

 

Foobar is always on, it has a quick search function I need for quick access to any song I want.

[eiheartx 1310]

1 HDD of 4TB for videos/series/a few live DVD (and a few movies, but I'm not a movie person anw).

1 HDD of 2TB for music only (available today: 1,16 TB). On it, folder for the musical style (OST, Black/Trash, Gothic/Sympho, Industrial/EBM, VK, J-pop, J-rock, K-pop, Metal, Rock/RnB/Pop, Visual Kei). On these folders, name of the artist/band, then a folder for each release (example: 2XXX.XX.XX / release name - CDS/EP/LP // and I keep the log detail when I rip myself a release), a PV folder (and a gallery folder according to the band, megamasso for example; and in it, folders for each member and group photos) and that's it.

I keep it organized, because I am a maniac.

I'm using iTunes to listen and organize everything, but not all are in it. I put mostly those I listen the most (but I've got the majority of it on my iPod). I also bought the other week CDpedia/DVDpedia to collect all that I have and to keep track of my collections, it will be long to add everything but I will do it.

 

CDPedia + megamasso (in french):

 

[nick 10212]

Something like this...

 

Music Library

┗━ 01.ヴィジュアル系

　┗━ タ行

　　┗━ DIR EN GREY

　　　┗━ 03.アルバム

　　　　┗━ [2014.12.10] DIR EN GREY - ARCHE (FLAC)

　　　　　┗━ DIR EN GREY - 【ARCHE】 01.Un deux.flac

[yakihiko 1480]

>Music

>>Visual kei

>>>Artist Name

>>>>Single/CD/DVD name

[Deathtopi4 428]

I keep everything organized in Itunes, and I have the setting in Itunes set so that Itunes organizes my computer's music folder in the same way everything is organized on Itunes. Sometimes it does some weird things so it's not a perfect system, but it saves me a lot of time so I don't really mind. Sadly nothing is backed up....

[doombox 4421]

I try to keep it fairly simple.

 

Music folder > Artist folder > album/single folder

 

I've recently started trying to tag the album folders with release date and bitrates. I keep everything mostly on my main hard drive, but I have a back up as well and I try to update it once a month or so. I've lost everything due to hd failure in the past. Not going to let that happen again.

[Biopanda 2675]

I just throw everything into one big folder, strip all of the tags and rename them after my favorite food products

[violetchain 912]

I do pretty much the same thing as ender-ender, except that I group projects involving my favourite artists together sometimes, so I can just drag and drop the main folder into Winamp and listen to all of the projects featuring a certain member together if I want to. Or I can just type the folder name into Winamp and everything will come up.
 

Ex.

 

TMGE AND RELATED folder:

 

-Thee Michelle Gun Elephant - ___

-Thee Michelle Gun Elephant - ___

-The Birthday folder   ->The Birthday - ___

                                   ->The Birthday - ___ 

-Chiba Yusuke folder ->SNAKE ON THE BEACH folder->SNAKE ON THE BEACH - ___

                                  ->Midnight Bankrobbers folder ->Midnight Bankrobbers - ___

                                  ->misc featuring tracks

-Radio Caroline folder ->Radio Caroline - __

-ROSSO folder          ->ROSSO - ___

...etc.

[Seimeisen 4406]

Get ready for a wall of text, you guys!

 

The mission of complete music library organisation will never end for me.

 

I got an external hard drive that I use for my iTunes library, and it also has torrents that I seed, various other shit that I've downloaded, and lossy upload files I've saved in case their links die. There are also folders within folders of music that I've downloaded but not added to iTunes. There are folders like this on my main hard drive as well. I take batches of downloads and put them in folders named by the date that I got them all (various "download runs"), like 2015-07-24.

 

Why? Because I tend to avoid adding stuff to iTunes. Again, why?! Because I like to use the album view, which is a fucking hot mess when you've got over 1,000 releases in your library.

 

Within Finder, it doesn't matter too much how things are sorted, but I do envy you guys who can use custom folder sorting. With iTunes, you're stuck with "artist name → album title", so when I'm organising my computer (replacing rips of certain releases, or moving deleted stuff I still wanna keep on my HD), it can be tedious to scroll through over a hundred band names.

 

I'm stuck with iTunes, because foobar for Mac will never happen; I'm not sure if it's technical obstacles, elitist software developers, or both. With iTunes, organisation, the way that I want it, is becoming more and more unachievable as Apple continues to fuck up their software, making iTunes and iOS less and less user friendly as time goes by.

 

Within iTunes itself, I put the release date in the Sort Album field (e.g: 2004-03-21 number three), for sort artist/song, I add back all the missing The's and A's and such, romanise kanji and kana, and spell out numbers, so this is what a typical sorting tab looks like.

 

And then, I use the grouping filed to specify if a band is VK or not. And if they're not VK (or Doujin), I specify which country/continent they're from, and for the comment field, I also put the release date (for when I'm browsing in "song view"), e.g:【2004年03月21日】(I use a custom autocorrect shortcut "codedate" to quickly get the formatting).

 

Of course most of this is for nothing, because iOS 8 ignores my sorting rules in artist view (and even ignores some artist sorting), because fuck them!

 

What I'd like to be able to do with Finder sorting is something like this:

iTunes Media

┗━ Grouping Field

　┗━ Artist Name

　　┗━ [YYYY-MM-DD] album title

　　　┗━ 01 Song Title.m4a

 

Within iTunes, I'd LOVE to go back to the artist grid view from iTunes 10 (although I do like the special album colour view in iTunes 12), or at least have an artist separator/navigator in the current album view. On the iPhone, I'd love to go back to the artist view that iOS 6 had (there are some apps that mimic this, but they're too ugly lol), and be able to view artists by grouping!

[chewi 54]

music

┗━artist

　┗━release title

　　┗━ 01 track name.audio format 

　　┗━ release title.picture format

 

if there is an artist that shares names i usually separate them by adding a characteristic, e.g.: Dev (Male) & Dev (Female).

i usually have to retag everything i download/buy/rip anyway, so changing the file names is just 1  extra step in mp3tag.

[Pandabear 414]

 

Within iTunes, I'd LOVE to go back to the artist grid view from iTunes 10

 

I second this. I miss having my playlist on the side as well without having to switch the My Music and Playlist tab. This is why I don't upgrade itunes anymore. I've thought about downgrading back, but too lazy for that. 

[paradoxal 2948]

I have a 3TB HDD drive for my music, DVD rips and torrents, and an external 1TB HDD for back ups. I only back-up my music and DVD rips, since otherwise I would need another external hard drive. I'm still emotionally scarred from Piisu's HDD failure, I don't want to experience it myself.

 

I organize my music the same way most of the others do:

 

Music

>> Lycaon

>>>> [2008.03.19] RED RUM

>>>>>> 01 RED RUM.flac

>>>>>> folder.jpg

 

I tend to keep the artist folders in a format that I can easily type with my keyboard, so usually no kanas or special characters there. Otherwise all my tags are completely romaji-free, if you don't count the album artist field. It's very useful to have the romaji in the title of an album folder, since Foobar is smart enough to let me search with that romaji!

[Seimeisen 4406]

I'm still emotionally scarred from Piisu's HDD failure, I don't want to experience it myself.

No... No, you do not! It is quite traumatic, I can tell you. I've been where he's been. It was spring of 2013, I had an external hard drive die on me, and I had no backup (I was stupid), so I had to rebuild my music library.

There were... a few things on that drive that I may never get back in this lifetime...

[hiroki 5521]

i have a 3TB for music i frequently listen to, one 2TB for classical music + stuff music i don't listen to as much, another 2TB for archiving flac rips of my cds, and one 1TB for miscellaneous junk.

 

organization-wise, it's like what most people do: VK > Artist > Release title sorted in chronological order > mp3s.

 

oh and the best way to guard against hdd failure (which is bound to happen - it's just a matter of time) is to set up a NAS in RAID5 configuration. that way you won't lose any data unless 2 of your hard disks in the array simultaneously fail - and that's highly improbable.

[inartistic 1151]

No... No, you do not! It is quite traumatic, I can tell you. I've been where he's been. It was spring of 2013, I had an external hard drive die on me, and I had no backup (I was stupid), so I had to rebuild my music library.

There were... a few things on that drive that I may never get back in this lifetime...

Uuuugggggghhhhh that's the worst!! My condolences. It took me 2 or 3 external harddrive failures, and similar losses of once-in-a-lifetime files, before signing up for a backup service. I use Backblaze. Can't live without it (although I've since been luckier with harddrives).

[inartistic 1151]

I keep my music folder in several sections (in a fittingly stupid arrangement for my personality), and then artist folders within those:

1 KISAKI family ― Matina/UCP bands

2 KISAKI family related ― related to Matina/UCP bands eg. THE BLACK SWAN

3 visual kei ― bulk of the music here

4 subpar visual kei ― lame or boring, but I don't want to delete for some reason; not put into iTunes

5 omnibus

6 pop and american

In each artist's directory I have folders marking their entire discography―for releases that I don't have, I mark the folder with ※. I number them just so I know how much of the discography I have, and so I can arrange releases which I don't know the exact release date of. Example:

Vior gloire

　　┗━01. (2011.07.30) SPECIAL MESSAGE CD ※

　　┗━02. (2011.08.17) INSPIRE

　　　　┗━Vior gloire - 01 - INSPIRE.m4a

All song filenames are in the format of [artist] - [tracknum] - [title], and all in basic Latin characters to make uploading/archiving easier. I'm also super particular about tagging; every release I download/rip, I strip all tags with Mp3tag and redo them myself. That ensures correct (“correct”?) information, but, also, it's fucking crazy how badly people can tag stuff. Especially when you get into artist sorting, and "DIR EN GREY" comes up as "emmuree" in iTunes or some shit... crazy.

[acbpn 434]

I only divide my music into three parts:

1.Visual Kei

2.-core, fav melodic death metal, technical death metal, brutal death metal

3.others

 

for the details, something like this,

H:\Musique\Visual Kei\Active\Kamijo\2015\Royal Blood～Revival Best～_2015.07.15\Emblem.m4a

and basically, I follow the vocalists of visual kei scene, so for bands, it'll be like this,

H:\Musique\Visual Kei\Active\真生\2015\漂流_2015.11.25\運命の人.m4a

you'll notice this is actually SID.

 

btw, I have three external hard drives, 500G+1T+64G, and I don't save videos and instrumental and live and remix tracks.

1T for the music, 64G for my job and 500G for video games.

[Devilish_Eye 1168]

>Music

>>Artist Name

>>>Single/CD/DVD name

[Biopanda 2675]

C:\NOT PORN\DO NOT LOOK\SERIOUSLY\pictures of hairless cats\Gackt\

[Jigsaw9 6783]

I divide it into J-music, International music and Hungarian music folders (used to have a K-pop folder too, but that died out over the years), then just "Artist name", and in that "(release date) Release title"

Edited May 3, 2016 by Jigsaw9

[TetsuAkira 289]

My music folder is a mess of all genres.

 

ITunes is where the magic happens. It's all sorted by artist / album and then year.

 

 

[Chi 2624]

I used to divide into korean/japanese/thai/chinese/western back in 2011-2012 but now its just c:/music/artist/cd

 

The only folder that used to be in chronological order was akb's and since they already had a bunch of singles at the time it was quite pleasant to look at...then i deleted a shitton of music and now nothing is organized like that, even my 48g stuff. idfc about cd names i have folders that are complete gibberish cuz the Japanese alphabet got screwed up after unzipping...i barely look at the folders anyways

Edited May 3, 2016 by seurong

[YuyoDrift 1540]

Pretty much place them in playlists at the moment, since I have no time due to school.

 

I wish I had album art for each one.