HydrogenAudio

Hydrogenaudio Forum => General Audio => Topic started by: Supacon on 2005-03-25 23:32:36

Poll
Question: How do you arrange your Songs and Album folders?
Option 1: 1 Level:  Music\Artist - Album - T# - Title.codec votes: 23
Option 2: 2 Level:  Music\Artist - Album\T# - Title.codec votes: 137
Option 3: 3 Level:  Music\Artist\Album\T# - Title.codec votes: 350
Option 4: 3 Lev. w/Year: Music\Artist\YEAR - Album\T# - Title.codec votes: 200
Option 5: Other (this pertains to directory structure ONLY.) votes: 168
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-03-25 23:32:36
I'm interested in finding out what kinds of directory structures all the audio collectors around here use for archiving their collections.  I'm interested in establishing some kind of a "standard" for myself, at least, based on what is most popular with the smart people into this stuff.

This poll ONLY pertains to your directory structure, and not your filename structure. Also, the name of your music root folders is irrelevant (Whether it happens to be "C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\" (the default place for music on a Windows system) or "/" (a unix root partition).

For myself, I generally have been using C:\Music\Artist\Album\ and then having the files themselves named so that they are numbered by track.

More recently, for artists whose albums I have more than one of, I've been naming the album directory with the Year, usually as "2005 - Album Title", but I've historically used "(2005) Album Title", and sometimes even "Album Title (2005)", but that doesn't have the advantage of the folders being sorted in order of year.

I'd like to work through my music collection and rename every directory and file consistently one of these days, because over the years I've done so many different things.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Eli on 2005-03-26 00:00:17
Music\Artist\Album\Artist - Album- T# - Song Title .flac
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Hall on 2005-03-26 00:09:29
Artist\[Date] [VLS/CDA] Album\Artist - Tracknumber - Title

I added another [VLS/CDA] tag after the release year because I have loads of vinyls collection and it would be nice to sort them out.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: moozooh on 2005-03-26 00:27:42
Main music directory:
AUDIO\Artist\Album (Year) [CODEC*]\nn Title.codec

Secondary one (just assorted tracks with no full releases):
AUDIO 2\Artist\Artist - Title.codec

* — only if lossless (then [LL]) or MPC (then [MPC]).
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Seimour on 2005-03-26 00:50:07
In my case it depends of several factors:

1. If there are several albums of the same artist:
(level 1) Artist or Group name
(level 2) [Year] Name of the Album -> files have this format: Track number - Track title

2. If it's just a single disc of a single artist:
(level 1) Artist - Name of the album -> files as before

3. If it's an album with tracks of several artists:
(level 1) Name of the album -> Track number - Artist - Track title

I think this is the tidest (unless for me). But really it's the way you prefer, things aren't black or white, them can be in a grey scale  - And yes, I separate by codec too: those encoded in ogg are under the ogg folder. Same with flac...
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Zurman on 2005-03-26 01:00:56
Music\Artist\(year) Album\nn. Title.ape
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: unfortunateson on 2005-03-26 01:09:03
My Music\Artist\(Year) - Album\(Tracknumber) - Title.flac
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-03-26 01:12:14
Quote
Artist\[Date] [VLS/CDA] Album\Artist - Tracknumber - Title

I added another [VLS/CDA] tag after the release year because I have loads of vinyls collection and it would be nice to sort them out.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285580"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


I'm not sure what a VLS/CDA tag is... could someone explain this?


Quote
Main music directory:
AUDIO\Artist\Album (Year) [CODEC*]\nn Title.codec

Secondary one (just assorted tracks with no full releases):
AUDIO 2\Artist\Artist - Title.codec

* — only if lossless (then [LL]) or MPC (then [MPC]).
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285586"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Personally I also add an extra tag like this to "non standard" formats.  i.e., if I have an album ripped into an ape, with a cuesheet, I'll add [cue.ape] to the Album folder.

If I have something like an ogg version, I might add [ogg_q0].  This is because I must be able to quickly identify which albums are non-standard, because I use several audio programs, and some of them don't support anything other than MP3.

And sometimes I keep alternate copies of the song (i.e. a cue.ape and an MP3 Lame_Standard) for this purpose.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: PFS on 2005-03-26 01:25:15
Personally, I hate having anything but artist and song title in the filename.  I find having the year or the album or the track no makes things ugly and awkward when you try to make mixes or transfer to a DAP.  I like to think of albums as collections of songs that stand alone and are tied together through metadata. As such, I use:

Music/(Albums)/[Artist] Album/[Artist] Track.mp3

Each album folder has an m3u, and the files have the track no and date tags filled in correctly.

The (Albums) part is there because I also have directories for videogame music files, music videos, one-file mixes, tracked music, etc....
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-03-26 02:03:36
@PFS:
I think that's the most original scheme I've seen yet.  I guess I always figured most people liked having the track number in the filename because you get used to listening to a CD, and you want to keep the files in the same order, even when your audio player doesn't support metadata handling or playlists.

For my uses DJing with digital audio, it might seem pointless to have the tracknumber and album in the filename, but you wouldn't believe how often I get people who ask me for "track 13 on such and such CD".  Another reason I'm a fan of the numbering in filenames is because originally, ID3 tags didn't contain the track numbers at all. I'm hoping that those days are long gone now, however.

The worst case scenario, I suppose, is that I'll come across files that have no tags, and just track names.  I have to look up the album on the FreeDB or something, and then use foobar's freeDB function to ensure that I got it right.

You are right, though, PFS, that if you want to make compilations and such, the track numbers can look very messy.  I guess normally I just listen to my music in the form of whole albums, but if I were going to make compilations a lot, I'd be interested in developing (or finding, perhaps) a program that you could use to take a bunch of tracks from their original source directory, and copying them over, renaming them in an appropriate fashion... this could be useful for putting them on a small, flash based DAP, for example.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Duble0Syx on 2005-03-26 02:08:07
Mine are layed out similar to the third option above.
X:\musicdir\artist\album\artist - album - # title.ext
I like to keep the artist/album in the filename just in case the file somehow find their way in the wrong place.  Also everything is tagged properly, so that doesn't really matter, but at this point there is too much for me to want to change it.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Calufraxis on 2005-03-26 02:14:39
(Music)\Artist - (Year) - Album\
or (Music)\Various Artists - (Year) - Album\

This is pretty good for me except for the all of the bands that are "The xxxx", can't wait for an os that can handle sorting on metadata like a media jukebox can.

- Cal
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: PFS on 2005-03-26 02:23:28
Quote
@PFS:
I think that's the most original scheme I've seen yet...
...
if I were going to make compilations a lot, I'd be interested in developing (or finding, perhaps) a program that you could use to take a bunch of tracks from their original source directory, and copying them over, renaming them in an appropriate fashion...
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285618"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Cheers man.  I love the system...great for mixed albums too.  When you drop a track from a mix in a compilation, the file indicates the artist rather than the mixer. 

It works great with winamp's media library, which read all the metadata and arranges things in order. That brings me to this program you mention.  In the summer, depending on how much time I have to teach myself the non-trival bits of C++, I intend on making just such a program.  It would basically be the winamp media library divorced from the player, with a bit more in the way of customization.  Playing stuff from the program would just send it to the default player, so you can use whatever player you like.  The program would basically be a useful shell for file exploring, design for music files and wrapped around your particular directory setup, no matter which way you have it organized.

And, dragging and dropping files to another directory or a DAP would be possible- winamp doesn't allow that, which is too bad.  The renaming you speak of could happen along the way.

I'll keep you posted...sounds like fun.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Megaman on 2005-03-26 03:05:43
My collection goes like this:

X:\Artist\Year - Album\Track# - Title.(ogg,mp3,mp4,mpc,etc.).

I keep lossless stuff (APE) in CD-R only.

There is one foder also (X:\Various or something) for non complete albums/single tracks.

I think it´s nice to have "Year - Album" because you can follow artists evolution through time.

Everything tagged and replaygained too. For the albums I like the most I have also lyrics and images (album cover/lyrics inside tags plus all album artwork in JPG format in the same folder).

It´s weird, being a long-time HA member, I have quite a few of my favorite albums encoded in MP3 160kbps CBR even now (encoded when LAME current version was 3.88 beta or so). I still think the quality is decent for me (I can tell the difference from the original but it´s so subtle it doesn´t bother me). I can´t understand those maniacs (my respects) that re-encode all the time (like "wow, megamix is out, lets re-encode!!!" ...a week later megamix 2 is out, they re-encode 500 albums again) although it´s probably time for me to re-encode all that stuff to vorbis 1.1 -q6. I´ll probably do that whenever I get loads of time to waste, not soon for sure.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Cosmo on 2005-03-26 08:39:39
normal albums:
\ Genre \ Artist \ Year - Album \ nn - Title
multi-disc albums:
\ Genre \ Artist \ Year - Album \ 1nn - Title . . . 2nn - Title
various artists:
\ Genre \ VA \ Album (Year) \ nn - Title (Artist)
\ Soundtracks \ Album {Composer}(Year) \ nn - Title (Artist if VA)

~ my directory of classical music is still rather inconsistent. =(
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: fl102 on 2005-03-26 09:05:39
Music\Artist\[YEAR] Album [etc.., ex : ep, live, single]\T#. Title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Gallvs on 2005-03-26 09:07:32
I use:

Code: [Select]
\L\Artist - (YEAR) Album\Tracknumber - Title.ext


where "L" is the first letter of the artist name, eg:

Code: [Select]
\Z\Zappa, Frank - (1969) Hot Rats\02 - Willie The Pimp.mpc


I have to do this because otherwise explorer takes forever to display all the folders... 

I used to sort also by genre but I realized it was more a hassle than an advantage, so I started using foobar's database more extensively.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Cornie on 2005-03-26 09:30:13
Studio releases: Artist\Album\[Disc #]\nn - Title.codec
  Basically, anything retail goes here....
      Artist can be Artist/Band name, 'Various Artist'/'VA' or 'Soundtrack' - depending on contents...

Live shows: Artist\Venue\Date\[Disc #/Set #]\nn - title.codec
  This would be for any LIVE recordings (bootlegs)...
      The 4th level defaults to 'Disc' unless all tracks fit one disc - in which case it splits by 'Set'
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: DreamTactix291 on 2005-03-26 09:40:04
Here goes for me

Artist\Album\nn Title.codec

On my iRiver iHP-120 this is the same except with very very basic genres (such as Pop, Rock, etc) preceding the Artist directory to simply the filetree-based navigation
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: neutral_00 on 2005-03-26 10:11:16
I use...

music\codec\Artist - Album - T# - Title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: razer on 2005-03-26 10:11:29
For single artists:
Artist - (Year) Album \ Artist - (Year) Album - NN - Title.codec

For compilations:
VA - Album (Year) \ VA - Album - NN - Artist - Title.codec

Sorts everything very nicely.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: neutral_00 on 2005-03-26 10:11:41
Apologies. double post. 
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-03-26 10:14:36
I just thought of another branch that I use for my BIG collection of music... 
I recently resorted everything so that Soundtracks, CDs by a single artist, miscellenious single tracks (probably mostly downloads, like stuff from MP3.com back in the day) and Various Artist compilations are all separated into different parent directories.

Within the various artist or soundtrack folders, there is usually only one other folder for each CD.

Although it appears that many of you guys have an "Artist" called Various Artists, or such, so that "various artists" is another folder amongst all your artist names.

This is much like how EAC does it, but the problem I have with that is that you get lots of little 100-300 MB directory trees, and then the Various artists tree is many gigabytes bigger.

BTW, nobody has yet answered what  [VLS/CDA] tags are...
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-03-26 10:20:27
Quote
This is pretty good for me except for the all of the bands that are "The xxxx", can't wait for an os that can handle sorting on metadata like a media jukebox can.

You should check out directory opus from GP Software (http://www.gpsoft.com.au/).  It can do this, at least with MP3, ogg, and WMA, to an extent.  Plugin support is there, so one could conceivably add in their own support for other codecs.  Surely you aren't expecting something like this from microsoft, right?  (Although I do believe that Windows Explorer offers some degree of capability to do this with MP3)


Quote
For single artists:
Artist - (Year) Album \ Artist - (Year) Album - NN - Title.codec

For compilations:
VA - Album (Year) \ VA - Album - NN - Artist - Title.codec


Razer, what's the reasoning behind you putting the year in different places for single and various artists?  You find it more intuitive to sort VA discs by name, rather than year, because it is less relevant than for several releases by a single artist, I suppose?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: razer on 2005-03-26 11:18:09
Quote
Razer, what's the reasoning behind you putting the year in different places for single and various artists?  You find it more intuitive to sort VA discs by name, rather than year, because it is less relevant than for several releases by a single artist, I suppose?

That's exactly the reason. Say I have something like "Superhits 2" and "Superhits 9" released a few years apart, and there are many other VA albums released inbetween them. That would make it difficult to browse by release year if I just wanted to find all my "Superhits" albums right away.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: grindlestone on 2005-03-26 11:28:29
One folder, no subfolders -

D:\Music\artist-album-track-title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: diskvask on 2005-03-26 12:34:22
Codec\Artist\Year - Album\Artist - Album - NN - Title.ext

Optional sub dirs; CD1/CD2/etc, Extra (if pictures & other info is present)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Insolent on 2005-03-26 13:41:54
Code: [Select]
Music\Artist\[Year] Album\T# - Title.codec


Unless it's a multi-disc album, in which case I use:

Code: [Select]
Music\Artist\[Year] Album\Disc #\T# - Title.codec


Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: f1losof on 2005-03-26 15:07:28
Albums
/media/music library/Artist - Year - Album [Label]/## - Title.ext

Compilations
/media/music library/Name (Year) [Label]/## - Artist -- Title.ext

...Note the different but 'compatible' notation, this is by design. This way i can easily parse it with a script without the need to add redunant VA/Various Artist tags. The double'-' between Artist and Title in the compilations format is there to prevent (potential) parsing issues aswell.
Also it is a compact layout of which I can easily burn backups to CDR in Joilet format without the need to rename files. I'm quite happy with it, after all i worked 4+ years on it
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: razer on 2005-03-26 20:05:54
Quote
Albums
/media/music library/Artist - Year - Album [Label]/## - Title.ext

Compilations
/media/music library/Name (Year) [Label]/## - Artist -- Title.ext
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285749"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Very nice, though I see two things "wrong" with it.

1: Compilation names mixed with artist/band names? Isn't that a bit untidy?
2: If you take away the directory structure and throw all the files in the same directory, there would be complete chaos.

Other than that, this is pretty much flawless.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: damaki on 2005-03-26 20:20:36
For albums :
/mnt/media/Musique/Albums/genre/artist/(year) album title/[CD disc/]## title

For compilations :
/mnt/media/Musique/Compilations/genre/album title/[CD disc/]## artist - title

For original soundtracks :
/mnt/media/Musique/OST/type (movie, anime, series, ...)/album title/[CD disc/]## artist - title

For operas :
/mnt/media/Musique/Operas/main composer/(year) album title/[CD disc/]## title
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-03-26 20:21:42
Quote
One folder, no subfolders -

D:\Music\artist-album-track-title.codec
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285710"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

For the people who use a system like this, I'm guessing that you don't have very large collections of music.  Doesn't this get rather hard to search through after you get past about twenty albums or so?


Quote
1: Compilation names mixed with artist/band names? Isn't that a bit untidy?
2: If you take away the directory structure and throw all the files in the same directory, there would be complete chaos.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285825"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


I used to do 1 all the time, and didn't mind, but eventually I got so many folders that explorer and such was very slow listing them all.  My main reason for splitting comps and artists was to make each tree more manageable.

I used to worry about 2.  But now I use a system like this, just ## - Title.codec.  If you ever want to burn the songs onto a Joliet CD (limit 64 characters per filename) It's a pain in the @$$ if the names get cut down.

In reality, what would happen to remove the folders from the directory structure?  And even if that happened, you could always just use a program like directory opus, or even some fancy media management software to sort by album title and reorganize it all or something.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Muzzy^F8 on 2005-03-26 20:30:38
Music\[Artist/VA] - (Date) Album (Genre)\T# - Artist - Title.codec

I like it very much. 
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: damaki on 2005-03-26 20:33:48
Quote
In reality, what would happen to remove the folders from the directory structure?  And even if that happened, you could always just use a program like directory opus, or even some fancy media management software to sort by album title and reorganize it all or something.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285832"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


I was thinking exactly the same, with foobar2000 masstagger it would not be a problem. The only issue would be tracks with the same number and the same title.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: schonenberg on 2005-03-26 20:45:36
Music\Artist - (Year)\Album\NN - Title.codec

For compilations:
Music\Album (Year)\Track Artist - NN - Title.codec

Is that the itunes way? I've heard itunes has the best naming.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-03-26 20:48:21
Quote
Is that the itunes way? I've heard itunes has the best naming.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285841"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Well, what is "best" is kind of subjective.  As long as the ripper, or media manager that you are using offers very flexible support for naming, you're just fine. (EAC, for example does a good job of this.)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: neutral_00 on 2005-03-26 20:52:17
Quote
For the people who use a system like this, I'm guessing that you don't have very large collections of music. Doesn't this get rather hard to search through after you get past about twenty albums or so?


Not really. I use the library or playlist in the players makes a very easy. I do not
like having many folders.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Cosmo on 2005-03-26 20:53:48
Re: short filenames ( # - Title.ext )
Quote
Quote
2: If you take away the directory structure and throw all the files in the same directory, there would be complete chaos.

In reality, what would happen to remove the folders from the directory structure?  And even if that happened, you could always just use a program like directory opus, or even some fancy media management software to sort by album title and reorganize it all or something.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285832"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Right, I have no worry of such hypothetical chaos because all files can easily be resorted or renamed from the tag metadata.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-03-26 23:04:26
Now that we all have a good idea of the various schemes people use to store their music, how hard would it be to write a program that can somewhat intellegently look at a series of directories and filenames, and determine what the song artists, titles, and dates and such are for the songs.

I wrote a program that scans files for duplicate songs, and if that is any indication, If I did this, such a program would be extremely thorough and extremely complex

I suppose a program like this could also guess at all the song data (by analyzing the filenames), then compare to any tags that exist.  It would consider the fact that some people use underscores, lower case text, and avoid certain characters in filenames, and then consider any tags to be more "authoritative". 

It would also have to account for the fact that id3v1 tags might be truncated, and then guess the remainder of the title, or whatever, based on the part of the filename that extends beyond the tag data.

If there is data in the filename that is not present in any of the tags, then perhaps there would be some additional field defined for "extra filename info".  (This is often the case with single-file downloads off crap networks like kazaa and such).  Someone will make a filename like:
Rush - Subdivisions (Remastered Version).mp3
But there would be no tag data for (Remastered Version), so then my theoretical program would consider that data an extra comment or something.


Would anyone have use for a program, or rather, an algorithm like this?  I'm thinking that it would be really handy if you have a large collection of music, and wanted to homogenize the way that your collection is formatted.

So if you finish archiving your 500 CDs, and then think "Damn - I should have labelled the directory names with the years in them", you could use this program to do that as a simple one-step process.


(BTW, Rush released more than one album per year some years, those ambitious guys.  I have to label THEIR directory names with the month, like 1975-10)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: zombiewerewolf on 2005-03-26 23:57:55
I've let iTunes organise my files. This is its structure if an album has more than 1 cd.
Artist\Album\cd#-track# Title.codec
otherwise
Artist\Album\track# Title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: jcsston on 2005-03-27 00:32:59
Looking at all the posts makes my naming schemce seems too far simple 

Music\Artist - Title.mp3

About 4000 files in a single folder. There are all tagged and I use fb2k's search feature to quickly locate a song or artist I want to listen to.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: plonk420 on 2005-03-27 04:03:29
i've long given up organizing my music... i used to do it by genre, but i just do it by first letter....

music\0numbers
music\0numbers\16-bit lolitas
music\a\
music\a\ace of base
music\a\...
music\b\...
...
music\w\
music\xyz
music\y_mixes
music\y_osts
music\y_various_artists
music\z_unsorted

kinda sucks if i want to hear a lot in a specific genre, but .. *shrug*
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Teqnilogik on 2005-03-27 05:28:34
For my ripped music:
Multimedia\Music\Ripped\Artist\Album\## Title.mp3

For music I have received from other sources other than CD:
Multimedia\Music\Downloaded\Artist\Album\## Title.mp3

Compilations are stored in a
Compilations\Artist\Album\## Title.mp3
structure in their respective directories above.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Rommel on 2005-03-27 06:45:20
Music\Artist\Year - Album\Artist - T# - Title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: grindlestone on 2005-03-27 07:20:56
Quote
Quote
One folder, no subfolders -

D:\Music\artist-album-track-title.codec
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285710"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

For the people who use a system like this, I'm guessing that you don't have very large collections of music.  Doesn't this get rather hard to search through after you get past about twenty albums or so?





I have a bit over 1800 tracks so I guess not as big a collection as some. It's easy to find tracks with the foobar search function and i've never been one to listen to a whole album straight through either. A few playlist of favourites do me and I have one big playlist with all available tracks in it to browse throuh as a feel like it. I use tags now, but didn't for a long time - the filename was enough.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: jaybeee on 2005-03-27 11:27:09
Artist:
Code: [Select]
\Audio\<lossy> or <lossless>\codec\Artist\Album\T##-Artist - Title.codec

e.g:
C:\Audio\lossless\flac\Massive Attack\Blue Lines\01-Massive Attack - Safe From Harm.flac

EAC naiming scheme: '%D\%C\%N-%A - %T'

or

Various Artists:
Code: [Select]
\Audio\<lossy> or <lossless>\codec\Various Artists\Album\T##-Artist - Title.codec

e.g:
C:\Audio\lossless\flac\Various Artists\James Hyman - A Quentin Tarantino Mash-Up\01-James Hyman & Audio Shrapnel - Intro Using 'Kill Bill' & Shaw Brothers Stings.flac

EAC naming scheme: 'Various Artists\%C\%N-%A - %T'
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Miriam on 2005-03-27 12:51:48
Music\Artist\Year Album\T# Artist - Title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: clintb on 2005-03-27 19:37:03
I have a dedicated external drive for all my music and everything is off the root as below.

\Codec\Artist\Artist - Album.flac (single file image)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: CyberTootie on 2005-03-27 19:59:13
Music\Artist\Album\Artist - Title (CT - Format).codec

Adding track numbers would be cool if Windows didn't allow for sorting by track numbers. Since it does as long as it's in the tags, it's all good. And with my "signature" I know what's mine.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-03-27 20:13:39
For my CD images I use:
\Music\Artist\YEAR - Album[cue.flac]\Artist - Album (YEAR).cue.flac

(although I probably use ape slightly more than flac, and am probably going to switch to WavePack soon, but that's beside the point)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Snire on 2005-03-27 21:53:12
I do it this way.
D:\My music\Artist - Album_DVD-xx
And filename: Track nr - Songname.m4a
I add _DVD-xx for backup purposes.
But I have tagged all my music very well, so iTunes sort right.
I never use windows explorer to find music I want to play.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: dobz on 2005-03-27 23:23:46
normal albums

music\genre\album\artist (year)\nn. track

compliations (various artits)

music\genre\VA. album - artist (year)\nn. track - artist

i find this fairly compact and easy to navigate on my iriver h140.
Some people prefer to put the year before the album but on the my h140 the display is fairly small and you really need to see the album or artist before you see the year
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ExUser on 2005-03-27 23:58:18
codec\artist - date - album (quality info)\tracknumber - title
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: thinkum dinkum on 2005-03-28 12:18:08
for artists with more than 1 album which is 80% of my collection

[Genre]/Artist/[Year] Album/T# Artist - Track.ext
or
[Genre]/Artist/[Year] Album/Artist T# Track.ext
..haven't decided yet which is more suitable for me, and I tend to move all "-" before and after T# because try to save space where I can (joliet)

for artists with 1 album

[Genre]/Artist [Year] Album/T# Artist - Track.ext

for various

VA/VA - Album or Artist or Label [year]/T# Artist - Track.ext

but, I also have other folders eg [Label] witch contains some obscure labels with 10 or maybe more releases, [Bootleg] folder etc etc  ..and they have different structure, if one have a wide spectar of music it's impossible to have just one naming structure.
end yes, I always move "_" cause it looks ugly and all my txt, nfo, sfv, jpeg files are in the same folder and have 00 before file name.

I my case, I end up focusing more on directory structure than on that same music 
..but it works fine now
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: audio2u on 2005-05-22 07:40:22
Wow.
Some interesting schemes among all these.
What does strike me as interesting is how many of you use 'genre' as a folder, which implies that all tracks from an album are going to be under a parent folder such as 'rock' (at some level).
As someone who has worked in commercial radio, I want every song to have it's own specific genre, not an entire album labelled as 'rock'. That way, if I want to listen to ballads, I could listen to ballads that come off otherwise 'rock' albums. For example, let's say, I dunno, Springsteen, for instance. Let's take 'Born in the USA'. A track like 'I'm on fire' or 'My hometown' would definitely be labelled a ballad, while 'No surrender' would most definitely be 'rock'.
Do these kinds of conflicts not bother those of you who use 'genre' as a folder?
I can definitely see the sense in contracting the filename so joliet limitations don't truncate said filenames when burnt to cd. Very smart.
Something else I'd personally never considered was putting the year in the album level folder, so that albums are sorted by year of release, rather than alphabetically. Nice.
Looks like I'm off to do some major re-sorting.
Oh, to the dude who said "if you use a single folder, you musn't have very large collections", mmmm, I dunno.
My collection is probably not as large as some who lurk around these parts, but I'm currently around the 5500-5600 mark ALL IN ONE FOLDER. Yeah, I know, I'm crazy.
What brought me to this thread is I'm wondering if parsing some of the tag data to the folder level (and therefore creating a couple of hundred 2nd and 3rd level folders) will help Windoze Explorer to browse the folders quicker?
Keen to hear peoples thoughts on that, too.
Cheers,
Bruce.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: tgoose on 2005-05-22 10:03:08
I have two structures, one with albums in just in a single folder (only about 50 of these) and one with individual downloaded songs (about 1,500 of them), which are filed alphabetical letter, band name then just the songs and the filenames are just the title of the song.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: abasher on 2005-05-22 10:23:59
Music\Albums\Genre\Artist - Album

And a separate folder with lossless albums.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: EdBanky on 2005-05-22 10:24:56
/Artist Name/(yyyy) Album Title/##. Track Name

When storing 10s of GB on a hard drive, I divide into Genre parent folders, like:

/Genre/Artist Name/(yyyy) Album Title/##. Track Name

Archiving (before formatting to my specs)

Artist Name - Album Title (<mm-dd- (if available)>yyyy) <3-letter code representing the source (ex: SBD, AUD, etc)> [CODEC] <Number of discs, if more than one (ex: 2 CD)>/<if multi-cd> Disc #/Track name as acquired

As in:

Juliana Hatfield - Live at Iota Club & Cafe (12-02-2004) AUD [FLAC]/juliana2004-12-02t01.flac
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: EdBanky on 2005-05-22 10:40:19
Quote
As someone who has worked in commercial radio, I want every song to have it's own specific genre, not an entire album labelled as 'rock'. That way, if I want to listen to ballads, I could listen to ballads that come off otherwise 'rock' albums. For example, let's say, I dunno, Springsteen, for instance. Let's take 'Born in the USA'. A track like 'I'm on fire' or 'My hometown' would definitely be labelled a ballad, while 'No surrender' would most definitely be 'rock'.
Do these kinds of conflicts not bother those of you who use 'genre' as a folder?

My way of thinking about the music seems significantly different from yours.  For whatever reason, I kind of append a "working genre" to a band's name in my head, so if I decide to sort and/or listen by genre, it is to hear the bands that I know will show up that way.

I honestly had never even thought of each song having its own genre.  I know what you mean, and can see how that makes sense, but I think of it kind of like this:

You've got the movie director (artist) and the film's genre (genre) and the film's name (album title) and scenes within the film (songs).  While this obviously doesn't work across the board with many directors, it would play out like this for me.

Thriller/Alfred Hitchcock/(1935) The 39 Steps/The scene with the prayer with the guy and the farmer's wife

So the way I think of genre, it would be like classifying each scene in a movie as its own genre.  I know it's a peculiar way to look at it, but it's in my brain that way.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: audio2u on 2005-05-22 11:23:37
Quote
I honestly had never even thought of each song having its own genre.  I know what you mean, and can see how that makes sense, but I think of it kind of like this:

You've got the movie director (artist) and the film's genre (genre) and the film's name (album title) and scenes within the film (songs).  While this obviously doesn't work across the board with many directors, it would play out like this for me.

Thriller/Alfred Hitchcock/(1935) The 39 Steps/The scene with the prayer with the guy and the farmer's wife

So the way I think of genre, it would be like classifying each scene in a movie as its own genre.  I know it's a peculiar way to look at it, but it's in my brain that way.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=299436"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Fair enough. Each to their own, eh?    It's things like this that I love about these sorts of forums (or fora).... hearing everyone's different views on stuff.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: audio2u on 2005-05-22 11:50:06
I know this isn't the thread to post this in, but seeing as how this is where I am right now....
...anyone know why the url tag doesn't seem to work in the sig file?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: matth6546 on 2005-05-22 15:31:06
music\artist\artist_date_album_track#_title_genre[_year2]


year2 = re-release date, if there is one
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: LordSyl on 2005-05-22 17:18:07
I store my music files on a different drive than that of the OS, for safety reasons.

The folder structure is:
<quality>\<music genre>\<codec>\<artist-album>

where quality is:
    -RandomFi (this special folder is for a few random tracks and has no structure) 
    -HiFi (mpc q5+, mp3 --aps+)
    -LoFi (mp3 128kbps , etc)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Cyaneyes on 2005-05-22 18:56:54
\Artist\Year - Album\tracknumber. title.ext

When an artist has multiple albums for one year:

Year (1) - Album
Year (2) - Album
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: MusicLover on 2005-05-22 20:05:23
Two folders:
"Academical" (serious) music>Composer>CD Title>(often)CD 1, CD 2, CD 3...
"Pop music">Group>Album (01, 02, 03 according to the year of release)

And one more, special folder "Various" in each main folder.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: MusicLover on 2005-05-22 20:20:04
P.S. It's quite complicated, so I'll provide some examples:

Music Library/Academical/Beethoven Ludvig von/Symphonies (Karajan)/CD X/03 Symphony No. 3 Es-dur op.55  Eroica  3. Scherzo. Allegro viace.ape
(I.e. Track # (space) Track name.ext)

Or Music Library/Pop/Therion/01 Time Shall Tell (1990)/02 Dark Eternity.mp3
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ExUser on 2005-05-22 20:28:45
Codec\Artist - Date - Album\Track - Title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: unmake on 2005-05-22 21:29:32
Quote
Main music directory:
AUDIO\Artist\Album (Year) [CODEC*]\nn Title.codec

Secondary one (just assorted tracks with no full releases):
AUDIO 2\Artist\Artist - Title.codec

* — only if lossless (then [LL]) or MPC (then [MPC]).
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=285586"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

that's approximately my style..

e:\audio\music\artist\artist - year - album [encoder.bitrate]\nn. track

For bands like "The Soundtrack of Our Lives" I'll abbreviate, or exclude, their name at the album level; otherwise I tend to hit the filename length limit.

I keep audiobooks and classical music in a separate root directory, as I do 'incoming music' which hasn't been tagged/error-checked/replaygained. once that process has been done, it gets moved to a 'clean' directory, which gets dumped to DVD once it's reached 4.3GB. Only then do things get moved to the main music dump.

The [encoder.bitrate] field is added manually, with reference to EncSpot or MQM. I've long pined for something which could tag directories automatically, but alas..
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: negritot on 2005-05-22 22:20:56
It's 2005. Are you guys really still doing this manually?

I had to actually look at how the database-like management program I use (iTunes  )keeps things organized. Turns out it's Artist/Album/T# - Song.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ExUser on 2005-05-22 22:24:15
negritot: I use foobar2000. It allows me to organize my files the way I want them, instead of shoehorning me into whatever format it wants.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: myxomatosis on 2005-05-23 00:45:25
For "full albums":

F:\Albums\*Genre*\*Artist*\*Album*\Tracknumber Title.extension

F:\Albums\Rock\Pink Floyd\Dark Side of the Moon\03 Time.ape
F:\Albums\Metal\Sonata Arctica\Ecliptica\07 Letter to Dana.mpc


[a href="http://img31.echo.cx/my.php?image=music8mm.png" target="_blank"]
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: khiloa on 2005-05-23 01:33:17
I do Poll option #3; it looks like this: Artist\Album\Track
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: cerberus on 2005-05-23 01:37:32
D:/music/format(mp3 , ape)/ type(rock , heavy)/
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: negritot on 2005-05-23 03:06:39
Quote
negritot: I use foobar2000. It allows me to organize my files the way I want them, instead of shoehorning me into whatever format it wants.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=299542"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

You're missing the point. The idea is that the database program becomes the front end to your music. I didn't even know what the directory structure was until now.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: DreamTactix291 on 2005-05-23 03:30:43
Quote
Quote
negritot: I use foobar2000. It allows me to organize my files the way I want them, instead of shoehorning me into whatever format it wants.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=299542"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

You're missing the point. The idea is that the database program becomes the front end to your music. I didn't even know what the directory structure was until now.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=299601"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
I'm too picky.  I prefer doing it myself.  But everyone is entitled to their own opinion you know

(Also a happy foobar2000 user)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Nero on 2005-05-23 03:49:02
Single artist albums (other than classical)...

I:\My Music\<artist>\<album>\<tracknumber> <title>.flac

Soundtracks...

I:\My Music\Soundtracks\<album>\<tracknumber> <title>.flac
(...and the artist tag contains the actual artist for each track.)

Various artist albums...

I:\My Music\Various Artists\<album>\<tracknumber> <title>.flac
(...and same as with soundtracks, the artist tag contains the actual artist for each track.)

Classical music...

I:\My Music\<composer>\<album> (<orchestra> - <conductor>)\<tracknumber> <title>.flac
(...the artist tag on all tracks contains the composer, and the title is usually appended with additional track info such as tempo, key, etc.)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ExUser on 2005-05-23 04:08:34
Quote
You're missing the point. The idea is that the database program becomes the front end to your music. I didn't even know what the directory structure was until now.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=299601"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


You've clearly never worked with your files. It sounds like you have a single source (perhaps self-rips only) with reliable and consistent tagging and nothing but music in your folders. I personally have many sources and many of these sources have unreliable tagging and filenaming conventions. Many of these sources provide me with copies of cds that I own but are too damaged to rip.

Furthermore, I have multiple computers on which I use my music selection and I have an FTP front-end allowing me access to all my music from anywhere on the internet.

On top of that, I occasionally enjoy having extra files along with my music. Cover art, files from data tracks from my cds, cuesheets for accurate reconstruction of the original CD, and so on.

Don't assume that just because someone disagrees with you they're missing your point.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: negritot on 2005-05-23 06:07:56
Quote
Don't assume that just because someone disagrees with you they're missing your point.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=299613"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

And the two aren't mutually exclusive, either; one can both disagree with me and miss my point.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: RocknRoland on 2005-05-23 06:34:12
music/genre/artist/album/song
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: blue57 on 2005-05-23 12:19:20
In my music folder (C:\Mp3\) I have:

\Artist\Year - Album (or Date, Location)\CD # (if applicable)\All that again - ## - Title.ext

eg.
C:\Mp3\Anathema\2001 - A Fine Day To Exit\Anathema - A Fine Day To Exit - 09 - Temporary Peace.mp3

C:\Mp3\Muse\2002 - Hullabaloo\CD 2\Muse - Hullabaloo - CD 2 - 01 - Dead Star.mp3

C:\Mp3\John Butler Trio\2003-08-17 - The Tivoli, Brisbane\John Butler Trio - 2003-08-17 - The Tivoli, Brisbane - 22 - Take.mp3


Any Songs I'm not sure of the cd or whatever just go in \Artist\
Songs I don't know the artist for go into \Unknown\
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: thinkum dinkum on 2005-05-23 14:17:52
ok, I wrote my structure couple of posts before and there is a lot of explanations about that, but how do you (if you have any) manage files nfo, sfv, jpeg, ini, etc
Do you have 00 before so files are at the top, or not numbering at all, or you save them in different folder?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: [storm-shadow] on 2005-05-23 14:53:03
x:/music/artist/album/artist - nn - title.codec

I use that for my full album collections. (Korn, Deftones)

x:/music/decade/artist - title.codec

I use that for my "one hit wonder" types.  (Various Artists Over The Years)

x:/music/collex/artist/album - title.codec

I use this for bands/entertainers who have more than just  a few songs I dig, but not worthy of a full album. (Oasis, Greenday)

x:/music/FLAC/artist - album/nn - title.codec

I use this for ALL my albums, while I evaluate them.  I give them a listen a few times, figure out what songs I like.  When I decide something is worth keeping, I foobar/convert/Vorbis into the one of the categories above.  After I have enough albums together (+ PAR Files) I burn them off to DVD-R. 

Don't get much time to convince me you have good songs, though.  Maybe a week.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: snookerdoodle on 2005-05-23 15:08:32
Music/Artist/Album/Title.codec

I either convert them directly to my mp3 player or play them with a server (SlimServer). Either way, both options snarf up the track number (and a nicer title) from the ID3 and/or flac tags.

I say that to point out that I really depend on other software (that maintains a cache of all of the tag info) for organization. It maps songs to their actual directory location and that's sufficient for me. Moreover, some of the stuff is tricky - e.g.: a lot of orchestra music albums include music by more than one composer and sometimes more than one orchestra and conductor. Do you just throw all of these in "Various Artists"? I'm curious as to what others put in for the "Artist" on these (composer, conductor, or orchestra).

Mark
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: tgoose on 2005-05-23 15:28:51
Quote
Music/Artist/Album/Title.codec

I either convert them directly to my mp3 player or play them with a server (SlimServer). Either way, both options snarf up the track number (and a nicer title) from the ID3 and/or flac tags.

I say that to point out that I really depend on other software (that maintains a cache of all of the tag info) for organization. It maps songs to their actual directory location and that's sufficient for me. Moreover, some of the stuff is tricky - e.g.: a lot of orchestra music albums include music by more than one composer and sometimes more than one orchestra and conductor. Do you just throw all of these in "Various Artists"? I'm curious as to what others put in for the "Artist" on these (composer, conductor, or orchestra).

Mark
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=299813"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

In terms of tagging I leave it off (or leave it how it is if it's downloaded) - Foobar is set up so it if there's a composer and performer it ignores the artist field (perhaps not very good in terms of global standardisation, but I'm a little obsessive compulsive about my tags now  ), and just put in Composer and Performer, on individual tracks if needs be. If I had any large collection of orchestral stuff on computer I'd probably put it in directories by composer, but I only have one classical recording on my PC, I think, which I'll put on CD when I get round to it anyway, so it's not really an issue for me.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Raptus on 2005-05-23 16:11:21
x:\one of 6 main genres\artist\album\## - artist - title.mpc
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: eyemthatguy on 2005-05-23 16:34:24
Normal
d:\1of7Genres\artist - year - album [BITRATEorFLACorAPEorVBR]\## title.ext

after reading earlier posts, my VA's need to be restructured/taggged, but Im sticking with the NORMAL layout! 
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Anas on 2005-05-25 15:03:55
Regular:
Music/Artist/Year - Album/Artist - Year - Album - Disc # (even if theres just one cd) - Track # - Title.mp3
eg. Music/Lake Of Tears/2004 - Black Brick Road/Lake Of Tears - 2004 - Black Brick Road - 01 - 01 - The Greymen.mp3

Various:
Music/[VARIOUS] Year - Album/Album - Disc # (even if theres just one cd) - Track # - Artist - Song.mp3
eg. Music/[SOUNDTRACK] 2003 - Freddy Vs Jason/Freddy Vs Jason - 01 - 01 - Ill Nino - How Can I Live.mp3
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: crazyman on 2005-05-26 14:57:37
For my purposes, just


../My music/Artist/Year Album (ev. CD1, CD2, ...)/NN Title.codec

is enough, and in case the artist released more albums in the same year, I make the appendix to the YEAR like XXXXA, XXXXB, ....

Crzmn
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: kl33per on 2005-05-26 15:09:54
Just changed mine.

Album Artist / [Date] Album / nn. [Artist] Title
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ectotropic on 2005-05-26 16:34:51
Heh - some of these schemes make me shudder  No idea how you guys cope with them like that!

For various reasons I reguarly need to locate files via windows explorer, so I spent a while comming up with a naming scheme that was fast to explore and easy to use (for me at least) - plus it's fast and easy(ish) to parse with scripts when I need to.

E:\Music\<source>\<type>\<album artist>\<album>\[<disc>\]<tracknumber>. [<artist> -] <title>[ <mix>].codec

items in '[' & ']' are optional based on the release

<source> = DVD, CD, LP, Downloaded, etc.
<type> = Album, Single, Compilation, etc.
<album artist> = main artist for this release, or if a compliation label or series (but never ever Various Artist - which is something I really can't stand )
<disc> = contains disc type (often same as source), disc number and name of disc
<artist> = artist of this track if different from <album artist>

It's a bit confusing written like that, so a some examples:

E:\Music\CDs\Albums\Hardfloor\Best Of Hardfloor\CD 1 - The Tracks\01. Once Again Back.flac
E:\Music\CDs\Albums\Hardfloor\Best Of Hardfloor\CD 2 - The Mixes\01. Rising High Collective - Fever Called Love [Hardfloor Remix].flac
E:\Music\CDs\Compilations\Twisted Records\Unusual Suspects\01. Younger Brother - The Finger.flac

Which works well for me, only thing I might change is adding in the album year for sorting purposes.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: bubka on 2005-05-26 16:44:13
My Music\Atrist\[year] Album\Atrist - track# - Title.*
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Shade[ST] on 2005-05-26 16:50:29
Genre\Subgenre\Artist\Album\T#. TrackName.mp3

I was thinking of incorporating the Album release years or Recording years in this, but I can't think of a way to do it.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Shade[ST] on 2005-05-26 16:52:39
Quote
E:\Music\CDs\Albums\Hardfloor\Best Of Hardfloor\CD 1 - The Tracks\01. Once Again Back.flac
E:\Music\CDs\Albums\Hardfloor\Best Of Hardfloor\CD 2 - The Mixes\01. Rising High Collective - Fever Called Love [Hardfloor Remix].flac
E:\Music\CDs\Compilations\Twisted Records\Unusual Suspects\01. Younger Brother - The Finger.flac

Which works well for me, only thing I might change is adding in the album year for sorting purposes.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=300705"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I like this one very much. inspirational.  Maybe I'll try it myself.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ectotropic on 2005-05-26 17:51:34
Quote
I like this one very much. inspirational.  Maybe I'll try it myself.[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=300710"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Cheers! Glad someone else likes it

Goodluck wi that and let me know if you come up with any improvements (or have any questions)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Shade[ST] on 2005-05-26 18:27:18
Quote
Goodluck with that and let me know if you come up with any improvements (or have any questions)
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=300720"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Did you think of adding genre to it?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ectotropic on 2005-05-26 18:45:09
Quote
Did you think of adding genre to it?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=300729"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Not really - partially because
Quote
I want every song to have it's own specific genre, not an entire album labelled as 'rock'. That way, if I want to listen to ballads, I could listen to ballads that come off otherwise 'rock' albums. For example, let's say, I dunno, Springsteen, for instance. Let's take 'Born in the USA'. A track like 'I'm on fire' or 'My hometown' would definitely be labelled a ballad, while 'No surrender' would most definitely be 'rock'.[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=299418"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
and partially because I have trouble putting much of my music in a single genre - where does one genre start and another end? One day I'll feel like a band should be one thing the next day another, not to mention bands who change styles as they go.

IMO adding genre to it just adds confusion - so any genre grouping I do is generally done in playlists (which has the benefit of easily being able to add those problem tracks to as many genre as needed).
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Erich w/ an h on 2005-06-05 14:09:51
AUDIO\$if2(Album Artist,Artist)\(Date) Album\Artist - Date - Album (Disc#) - Track# - Title.flac

Organizes well, tree structure wise, and I can still sort by filename if i wanted to for the same results.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: J-pak on 2005-06-05 16:09:34
Music\Artist\YEAR - Album\T# - Title.codec

What I use. Still have some albums that I need to fix with the years.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Shadikka on 2005-06-13 16:32:25
Genre \ (Year) Artist - Album \ T# - Title . mpc/mp3/ogg
or
Genre \ Artist - Title . ext
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: biggerluke on 2005-07-04 17:04:17
codec/artist/album/[cd1/cd2]/trnumber - trname - artist.ext

eg

flac/coldplay/xy/01 - square one - coldplay.flac
or
mp3/coldplay/xy/01 - square one - coldplay.mp3

also have in folder
flac/coldplay/xy/00 - xy.png
flac/coldplay/xy/00 - xy.sfv
flac/coldplay/xy/00 - xy.m3u
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: jonte on 2005-07-12 01:35:16
I use
Music/A/Artist/Artist - Album (Year)/Artist - Album [#Tracknr] - Song.codec

Example:
Music\I\Iron Maiden\Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark (1992)\Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark [#5] - Childhood's End.mp3

Various Artist goes in
Music/V/Various Artists/Various Artists - Album (Year)/Album - [#Tracknr] - Artist - Song.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Go2Null on 2005-07-12 01:49:31
I must be weird:-)
Year\Album~Artist~T#~Title.codec

The year directory is just used to minimize files per directory.

All organization is done using metatags in fb2k. No need for great organization at the file level.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Acid8000 on 2005-07-12 02:01:52
My Music\<Artist>\<Album>\T# - Title.codec

Various Artists/Compilations:
My Music\Various Artists\<Album>\T# - Title.codec

Soundtrack:
Music\Original Soundtrack\<Album>\T# - Title.codec

When I used Windows Media Player I had:
Music\Artist\Album\Title.wma ...and for any WMA files I haven't been too concerned about renaming.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Jud on 2005-07-12 03:07:55
Quote
x:\one of 6 main genres\artist\album\## - artist - title.mpc
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What main genres do you use?  I've wanted to do a mapping of the ID3v1 + Winamp extension genres to a few that really describe what the music is.  For directory structures I'd like more generalized genres to keep things together (for example, make Electronic include Techno, Drum & Bass, House, Jungle, etc)

My set up is:

\Music\<Format>\<F>\<Artist> - (<Year>) - <Album>\<Track> - <Artist> - <Song>

<F> is the first letter of the Artist (excluding the, a, an)  Numbers are converted to what letter the number starts with.

For CUE/M3U/MD5/JPG I prefix with 00.  Multi CD's I keep in separate directories.  If it's a CUE I don't create an M3U.

I save EAC LOG files for personal rips.  For lossy formats I create MD5's, for lossless the EAC LOG file is enough since there's programs that can decode on the fly to verify (not much slower than MD5/SFV, and just cleaner).
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Drenholm on 2005-10-14 09:17:40
Single tracks:
%artist%\%album\%tracknumber%. %title%
Various\%album%\%tracknumber%. %artist% - %title%

Images:
%artist%\%album%
Various\%album%

I don't have a strictly-enforced naming scheme but, in terms approximating foobar2000's formatting, it would be something like that. I also have a couple of "Disc n" folders.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Involarius on 2005-10-14 12:49:30
Music\bitmap\[Artist]\[Album] - [TrackNumber] - [Title].[ogg|flac]

My folder bitmap\ contains all recorded sound. Another folder, vector\, is for my MIDI collection, and another, hybrid\, is for the modules (*.mod, *.s3m, *.xm, *.it).
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: loophole on 2005-10-14 16:20:08
For people that use media jukebox software, can I ask do you, or why do you care how they're stored on your filesystem? I just let iTunes do it's thing and manage my music through that - not the finder (or explorer.exe). I couldn't care less whether they were stored by artist, genre, album or even a random hash ala the ipod filesystem.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: HAL_ on 2005-10-14 17:26:25
\Music\<F>\<Artist>\<Year> - <Album>\<Tracknumber> - <Title>.<codec ext>

<F> is the first letter of the Artist (excluding the, a, an) Numbers are converted to what letter the number starts with.

various artist :
\Music\_Compilation\<Genre>\<Year> - <Album>\<Tracknumber> - <Artist> - <Title>.<codec ext>


soundtracks & classical music are in specials directories

for classical music I use :
(Bith year - death year) <Artist>\<Year> - <Album>\<Tracknumber> - <Title>.<codec ext>
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Dondo on 2005-10-14 19:53:09
Quote
For people that use media jukebox software, can I ask do you, or why do you care how they're stored on your filesystem? I just let iTunes do it's thing and manage my music through that - not the finder (or explorer.exe). I couldn't care less whether they were stored by artist, genre, album or even a random hash ala the ipod filesystem.
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I'll try to answer that - what happens if you decide to use a new program? Locking yourself into doing whatever "Program X" or "Program Y " does could potentially limit your options if you were every to change how you use your music.

Personally, I use too many programs in my daily music needs to even consider doing it in an unstructured way - EAC for ripping, Winamp for listening and Catraxx as a database/frontend.
My setup is close to Level 3 in the poll, except I don't use "Music" at root, I use an "A" folder, a "B" folder, etc.
example  - Z:\S\Sianspheric\RGB\01-Sianspheric-To Myself.flac

I used to have it as Z:\artist\album\file but it was getting to be too much scrolling when adding items to my database. (This is on a dedicated drive).
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: wynlyndd on 2005-10-14 20:03:06
Z:\Music\

FileFormat\<first letter of artist>\Artist\AlbumTitle\Artist-AlbumTitle-TrackNumber-Trackname.extension



Aye I have long filenames. Arguably, I have no need to put Artist and AlbumTitle as part of the file name if the ID3 tags are properly maintained so this may change. This is a holdover from the time when I traded individual files around more often and didn't maintain the ID3 tags well. Files orphaned away from the file structure had none of this identifying metadata. This shouldn't be so much of a problem these days. I still rigidly maintain this folder structure to easily find and pull files for compilations or to sample for people. Also helps when writing scripts to do stuff for me or when using other people's scripts and small programs.

The FileFormat level of separation is to keep FLACs separate from MP3s which are separate from MPC which are separate from AACs. I used mareo I think to rip into both FLAC and MP3, but there are some leftover MPC from when I experimented with that (if my iPod played MPC I would rip to that format again, but alas) and all the AACs are purchased or free downloads from Apple ITMS.

I used to have some divisions based on Genre, but I discovered that to be too subjective.

If the first letter of an artist is actually a number, I have a folder called "123s" for bands like 2 Live Crew and 311.

Soundtracks and compilations I never seem to satisfy myself. I'll do it one way for awhile and then switch so right now i have about 2 or 3 competing "standards" in my file structure.

What do I do for Albums with multiple discs? As I sit here I don't remember, but I believe I put (disc n) in the Albumtitle level. For example, Infected Mushroom's Converting Vegetarians would be :

Z:\Music\MP3s\I\Infected Mushroom\Converting Vegetarians(disc 1)\

Again, keeping to a fairly rigid 2 level heirarchy above the actual tracks, helps when writing scripts as I always know how to treat the folder names of the parent folder and the parent of that folder.

Then again, now there are tools that can analyze the file itself and try to fill out tags for you unlike the days you had to make your own tools.

Note I don't own much classical style music so I haven't run into the organizing needs some of you have nor have I really hit the limitations of ID3v1.1 even as I move to ID3v2.3
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: frodoontop on 2005-10-14 20:08:48
I really like the way I have it now. It's like fileformat/artist/artist-album-year/tracknumber - trackname. I can find my music files fast this way.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: wynlyndd on 2005-10-14 20:16:28
I'm just curious about the level of importance many of you people have for the year.

While I don't consider my ID3 tags complete unless I have the year, especially so if I own the full discography for an artist, I never would have thought to add that to the file names or make it part of the folder structures.

In most cases, I never need to know the year.


Why is it so important to you all? (Note I am asking this not to knock your decisions and opinions, I'm actually curious if you have a good reason that I may not have considered)

Edit: I just considered one reason why to maybe go \AlbumTitle-Year\ because I think a couple of bands have released albums years apart with the same title (like the first few self-titled Peter Gabriel albums, which reminds me I need to rip them eventually)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Drenholm on 2005-10-14 20:24:18
I just add the year as that on the CD case, as I do with the COMMENT field (CD catalog number). It's not too important but I try to include everything.

It's genre that irks me. I may just start tagging my CD images with a genre from the freedb list rather than wondering what exactly to call them. It's so much simpler to call something rock instead of wondering if it counts as punk, metal or punk rock!

Anyone have any good hints for genre classification?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: wynlyndd on 2005-10-14 20:33:53
Quote
I just add the year as that on the CD case, as I do with the COMMENT field (CD catalog number). It's not too important but I try to include everything.

It's genre that irks me. I may just start tagging my CD images with a genre from the freedb list rather than wondering what exactly to call them. It's so much simpler to call something rock instead of wondering if it counts as punk, metal or punk rock!

Anyone have any good hints for genre classification?
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Well, I've often gone to allmusic.com and used their recommendation for genre, mostly to keep from having to make that determination myself.

Also, I have some CDs where the album as a whole is characterized one way, but there might be an song on there with a decidedly different feel. Do you think I get down to the track level when characterizing genre? Nope, I'm too lazy for that. I justify it by saying Genre is so subjective and characterize the whole album.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2005-10-14 21:56:27
About the issue of genres, I've really found that the whole concept of a genre is a matter of opinion.

As I may have mentioned in another post, tagging files with "correct" genres is very important to me, as I use my music to DJ, and often need to search for music by style.  Usually I use generic types, like Rock, Country, Dance, etc.  But I'm finding that my music supplier is using weird ones like "Adult" and "Top 40 Pop" now, so I've been retagging them as "Pop/Urban/Rap Fast" and things like that.

This blows the usefulness of the id3v1 tags right out of the water, but basically what I'm saying is that I tag every single song with multiple genres (delimeted by slashes).  Obviously this would be tedious for regular music albums, but for my Various Artist compilation albums with an assortment of current popular music, this seems necessary to me.

I'd almost like some kind of fancy relational database system with support for internet connectivity to a database of all songs and artists and the classifications of each to do this crap for me, but... my system works.  It just takes some time whenever I rip a CD.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Involarius on 2005-10-14 22:42:08
Quote
But I'm finding that my music supplier is using weird ones like "Adult" and "Top 40 Pop" now, so I've been retagging them as "Pop/Urban/Rap Fast" and things like that.

This blows the usefulness of the id3v1 tags right out of the water, but basically what I'm saying is that I tag every single song with multiple genres (delimeted by slashes).
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In Vorbis Comment (the tagging format used in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files) you can repeat the same tag. You can set GENRE=Pop and GENRE=Urban in the same file.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: theboyjenkins on 2005-10-14 23:02:52
I just have all my random singles an a flat folder and all my albums in a folder named after them. I let the various media librarys of winamp, foobar, etc do all the organising / searching for me.

This of course only works because my tagging is spot on
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: AgentMil on 2005-10-15 00:45:30
Albums\Artist - Album Name - Year\Track No. - Title.codec

Dont like to overcomplicate things...

As above my tagging is very spot on.

Regards
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: singaiya on 2005-10-15 18:56:06
Quote
I just add the year as that on the CD case, as I do with the COMMENT field (CD catalog number). It's not too important but I try to include everything.

It's genre that irks me. I may just start tagging my CD images with a genre from the freedb list rather than wondering what exactly to call them. It's so much simpler to call something rock instead of wondering if it counts as punk, metal or punk rock!

Anyone have any good hints for genre classification?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=334415"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


I use genre as a top level because when I want to listen to music, I have a hard time deciding since I have so much stuff, so I'd rather think "I feel like listening to metal" instead of "I feel like listening to artists that start with the letter B".. if that makes any sense.

Defining your own genres is better than strictly using generic ones, but it does take a lot of time. For example, sometimes I have one genre, and sometimes I have subgenres, making sorting not as uniform. With APEv2 you can add multiple genre tags, which I'd like to figure out but haven't had the time yet.

If you want to switch to genre based sorting, first write down which genres you will need. I use 18 main genres, about half of which are ID3.1 compliant, the other half are not. I found the list of basic ID3.1 compliant genres and used what's relevant there, then supplemented the rest with my own definitions for APEv2 tagging. For example, I use "Blues" from ID3.1 with no subgenres, but within Rock I have several and I use "Rock-Garage" for garage rock (APEv2) because I have far more subgenres in rock than in blues. But a blues guy might only need "Rock" (ID3v1 compatible) but need "Blues-PreWar" for a blues subgenre. It depends on how your collection is weighted in terms of genre, that is for you to figure out.

Dates would be nice but I have a harder time with them than with genres, so I'm not using them in directories. So many albums have different dates that are useful. Ideally for me all the dates would be referring to the recording (the most important date for me). But then there are so many albums with several years between the recording and the release. Then there are reissues, compilations. The date listed on the CD (and in online databases) is rarely the recording date, but more often the release date. No biggie if it was released the same year it was recorded but....
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Drenholm on 2005-10-15 19:27:50
That's some good advice on genre. I would indeed stick to a few but my problem comes at classifying certain bands from my strange music taste. For example, are Velvet Revolver rock or metal? Was blink-182's new album punk or alt. rock? And just WTF are CKY?

(No comments on my collection please. )

EAC asks for release dates but I usually just put the date on the rear of the CD case. Which is probably the final mastering date and thus may not be representative of the release date on all CDs! But oh well...
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: singaiya on 2005-10-15 19:58:53
I know, there will always be problem cases. In the end, you can just pick one and not worry about it too much. And like I said, if you use APEv2, you can put as many genres as you want on a file (though of course you will only want it in one genre directory). Personally I would not put Blink 182 in punk, but it's different for everyone. Don't worry what anyone else would think, it should just make sense for you. I agonized over things like the Pretenders (Pop? Rock?) and the Pixies (Pop? Alternative?). And of course you can break them apart. Like I have early Husker Du in Punk, but their later albums in Alternative. But I have both Punk and Alternative as subfolders in Rock.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Olive on 2005-10-15 20:56:52
%artist% - %date% - %album%\%artist% - %album% - %tracknumber%. %title%
or
%album%\%album% - %tracknumber%. %artist% - %title%
if %album artist%

With a few exceptions, eg for artists I own the full discography or a lot of albums:
%artist%\%date% - %album%\%artist% - %album% - %tracknumber%. %title%
or
%artist%\%date% - %album% - %tracknumber%. %title%
(I think I'll be renaming those ones though)
or
%artist%\%date% - %album%\%tracknumber%. %title%
only if $or(%artist%,%album%) is really too long

PS. It can be %album%[cd %disc%] instead of %album%, and everything in lower case.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Drenholm on 2005-10-16 09:50:55
Wow, that must get confusing. Whatever will you do when one of your album or track titles has a dash (" - ") in it?

Anyway, singaiya, thanks for your insights about genre.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Ihmemies on 2005-10-28 22:15:08
Artist\Artist - Year - Album\Artist - Track number - Track name.filetype
like...
Nightwish\Nightwish - 1998 - Oceanborn\Nightwish - 03 - Devil & The Deep Dark Ocean.flac

That way I get all the information even without tags, if needed
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: xmixahlx on 2005-10-28 22:19:46
artist/album/track# - artist - title.ext

works good with various, too.
oh, i don't use tags either


later
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: kathaa on 2005-10-28 22:35:54
always the same one here. no matter if classical or compilation etc.

a concrete example would look like this:

x:\A\A Perfect Circle\A Perfect Circle - 2000 - Mer De Noms

and then # - title

i like seeing the albums in chronological order
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: LANjackal on 2005-10-29 01:37:25
K:\My Music\Album Artist\Album\Track Artist_Album_Track Name_Bitrate.Format

You can see a listing (NOT actual files) of my entire music library here (http://www.myfilehut.com/userfiles/15408/wmpdb1.htm).
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: skelly831 on 2006-01-09 02:48:14
After many tries at creating my ultimate directory structure for lossy files (easy as hell with Foobar  ), I arrived at these final options:

X:\Music\codec\artist - date - album\nn title
X:\Music\codec\artist\(date)* album\nn title
X:\Music\artist - date - album\nn title
X:\Music\artist\(date)* album\nn title

if the album is VA:
X:\Music\Various Artists - date - album (or compilation name)\nn artist - title
X:\Music\Various Artists\(date)* album\nn artist - title

*If I go with either of these options, I would have to decide between (date) and [date], unless there's something that might interfere with the use of []'s.

Something tells me to go with the "artist - date - album" style simply because that's exactly how I name my lossless images, but sorting first by codec seems like a neater way of organizing. I'm hesitant to use the "artist\(date) album" style, because that's what WMP and iTunes use, and I always fount it frustrating when all I have from ArtistX is a 3 song EP or something and I end up with a whole folder with "ArtistX\EP title\3 songs".

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the "artist - date - album" style can get produce folders with really long names, and looks like crap when using any kind of tree style view.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: corganzero0 on 2006-01-09 03:02:37
G:/Music/Artist/Album/Artist - # - Track.mp3
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: kockroach on 2006-01-09 03:25:35
X:\Music\FLAC\Artist\Album\Title.flac
X:\Music\MP3\Artist\Album\Tracknumber. Title (Year).mp3

Artist is Album Artist for compilations.  I use different track titles for unique naming when loaded on my mp3 player.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: clintb on 2006-01-09 06:27:54
Single FLAC/CUE Images
For normal releases:
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).flac
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).cue
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).jpg
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).log
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).html

Various Artists:
Year ~ Album\Year ~ Album (Disc 1).flac
(Same for .cue, .jpg, .log & .html)

Soundtracks:
Year ~ Movie/Album title\Year ~ Movie/Album title (Disc 1).flac
(Same for .cue, .jpg, .log & .html)

Individual files/tracks
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album ~ ## ~ Name.codec

Why the tilde (~)?  Because I've NEVER seen it used in an Artist/Album/Song name and it frees me up to use the dash (-) for things like "'89-'93".
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Veej007 on 2006-01-09 07:08:53
i am an artist - title.codec guy.  one folder is all you need if you tag well and have a frontend that's worth a crap.

actually, i use two folders, not one:

stuff i have backed up/artist - title.codec
stuff i have not backed up yet/artist - title.codec

i'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned this.  i learned the hard way that this is probably the most important element of directory structure.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: joule on 2006-01-09 08:47:16
I almost only have albums.

I used to have the following X:\Music\artist - album\nn-title.codec but now i've found something that i think is a very good tweak of this. The basic is still the same, but in those case I have more than one album from any given artist I will put those albums like X:\Music\a r t i s t\artist - album\nn-title.codec. This makes my music folder more tidy, especially while i'm getting more and more albums.

Also note the effect of these artists being on top of every first letter when sorting this folder.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: hybridfan on 2006-01-09 22:21:37
Music\Artist\Album\T# - Title
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: xequence on 2006-01-09 22:49:41
A big music folder, each with smaller folders that are "Artist - Album" and in those folders I have "Artist - Title".
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: calx on 2006-01-09 23:19:49
F:\Audio\Artist\(Year) Album\#. Title.mp3
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: binkgle on 2006-01-09 23:56:31
Music/Artist/Album/# - Artist - Album
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: harto69 on 2006-01-10 07:40:31
Flac/Cue Images
Music\ripps\artist\album\artist - year - album (disc 1).flac, *. cue

Mp3
Music\mp3\artist\album\artist - album - tracknumber - title.mp3

Harald
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: pepoluan on 2006-01-10 13:09:12
d:\music\[genre]\artist\(year) album\#T. artist - title.ext

my brother demands I have [genre] there :-/
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2006-03-31 06:08:09
I find that, in many cases, Genre can almost be subjective, unless you're really vague or generic.  Like... the difference between Metal and Classical is usually easy... but what about NuMetal and Rap?  Or overlapping and crossover genres? 

Often music can be categorized into more than one genre, so I think that it's best to leave genres in your meta tags...  of course, music stores have to make that choice to make it easier to find types of music that you listen to, and I suppose that for the bigger ones, at least, they can just put a copy of the CD in each section that it applies to.

On that note, it'd be cool to have some kind of a filesystem, or perhaps just a music management or database system that allows you to have one album or track in two places at once (through some kind of link, most likely).  I've seen software that does this, and perhaps foobar's Album List can do that if you have two genre tags or something.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: skelly831 on 2006-05-11 00:37:39
I find that, in many cases, Genre can almost be subjective, unless you're really vague or generic.  Like... the difference between Metal and Classical is usually easy... but what about NuMetal and Rap?  Or overlapping and crossover genres?

I try to avoid genres, I only use generic stuff like Metal, Rock, Classical, Electronic... The only use I have for the genre tag is with Classical, because I have a separate sorting string in foobar for it, but otherwise I don't fuss over it. Some of my metalhead friends go as far as having different super-specific genres for each track on an album, like "Neo-classical/Progressive/Symphonic Metal" and the next track is "Ambient/Darkwave/Neo-classical". Ridiculous.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: bodrox on 2006-05-11 06:14:07
%drive%\--music--\artist\year - album\t# - artist - title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: miscellanea on 2006-05-11 07:54:04
[drive]\Music\Artist\Album - Tracknumber - Title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: PatchWorKs on 2006-05-11 09:12:26
\genere\[nationality] artist - album (year)\#t - title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: robinpb on 2006-05-11 14:06:48
[0-9,a-z]/$artist/$year $album [catalog info]/$track# - $tracktitle.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: chemeye on 2006-05-11 19:55:57
Artist/(Year) Album/Artist - Track # - Song Title

for various artists: Various Artists - Album Name (Year)/Track # - Song Artist - Song Name

This was a question I spent alot of time pondering. 
I started doing things one way and thought that was best...
I made a change mid-stream and added the "(date)" before "Album" for better chronology.
I also changed mid-stream and added "Artist" before track # to better identify the thousands of songs in my library-so I can easily see, in the track name itself, who the artist is.
I currently use only FLAC & keep everything in a FLAC Archive so I do not use ".flac" in the song title.
In the future, I plan to transcode to (probably) MP3 and in that case I will use ".mp3" as a file name/format descriptor.  Since there would be a loss in quality from the original lossless source, I would mark this and make it as clear as possible that the files are MP3s.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: senab on 2006-05-11 22:40:10
Mine is:

Music\Album Artist\Album\T#. Artist - Title.codec

This works for both compilations and single albums. If it's a single album I just set Album Artist to what Artist is.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: kanak on 2006-05-12 17:41:47
Mine is:

1. For Complete Albums:
e.g.: Jeff Beck's you had it coming:

E:\J\Jeff Beck- [2001]- You Had It Coming\##- Title.codec

2 For Singles
e.g.: Beulah's Gene Autry:
E:\`Singles\Beulah\Beulah- Gene Autry.codec

3 For Compilation Albums
e.g.: I Am sam soundtrack:
E:\`Compilations\OST- I am Sam [Date]\##- Artist- Title.codec

4 For Songs whose tags have to be fixed
E:\`Fixx\<File>

Works well for me
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: valnar on 2006-05-12 20:21:09
For the most part, I use REACT defaults as they are well thought out.  Alphabetically organize by artist, then year of album, then title.

F:\Music\The Beatles\1965_Rubber Soul\The Beatles - (1965) Rubber Soul.flac
F:\Music\The Beatles\1965_Rubber Soul\The Beatles - (1965) Rubber Soul.cue

Level 1 gives me... well, my music folder
Level 2 is the Artist alphabetically
Level 3 is the year with Title
Level 4 is the file itself, with all that stuff in case I move it around

#3 is the most important because if an artist has 10 or so albums, I'd like to visually see them in chronological order.  Metatags will come and go, and preferences will change over time.  File structure has been with us for decades, so that will always be important.


I only archive full albums.

-Robert
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Aankhen on 2006-05-12 20:50:30
I use foobar2000's file utilities to sort all my music into folders.  This is the structure I use for full albums:

Album Artist \ Album (Year) \ [disc #-]nn. title [~ track artist]

For single songs, I use this:

Album Artist -- Album [Year] -- [disc #-]nn. title [~ track artist]

Basically the same as the earlier one, only it doesn't create subdirectories.

I would like to handle disc numbers better in both cases, but I can't seem to find an elegant method.  I don't put the genre in the directory structure for a few reasons:
  • I don't know or don't care about the genre of most of the music I have.
  • If I do add genres, I add them to single songs, not entire albums.  An album may have songs from multiple genres.
  • If my directory structure is inadequate from any point of view, never fear!  fb2k's Album list window is amazingly flexible; I've never needed to search for a track (either using fb2k's Search feature or Windows Explorer).

Live shows: Artist\Venue\Date\[Disc #/Set #]\nn - title.codec
  This would be for any LIVE recordings (bootlegs)...
      The 4th level defaults to 'Disc' unless all tracks fit one disc - in which case it splits by 'Set'

What is a 'Set'?

Quote
One folder, no subfolders -

D:\Music\artist-album-track-title.codec
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For the people who use a system like this, I'm guessing that you don't have very large collections of music.  Doesn't this get rather hard to search through after you get past about twenty albums or so?

You said it!  I used to have around 5,000 songs sorted like this, and it would take a minute or so to open the folder, or even list it in the directory tree.  The situation has been alleviated somewhat now: I have all my full albums in subdirectories according to the structure above.  I do still have nearly 3,000 single songs thrown together in one large directory, though.

Quote
In reality, what would happen to remove the folders from the directory structure?  And even if that happened, you could always just use a program like directory opus, or even some fancy media management software to sort by album title and reorganize it all or something.

I've always felt the same way.  And you wouldn't even need any program other than fb2k.

AUDIO\$if2(Album Artist,Artist)\(Date) Album\Artist - Date - Album (Disc#) - Track# - Title.flac

Assuming the `$if2()` is a literal part of an fb2k string, here's a small suggestion: use %album artist% instead of the $if2().  %album artist% uses the album artist if it's there, but falls back on composer/performer/artist.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: jfro on 2006-05-12 22:09:17
Personally I tend to shy away from putting genres in the majority of my folder names because they can be so subjective and they're still evolving.  Sometimes I even find myself going back and changing the genre in my ID3 tags.  For example, I had the band "Explosions in the Sky" labeled as "rock (instrumental)" because they play rock music without singing.  Months later I found out there's a popular term nowadays for that type of music called "Post Rock."  It's hard keeping up with all the musical trends sometimes.  Anyway, my basic folder structure breaks down like this:

Full CD's:
G:\Audio\At the Drive-In\[2000] Relationship of Command\01 - Arcarsenal.mp3

In each CD directory I keep a log of the rip, a playlist file and an image of the cd cover entitled "art.jpg."  I tried the "folder.jpg" method but windows constantly got the thumbnails confused.  I'm not a big fan of deep directories.  Each disc in a multiple-disc release gets its own respective folder.  I also frequently include a [MISC] folder in an artist's directory for random live songs and tracks which were not part of an official release.

Compilations:
G:\..\Compilation - Motown Legends (Volume 1)\[1994] Motown Legends (Volume 1)\Track Number - Artist - Track Title.mp3

Soundtracks:
G\..\Soundtrack - Rushmore\[1999] Rushmore (OST)\Track Number - Artist - Track Title.mp3

I use the prefix "Soundtrack" as opposed to "OST" in the folder name because, for the life of me, I can't expect someone new to digital music to alphabetically go to the O's to find a soundtrack. 

The only time I use the genre in a folder name is for comedy and to clump together large groups of miscallenous single songs:
G\..\Comedy - Seinfeld, Jerry\[1997] I'm Telling You for the Last Time\01 - Intro-Phones.mp3
G\..\Misc - 80's\Artist - Track Name.mp3
G\..\Misc - Dance\Artist - Track Name.mp3

Hello to everyone by the way!  This is my first post but I've been using the site as a wonderful learning tool for a while now.  Figured this was a good thread to start in considering the organization of my own music collection is the only aspect of digital music I know more about than anyone else here.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: skelly831 on 2006-05-14 00:32:17
Finally settled on something thorough but easy to navigate:

Albums
Music\Albums\Artist\(Date) Album\nn Title

Compilations and splits
Music\Compilations\(Date) Album\nn Artist - Title

Classical
Music\Classical\Composer*\Album (Ensemble - Conductor)\nn Title
* Sorted by last name.

CD Images
Music\CD Images\Artist - Date - Album.wv/flac
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: fragtal on 2006-05-28 16:04:11
muzic\genre\subgenre\artist\[year] album\track# - title.container

it takes a helluva time to find a subgenre for certain artists/groups..
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Supacon on 2006-05-28 23:45:12
Hmm... isn't sorting by genre like that kind of limiting?  For instance, many artists have songs that fit into more than one genre categories, and genres are largely a matter of opinion, so a song could be more than one genre, right?

Personally, I think it makes more sense to keep genre information in the tag, and not in the filesystem.  You can use a number of programs, albumlisters, or database utilities to sort your music by genre when you want to look for a certain type of music, and that way would be much more extensible, so that those songs that could be either rock or country, say, depending on your mood or opinion, would show up in either seach without having to have them on the disk twice.

Out of curiousity, does foobar's albumlist component have this functionality?  I seem to think it does, but I haven't used it much.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: duckpatch on 2006-11-25 01:28:03
Hmm... isn't sorting by genre like that kind of limiting?  For instance, many artists have songs that fit into more than one genre categories, and genres are largely a matter of opinion, so a song could be more than one genre, right?


You are exactly correct except often artists are known for a certain genre. For example, Jethro Tull do blues, classic rock, folk rock, etc.. but I would class them as Prog-Rock. I would rather seperate my oldish music to today's new music scene aswell.

Heres how I organise my files:
Albums/EP's/Singles:
..\Albums\Genre\Sub-Genre\Artist\Album\## Song Title.ext

Singles: (single .mp3 files that wern't realeased as singles but didn't on an album)
..\Single Songs\Artist - Song Title.ext

Bootlegs: (live, unauthorised recordings)
..\Bootlegs\Artist\(Year) Album\## Song Title.ext

Compilations: (often VA)
..\Albums\Genre\Sub-Genre\Various Artist\Album\## Song Title.ext
or
..\Compilations\Genre\Sub-Genre\Album\## Song Title.ext **

**rarely its this because I like the first structure better.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: /mnt on 2006-11-25 03:15:53
Here is my music directory structure.

Have a album playlist on all my albums in the album folder as

Artist - Album

also have a album art image on each album folder as

Folder.jpg

Albums, EPs and Singles:

I store albums, singles and EPs in 1 folder called Albums since EPs are like mini albums and most singles have more then 1 or 2 tracks.

Albums

Music\Albums\Artist - Album\Track # - Artist - Title.codec


eg

Music\Albums\Fear Factory - Demanufacture\04 - Fear Factory - Replica.mp3

also double disc albums are stored in the same folder as:

Music\Albums\Artist - Album\Disc # Track # - Artist - Title.codec

eg

Disc 1

Music\Albums\Black Sabbath - We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'N' Roll\1 04 - Black Sabbath - Paranoid.mp3

Disc 2

Music\Albums\Black Sabbath - We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'N' Roll\2 09 - Black Sabbath - Snowblind.mp3

EPs

Music\Albums\Artist - Album (EP)\Track # - Artist - Title.codec

eg

Music\Albums\Nine Inch Nails - Broken (EP)\06 - Nine Inch Nails - Gave Up.mp3

Singles

Music\Albums\Artist - Album (Single)\Track # - Artist - Title.codec

Compilations

Music\Compilations\Album\Track # - Artist # Title.codec

eg

Music\Compilations\Relapse Records Sampler\15 - Zeke - Chinatown.mp3


Soundtracks

Music\Soundtracks\Media Type\Album\Track # - Artist # Title.codec

eg

Music\Soundtracks\Video Game Soundtracks\Quake II OST\06 - Sonic Mayhem - Quad Machine.mp3


Misc (Non-released, podcasts and non-album playlists)

Music\
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Teknojnky on 2006-11-25 03:33:50
Mine is:


\Music\_Soundtracks_\Album\Album Artist - Year - Album - Track# - Artist - Title.xyz

\Music\_Techno_\Year - Album\Album Artist - Year - Album - Track# - Artist - Title.xyz

\Music\_Various_\Year - Album\Album Artist - Year - Album - Track# - Artist - Title.xyz

\Music\A\Artist\Album Artist - Year - Album - Track# - Title.xyz

\Music\B\Artist\Album Artist - Year - Album - Track# - Title.xyz

Basically most compilations are sorted according to techno/soundtracks/various, everything else sorted into #/first letter folder, then artist folder.

I don't use album folders for non-compilations.

Album art is stored either artist - album.jpg or album.jpg, and also in tags where possible.

Also in most situations, I store multi-disc sets as one album and use the track numbers to indicate disc... IE  101 for disc 1 track 1, 201 for disc 2 track 1, etc etc.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ruikou on 2006-11-25 03:48:18
For me:
GENRE\ARTIST\ALBUM [YEAR]\TITLE.CODEC
note: the genre is often innaccurate
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Cornie on 2006-11-25 15:14:16

Live shows: Artist\Venue\Date\[Disc #/Set #]\nn - title.codec
  This would be for any LIVE recordings (bootlegs)...
      The 4th level defaults to 'Disc' unless all tracks fit one disc - in which case it splits by 'Set'

What is a 'Set'?


lol... been away from the computer awhile 
anyway.... ever been to a concert? Typically the headliner(main) band will play more then one 'set' of songs
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Rivers1080p on 2006-11-25 16:29:39
My MP3's are are labeled with track number and title like so: "05 Just my Imagination"
Those are placed in a folder labeled like so: "Cranberries 1999 Bury the Hatchet"
And those folders are in my MP3 folder.

Don't have to much on my computer as of now, but as I rip and the number of folders grow I probably will make artist folders labeled simply "Cranberries" where I store all my Cranberries albums (and singles). Those subfolders will still be labeled "Artist Year Songtitle"
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Soap on 2006-11-25 16:43:10
While I have mine:
\music\Artist - Year - Album\Track# - TrackTitle.Codec
File structure makes a poor database.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: doubleXP on 2006-11-25 17:48:47
Hi Everybody,

my Directorystucture is as follows:
X:\Audio\A...Z\Artist\Album\Titel.Codec

For multible CD's in one Album:
X:\Audio\A...Z\Artist\Album\CD1..CD2\Title.Codec

For ripped Vinyl:
X:\Audio\A...Z\Artist\Album\Side1...Side2\Title.Codec

For sampler and soundtracks:
X:\Audio\A...Z\Album\Title.Codec
X:\Audio\A...Z\Album\CD1...CD2\Title.codec
X:\Audio\A...Z\Album\Side1...Side2\Title.codec

Everything else is organized with the tags and in a database.

Greetings
Christian
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Martin F. on 2006-11-26 01:10:47
Music\Genre\Artist\Artist - Year - Album\Artist - Album - Track number - Title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: OmniCbex on 2006-11-26 05:46:18
I voted as the second choice, however, I do incorporate the year.
Actual directory structure of HD:
(drive letter):\music\albums\(artist - (year) disc title)\(T# - song name.codec)

"soundtracks" and "recorded" in "music" dir as well.

This makes the albums appear with artists in alphabetical order and their albums in chronological order.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: The Celestial Celebi on 2008-05-02 22:59:17
I voted none.

My structure is as follows:

ALBUM-XXX/Release_Name
ALBUM-XXX/Release_Name
ALBUM-XXX/Release_Name
LiVESET-XXX/EVENT/Event_Name/Release_Name
LiVESET-XXX/SHOW/Artist-Show_Name/Release_Name
ViNYL-XXX/A/Release_Name
ViNYL-XXX/B/Release_Name

etc. Where XXX is either "HARD", "OTHER", "SOFT" and for some categories a few exceptions.

For the ViNYL section I separate the releases in letters, because well, there's such a shitload of stuff there.  I put DJ_X in the X letter and also The_X in the X letter. Which could be a bit confusing sometimes.

This works very well for me, since I like "hard" music. Hardcore, hardstyle, jump, etc. I don't listen much to the other stuff, so it's in a separate category. It's mainly for "having it". I don't listen very much to the cabaret stuff either, since it's usually nice to hear it once and also it isn't really music. So a special category for that too.

Some examples:
I:\ALBUM-HARD\Qlimax_-_Mixed_By_Lady_Dana-2001-TWCMP3
I:\ALBUM-OTHER\Extince_-_Vitamine_E_DUTCH-Retail-2001-TWCMP3
I:\ALBUM-CABARET\Hans_Teeuwen-Trui-2CD-2000-REV (this is such an exception)

I:\LiVESET-HARD\EVENT\Sensation_Black\Sensation_Black_2004_-_Luna_Live-07-10-CABLE-2004-XDS_INT
I:\LiVESET-HARD\SHOW\VA-Club_Fresh_Hardhouse\Deepack_-_Hardhouse_Generation_(FreshFM)-FM-14-11-2007-HBLiVE
I:\LiVESET-SOFT\EVENT\Sensation_White\IDT_Sensation_White_2004_Afterparty-Live_At_ID-T_Radio-Read-NFO-CABLE-07-03-2004-TWCLIVE
I:\LiVESET-HARD\SHOW\Blutoniums_Brian_M_Vs_McBunn-Harder_Styles\Blutoniums_Brian_M_Vs_Mcbunn_-_Harder_Styles_003__Incl_DJ_Vortex_Guestmix_(DI.FM)-SBD-27-06-2006-HBLiVE

I:\ViNYL-HARD\#\3_Steps_Ahead-Drop_It__The_Prophet_Remix-Promo_CDR-2003-MiM
I:\ViNYL-HARD\G\Gizmo_and_Symastic-Listen_Up-Vinyl-2006-SND
I:\ViNYL-HARD\T\Technoboy-Into_Deep__Into_Dub-Vinyl-2006-SDS
I:\ViNYL-SOFT\B\Barthezz_-_On_the_Move-CDM-2001-iDC
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Matt Schuette on 2008-05-02 23:21:07
Full albums:
Full Albums\%artist% - %album%\%artist% - %track% - %title%.ext

Multi-disc albums:
Full Albums\%artist% - %album%\Disc %discnumber%\%artist% - %track% - %title%.ext

Soundtracks/compilations:
Full Albums\%album artist% - %album%\%track% - %track artist% - %title%.ext

Singles (in varying folders):
%artist% - %title%.ext

Album art, for full albums is always:
Full Albums\%album artist% - %album%\cover.jpg

which means that for multi-disc albums, I just have one picture.  Rarely, a boxed set will have different covers for each disc, then those go inside the Disc %discnumber% folder with the tracks.

The duplication of %artist% bothers me from time to time, but this way the tracks can be singles without losing any important information.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Light-Fire on 2008-05-02 23:36:38
More precisely:

MyMusic\Artist\Album\T# Title.codec
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: randal1013 on 2008-05-02 23:51:58
i do:

music\artist\date.album\track.title
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: shakey_snake on 2008-05-03 01:09:07
Release type\%artist%\%album%\[%discnumber%\]%tracknumber% %title%.filetype

Release type is one of the following:
  • Albums
  • Bootlegs
  • Collections, Tributes and Soundtracks
  • EPs
  • Greatest Hits and Boxed Sets
  • Loose Tracks
  • New Music
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ~*McoreD*~ on 2008-05-03 01:21:40
AlbumArtist\Album\TrackNumber Name.mp3
AlbumArtist\Album\DiscNumber-TrackNumber Name.mp3
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ArtMustHurt on 2008-05-03 02:34:10
mine is:
Music\Artist - Year - Album\Track # - Title.codec

but i only use this way because thats how i started to sort my collection

eventually i'll sort it like this:
Music\Artist\Year - Album\Track # - Title.codec
can foobar do this for me or can i do this with a script or something?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: sketching on 2008-05-03 04:44:01
My structure is: Music\ALBUM ARTIST\[DATE] ALBUM\(DISCNUMBER)TRACKNUMBER TITLE

@ArtMustHurt: foobar2000 can do it using the "Move to" dialog and Titleformatting.

Here's the titleformatting that I use to move to my music from my downloads folder to my music folder:
Code: [Select]
$if($stricmp($left(%ALBUM ARTIST%,4),'The '),$substr(%ALBUM ARTIST%,5,$len(%ALBUM ARTIST%))', The ',%ALBUM ARTIST%)\['['%date%']'] %album%\[%discnumber%]%tracknumber% %title%


The bits before the first backslash just move "The" to the end of the Album Artist folder name.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: plnelson on 2008-05-03 18:50:42
I'm interested in finding out what kinds of directory structures all the audio collectors around here use for archiving their collections.  I'm interested in establishing some kind of a "standard" for myself, at least, based on what is most popular with the smart people into this stuff.

This poll ONLY pertains to your directory structure, and not your filename structure. Also, the name of your music root folders is irrelevant (Whether it happens to be "C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\" (the default place for music on a Windows system) or "/" (a unix root partition).

For myself, I generally have been using C:\Music\Artist\Album\ and then having the files themselves named so that they are numbered by track.

More recently, for artists whose albums I have more than one of, I've been naming the album directory with the Year, usually as "2005 - Album Title", but I've historically used "(2005) Album Title", and sometimes even "Album Title (2005)", but that doesn't have the advantage of the folders being sorted in order of year.

I'd like to work through my music collection and rename every directory and file consistently one of these days, because over the years I've done so many different things.


As I've said many times before on this forum, the directory structure is NOT VERY IMPORTANT.  What's important is that the TAGS are consistent, well-organized, and well thought-out.

My directory structure is simple.  At the top is a root.  (say "music" or "audio").  It should NEVER be a specific drive letter like "C:".  First of all that's a Windows convention so what would happen if you moved your collection to a different environment?  And, second, what if you move your collection to another drive, e.g., an external USB drive or a NAS?  Then the letter would change.  So your root should never be drive-letter-dependent.

Under that I basically have classical and non-classical music.  Classical music is organized into folders of composers, and then all the relevant tracks are under that.  Non-classical music is organized into folders of artists, with all the tracks a level below that.  So, for example, all my Rolling Stones songs are in the same folder, all my Billie Holiday songs are in the same folder, ditto my Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, ditto all my Feist  ( a small collection so far), all my Radiohead, all my Moby, etc. 

I have over 10,000 tracks, about half classical, half nonclassical, and I add maybe 20 or 30 tracks a week, and this simple, easy system works great!  The heavy lifting is done by the tagging scheme.  Ambiguities are never a problem -  I have 3 versions of Dvorak's Op. 90 'Dumky' trio for instance; I have 3 versions of "Everything in its Right Place" (the Radiohead song) - one by Radiohead, and covers by a jazz pianist and a classical pianist.  I have FIVE versions of "Orange Blossom Special" - two different ones by Bill Monroe and  3 more by other artists.

I play this music on my PC, on my two iPods, and on my Sonos system and my simple directory scheme  (with a sophisticated tagging scheme) works great!  Also, I hope it's clear from my above comments that I'm a serious music lover with eclectic tastes and a big collection so if this works for me it will work for ANYbody!
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Cycles on 2008-05-03 19:45:39
I have:

h:\Music\Albums
h:\Music\Singles
h:\Music\EPs
h:\Music\Soundtracks
h:\Music\Compilations
h:\Music\DJ Mixes

Each of these uses artist\album\n. trackname.codec

Does the job, very nicely too
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Steven123 on 2008-05-03 19:55:20
Maybe this would help:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Landus on 2008-05-03 20:00:43
I use the Music\Album\T# - Title.codec structure, but I also put the year in parenthesis after the album. It looks like this:

My Music\Within Temptation\The Heart of Everything (2007)\01. The Howling.mp3

I use MusicBrainz and MP3Tag to do all of my tagging and folder creating/file moving after I rip a CD.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: plnelson on 2008-05-03 20:49:24
I use the Music\Album\T# - Title.codec structure, but I also put the year in parenthesis after the album. It looks like this:

My Music\Within Temptation\The Heart of Everything (2007)\01. The Howling.mp3

I use MusicBrainz and MP3Tag to do all of my tagging and folder creating/file moving after I rip a CD.


Can someone please explain what this fixation so many people have with the album is all about?

I will grant you that SOMETIMES the songs on the album are related to each other in some specific artistic way -  "Sketches of Spain" (Miles Davis), say or "Tommy"(The Who).  And house or DJ mix music has to be kept together so you can gaplessly transition from one track to the other as the DJ intended.

But the vast majority of the time the songs are just songs and the "album" is just a container - the physical polycarbonate or vinyl disk the record label decided to put them on.    I'm also a photographer and it's like if I bought a bunch of photographic accessories - filters, lens caps, straps, etc, and they all came in the same box so I decided to always store them together after that because of the box they came in.

Many times the SAME song will appear on more than one album  - a first release, a later "best of" compilation, and then a late-night TV "greatest hits of the 90's" collection.  Other times the "same" album will have DIFFERENT versions of the "same" song -  for instance, when the Moby album "Play" was first released it had one version of "South Side"  and then later they CHANGED it to include the version with the Gwen Stefani vocals!    Also sometimes the US and EU versions of the "same" albums will have different content.

If you feel the album is significant you can always include that information in the tag.  But why make it part of the directory structure?  As I said above, I keep ALL the songs by a given artist in one flat older.  The songs may have been ripped from a CD, bought online, or stream-ripped, it doesn't matter.    I've never had any problem with this scheme and it's very easy and simple. 

Also, albums are SO 20th century!    They are an old-fashioned, outmoded concept, like dial telephones.  CD sales are down, online sales are up; most people just care about individual songs anyway, and your kids are going to ask you what an "album" was.

(I know I've made this rant on HA before, here, but I still don't "get" what the big deal with albums is)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Tene on 2008-05-03 22:04:45
/mnt/blockdevice/mediatype/artist/artist.yyyy-mm-dd.albumname/artist.yyyy-mm-dd.albumname.##.title.ext

Rexeg friendly structure.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Roseval on 2008-05-03 22:25:04
I’m not interested in file structures at all.
I use the contents of the tags to browse my collection.

To plnelson
In classical Music, a composition in general consist of several parts and they are related and should be played in the right sequence.
That’s the way I use the album tag, album=composition, song=parts. The album tag is an excellent way to structure your collection by composition
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: 2tec on 2008-05-04 01:26:07
Music\Artist\Album\Artist - Album- T# - Song Title .flac
Mine's still the exact same. 
Audio\Music\Artist\Album\Artist - Album - T# - Title.flac

Personally, I still find this to be the most 'intuitive' and useful structure; although I keep my lossy (distilled) files elsewhere and I'm still fiddling with Various Artists and compilations.

As for why use an album-centric structure? For me, it's mainly due to the fact that most music IT is already structured around the album, ie. Freedb, discogs, etc.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: plnelson on 2008-05-04 17:16:23
I’m not interested in file structures at all.
I use the contents of the tags to browse my collection.

To plnelson
In classical Music, a composition in general consist of several parts and they are related and should be played in the right sequence.
That’s the way I use the album tag, album=composition, song=parts. The album tag is an excellent way to structure your collection by composition


Yes, that's the canonically correct way to do classical.  Album = opus.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: milesmonk on 2008-05-04 19:37:18

Music\Artist\Album\Artist - Album- T# - Song Title .flac
Mine's still the exact same. 
Audio\Music\Artist\Album\Artist - Album - T# - Title.flac

Personally, I still find this to be the most 'intuitive' and useful structure; although I keep my lossy (distilled) files elsewhere and I'm still fiddling with Various Artists and compilations.

As for why use an album-centric structure? For me, it's mainly due to the fact that most music IT is already structured around the album, ie. Freedb, discogs, etc.


I use almost the same structure.  All my complete albums are stored in one directory "Music", in which I use the following structure:
\%Album Artist%\%Album%\%Album Artist% - [%Album% (Disc %discnumber%) - %tracknumber%] - %Title% (%TrackArtist%).ext

"(Disc %discnumber%)", is of course used only when it is multi-disc.  And "(%Track Artist%)" only when the song has a "Feat." artist or it is a multi-artist album, in which case %Album Artist% in the file name is rendered as "VA".  A multi-artist album, which is not Various Artist has each artist delimited by ";" (which is displayed as "," in foobar2000).  So, "Simon & Garfunkel" but "Frank Sinatra, Antonio Carlos Jobim".

Soundtracks are tricky.  I used to have a folder in the Music root directory called !Soundtracks, but I now put then within Music\Various\Soundtrack\%Album%.  The problem is %Album% should be just the name of the movie, or if it should be the complete title as appears on the CD ("Music Inspired By...").  Also, soundtracks by a single artist pose a problem.  Should that be located in the soundtrack category, or in the artist's name?      (Currently, most such albums go in my soundtrack category, because most of them were composed for the film, and not just used in it.)

Western Classical (and Carnatic and Hindustani, to a lesser extent) create problems.  For a Glenn Gould recording, for instance, should primacy be given to Glenn Gould or to Johann Sebastian Bach?  Currently, I list it in a separate folder in the Music root directory, called !Genres.  So, the structure for that is:
\!Genres\%Composer%\%Album%\%Performer% - [%Album% - %tracknumber%] - %Title%.ext

I would like to know how others handle Western Classical.  Another area of problems: "Sets".  (E.g., the Verve sixty-album "Jazz Masters" set, in which most discs are by single artists, but some (two) are compilations.)  Currently, they're on a separate partition, so create no problem.   

Note: I came up with the above system when not all my music was properly tagged.  So, while I would have liked to use %Original Release Date% (or %Date%, if I have the original release itself), I did not. 
My aim in coming up with this system was to be able to "sort by name" and have all albums by an artist in release order and the tracks ordered by track number.  And also to have all the information pertaining to the file not only in the folder structure, but in the file name itself.  So, if I create a flat structure (put all the files in a single folder), the degradation will be graceful, and the files will still be in order. 

Comments?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Roseval on 2008-05-04 21:00:17
My only comment is that I don’t understand why one is so concerned about file structure.
Any decent player uses tags to browse your collection.
Using WMP I can select a composer say Beethoven. I can sort all his works by title, genre and as I have given a couple of tags a very distinct use, by opus number and by year of composition.
Why do I need a complicated file naming convention when filtering and sorting by tags (not to mention the search box) do the job?

If I read these postings about directory/filename structures, I have the feeling that a lot of people simply don’t understand where tagging is about.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: DuncanG on 2008-05-04 21:55:36
...
I'd like to work through my music collection and rename every directory and file consistently one of these days, because over the years I've done so many different things.


If your after a painless method of reorganising your entire media library's file structure and file names in one fell swoop try MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com). You can specify the file name and path using title formatting and it reads the relevant info from your id3 tags. It also moves album art. If your tags can a bit patchy you can use it to auto tags the files, although I prefer Winamp for this as you can select batches of files rather than single albums.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Slipstreem on 2008-05-04 22:26:28
It all lives on my external hard drive in a directory called "Music", organised thus...

\Music\Artist\Album

...alphabetically for artist and album.

Winamp picks up on the tags and displays them in almost exactly the same order.

In answer to Roseval regarding directory structure having no importance (apologies if I've misread that), there's nothing to be lost by showing a little discipline and making use of an OSes existing directory structures. It sure makes it easier when you're trying to find something via Windows Explorer. I follow the same disciplines for all installations and file storage. It seems pointless to avoid it and shabby practice not to do it IMO.

Cheers, Slipstreem. 
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Roseval on 2008-05-04 22:54:54
In answer to Roseval regarding directory structure having no importance (apologies if I've misread that), there's nothing to be lost by showing a little discipline and making use of an OSes existing directory structures. It sure makes it easier when you're trying to find something via Windows Explorer. I follow the same disciplines for all installations and file storage. It seems pointless to avoid it and shabby practice not to do it IMO.

Agreed
One can conjecture up many reasons to have a well structured structure.
1 directory with 20.000 files might affect performance
Coverart as a jpg in the album directory requires an album structure
Finding a missing track using explorer,
Etc. etc.

In practice I have root/artist/album/ not because I’m structuring it this way but because I set my player to do so. Any change in a album/artist/title tag is reflected in the directory structure / filename.

I only browse the file structure to solve problems (hey, track 4 is gone) and in these cases a good structure and meaningful names are important.
However, I do have the feeling that a lot of people are trying to put as much different information as possible in the structure because they don’t use or don’t understand tagging.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: milesmonk on 2008-05-04 23:01:06
My only comment is that I don’t understand why one is so concerned about file structure.
Any decent player uses tags to browse your collection.
Using WMP I can select a composer say Beethoven. I can sort all his works by title, genre and as I have given a couple of tags a very distinct use, by opus number and by year of composition.
Why do I need a complicated file naming convention when filtering and sorting by tags (not to mention the search box) do the job?

If I read these postings about directory/filename structures, I have the feeling that a lot of people simply don’t understand where tagging is about.


I agree completely.  The behaviour that I (and some others in this thread) exhibit is most definitely anal-retentive.  But it's not only about file-structure.  The way I see it, file-structure is only a reflection of metadata.  (After all, renaming files in accordance with the scheme I've outlined above is only a click away in foobar2000/mp3tag/[your mp3 renamer of choice].)  Changing file-structure isn't all that difficult.  But coming up with a consistent and intelligent metadata system is.

So, you see, at the root of things, I'm concerned not so much with the file/folder structure, as with tagging.  Who should be "Artist" for a a Classical performance?  Sometimes it is the performer who is the highlight (e.g., Glenn Gould/Luciano Pavarotti), and sometimes it is the piece being performed that is the star (e.g., a second-rate philharmonic performing Beethovan).  Sometimes, it is the conductor who is given top billing.  How do you tag it, and how do you organise/display/sort it in your player of choice?

The questions I had raised for the file structure also apply directly to tagging.  Do you tag it uniformly as "OST: [Movie Name]" or "[Movie Name]" or "[Full title as provided on the CD]"?  AMG has a habit of using "Soundtrack" as the Album Artist for all multi-artist soundtracks.  Do you follow that, or use "Various Artists"?  These are questions about tagging as well.

Sure, most people never think twice about such questions.  But then, those people aren't following this discussion, are they?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Roseval on 2008-05-05 00:17:22
Quote
So, you see, at the root of things, I'm concerned not so much with the file/folder structure, as with tagging. Who should be "Artist" for a a Classical performance? Sometimes it is the performer who is the highlight (e.g., Glenn Gould/Luciano Pavarotti), and sometimes it is the piece being performed that is the star (e.g., a second-rate philharmonic performing Beethovan). Sometimes, it is the conductor who is given top billing. How do you tag it, and how do you organise/display/sort it in your player of choice?



I’m using WMP so I have tags for
Composer, Album, song, artist, contributing artist, conductor.
These are self explaining
Genre I use for something I don’t know how it is called in English but it contains String quartet, string quitet, sextet, etc.
Period I use it for the year of the composition
Sub genre for opus numbers.

The album is the work, so I have each composition separately.
Now Beethoven wrote his first string quartet and called it rather aptly String quartet 1.
Now Brahms wrote his first string quartet and called it rather aptly String quartet 1.
As an album don’t exist in PC audio, a lot of players use the album title to group songs together.
To avoid this, every composition is pre fixed with the name of the composer so:
Beethoven – string quartet 1 op. 1
Brahms – string quartet 1 op.3
Now if you ad the opus number there is no real need to pre fix the composer but I rather have the works grouped by composer then by type.
Beside
string quartet 1 op. 1
string quartet 1 op. 3
is not a very easy way to find a string quartet by Beethoven

You can have duplicates, say Beethoven – string quartet 1 op. 1 performed by the Alban Berg Quartet and by Hagen quartet.
Most players group these together so you get part 1 played by Alban and then part 1 played by Hagen. So I add the performer to the album to
Beethoven – string quartet 1 op. 1 – Alban Berg
Beethoven – string quartet 1 op. 1 – Hagen

1 You have a piano sonata played by Martha Argerich
2 A violin concert played by Gideon Kremer
3 A sonata for violin and piano played by both.
I want to be able to find all the works performed by Argerich, like wise by Kremer.

For artist I simply use the names so 3 becomes Kremer/Argerich
The contributing artist is the same as the album artist but in case of 3 this becomes Kremer;Argerich
In WMP using artist I see the combinations
Using contributing artist due to the ; I get all the works where the individual artist is involved.
This is also great for jazz or samplers (Artist: Various, Contributing: XYZ

To become a bit more specific: Who should be "Artist" for a a Classical performance is a question I don’t have.
Glenn Gould is simply one of the many excellent performers, no reason to treat him different.
Luciano Pavarotti, treat it as it is, pop music
A second-rate philharmonic – delete

A bit more serious, there is no reason to use the artist for any thing else as the performer. The only exception is a player not supporting the composer tag (not uncommon as players are designed with pop music in mind). In these case you might consider using the composer as the artist. In fact standard FreeDB output is Artist: Beethoven Composer: unknown.

From a psychological point of view, I understand, sometimes an artist becomes more important than the works but stick to the tags, if you do it right (and your player allows for it) you can find them all
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Cidinho on 2008-05-05 01:00:55
My Musics\Artist\(Year) Album\Track n. Title

Used to be My Musics\Artist\Title, but now I'm listening to more formal music that actually gets released...

also, I found a problem when downloading old music, like Mozart. I just don't know what year and album it is =P
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ~*McoreD*~ on 2008-05-05 14:27:45
My only comment is that I don’t understand why one is so concerned about file structure.
Any decent player uses tags to browse your collection.
Using WMP I can select a composer say Beethoven. I can sort all his works by title, genre and as I have given a couple of tags a very distinct use, by opus number and by year of composition.
Why do I need a complicated file naming convention when filtering and sorting by tags (not to mention the search box) do the job?

If I read these postings about directory/filename structures, I have the feeling that a lot of people simply don’t understand where tagging is about.


My thoughts exactly. As long as you have the most basic file system organization of your music files there is no need to worry about it more. The era of browsing music through Explorer and listening to music is over. Now a good player provides very customizable, searchable browsing abilities (foobar2000), so a logical order of your music files in AlbumArtist\Album is enough.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: stampgevaar on 2008-05-05 16:57:13
Music/mixed compilation/album album artist year
Music/compilation/album album artist year
Music/albums/ album artist album year
Music/tracks/genre
Music/live sets/genre
Music/vinyl/label/catalog album album artist year

I like to keep things a bit separated because tracks and live sets aren't really official releases (soulseek/website downloads stuff) and I have way to much vinyl to put them in the same folder with the rest. Also nice to know which label your listening, i think it gives a better image of a certain genre (for house music that is). Also have a lot of various artist albums that's why I prefer separate folders for those (compilation)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: tom_vienna_at on 2008-05-05 17:09:32
Very simple, as I don't care for "albums" at all:

Artist\Artist - Title.codec

Album-directories only make sense if you like complete albums on your hd. I personally haven't come across an album were I liked each and every track.

edit: typo
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: boombaard on 2008-05-05 17:36:49
hm.. and since our needs evolve, and this poll has been running a while: (;-))

%composer%/$iflonger([%conductor%],%key%,$substr(%conductor%,$add($strrchr(%conductor%, ),1),$len(%conductor%))',' $abbr($meta(ensemble,0),20)[',' $substr($meta(performer,0),$add($strrchr($meta(performer,0), ),1),$len($meta(performer,0)))],$iflonger([%ensemble%],%key%,$abbr(%ensemble%,25)[',' $substr($meta(performer,0),$add($strrchr($meta(performer,0), ),1),$len($meta(performer,0)))],$abbr($meta(performer,0),35)[, $abbr($meta(performer,1),25)][, $abbr($meta(performer,2),25)][, $abbr($meta(performer,3),20)]))/[%album%][ '('%date%')']/ (where i use %album% to contain the work information)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Steven123 on 2008-05-11 01:46:18
hm.. and since our needs evolve, and this poll has been running a while: (;-))

%composer%/$iflonger([%conductor%],%key%,$substr(%conductor%,$add($strrchr(%conductor%, ),1),$len(%conductor%))',' $abbr($meta(ensemble,0),20)[',' $substr($meta(performer,0),$add($strrchr($meta(performer,0), ),1),$len($meta(performer,0)))],$iflonger([%ensemble%],%key%,$abbr(%ensemble%,25)[',' $substr($meta(performer,0),$add($strrchr($meta(performer,0), ),1),$len($meta(performer,0)))],$abbr($meta(performer,0),35)[, $abbr($meta(performer,1),25)][, $abbr($meta(performer,2),25)][, $abbr($meta(performer,3),20)]))/[%album%][ '('%date%')']/ (where i use %album% to contain the work information)


 

That's weird, I use this exact directory structure/naming scheme!
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: 2tec on 2008-05-11 02:19:26
I personally haven't come across an album were I liked each and every track.
Owww. Not even Dark Side Of The Moon?  What about albums like Jeff Wayne's "War Of The Worlds" or "Best Of ..." albums?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: james.miller on 2008-05-11 14:34:26
MUSIC / Artist - (album number) - Album / %N - %T

i put the album number there to keep the albums in the chronological release order.

example:

Metallica - (1) - Kill Em all
Metallica - (2) - Master of Puppets
Metallica - (3) - And justice for all

ect


browsing by tag is fine but for archieve purposes its much easier to have one folder per album.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: tom_vienna_at on 2008-05-11 17:41:12
I personally haven't come across an album were I liked each and every track.
Owww. Not even Dark Side Of The Moon?  What about albums like Jeff Wayne's "War Of The Worlds" or "Best Of ..." albums?

Sorry, but I don't care for that kind of music at all. I guess it all comes down to personal preferences really.

But I used to have all my music in one folder per album... until I came to the conclusion that I am building up mountains of things. Why keep music on my hd that doesn't sound good to my ear - for the sake of completeness? No, that would be stupid.

But I am aware that other people see things differently - and having the complete album in one folder is just the perfect thing for them.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Nick.C on 2008-05-11 18:24:10
MUSIC / Artist - (album number) - Album / %N - %T

i put the album number there to keep the albums in the chronological release order.

example:

Metallica - (1) - Kill Em all
Metallica - (2) - Master of Puppets
Metallica - (3) - And justice for all

ect


browsing by tag is fine but for archieve purposes its much easier to have one folder per album.
Why not use the year associated with the album? e.g. Mike Oldfield - [2008] Music of the Spheres.

Recently I changed from one folder per album to one file per album, so I no longer have the problem of deep directory structures.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: 2tec on 2008-05-11 18:57:12
But I used to have all my music in one folder per album... until I came to the conclusion that I am building up mountains of things. Why keep music on my hd that doesn't sound good to my ear - for the sake of completeness? No, that would be stupid.

But I am aware that other people see things differently - and having the complete album in one folder is just the perfect thing for them.

Actually, personally I also don't bother keeping songs I don't like. However, even if I have a single song, it resides in a folder named after the source of the song. In most cases, this is an album / CD / DVD. The main reason I have found I need to do this is to distinguish between the additional images and lyrics that I maintain with the song(s). Without distinct folders, I'm left either maintaining a database or a separate repository, both of which have exactly the same need for structure as my directories now reflect, so why bother?

Besides, it is possible to rename and reorganize directories and files based on tags, so it should be possible to produce a collection organized exactly as your tags are, no?

Recently I changed from one folder per album to one file per album, so I no longer have the problem of deep directory structures.

  Ok, but how do you listen to tracks in an order different than the album's?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Nick.C on 2008-05-11 19:12:08
Ok, but how do you listen to tracks in an order different than the album's?
I use foobar2000 - you can create custom playlists pulling individual tracks out of each album.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: thinkum dinkum on 2008-05-11 20:56:17
Root\

- [Custom Genres] -

Artist [Year] Album\T# Artist - Title.codec
Artist [Year] Album [Original Year]\T# Artist - Title.codec
Artist - Performer [Year] Album\T# Artist - Title.codec
Various Album Artist [Year] Album\T# Artist - Title.codec
Various Publisher [Year] Album\T# Artist - Title.codec

Year tag depends on type or reissue, remaster etc.
the few main i can think of, there are several other rarely used methods

In most of the album folders there are:

00 Artist - Album.cue
00 Artist - Album.log
00 Artist - Album f.png
00 Artist - Album b.png ...
folder.jpg

Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: 2tec on 2008-05-11 21:04:43
I use foobar2000 - you can create custom playlists pulling individual tracks out of each album.
What about random playback? How ever do you manage album art and lyrics? Does this preserve gaps? So many questions!  I hope it's no bother?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Nick.C on 2008-05-11 21:21:34
What about random playback? How ever do you manage album art and lyrics? Does this preserve gaps? So many questions!  I hope it's no bother?
Use the Playback > Order > Random in foobar2000 for random playback;
I don't (yet) but I think it would be possible with care;
If the image is ripped with the cuesheet then gaps should be preserved for burning back to CD (I think).
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: plnelson on 2008-05-12 18:33:36
My only comment is that I don’t understand why one is so concerned about file structure.
Any decent player uses tags to browse your collection.
Using WMP I can select a composer say Beethoven. I can sort all his works by title, genre and as I have given a couple of tags a very distinct use, by opus number and by year of composition.
Why do I need a complicated file naming convention when filtering and sorting by tags (not to mention the search box) do the job?

If I read these postings about directory/filename structures, I have the feeling that a lot of people simply don’t understand where tagging is about.


Exactly right!

And to put this another way, "file structure" is a device and OS-dependent concept so it limits your portability.    Tags are universal.  There is not a major, music-playing device in wide use today that doesn't utilize tags  -  iPods/iPhones, all other portable MP3 players, car stereos, PC-based music playing sw, Sonos, Roku, Logitech / Squeezebox, my Verizon cellphone, etc. 

I'm a sw engineer so maybe I'm more used to thinking in object-oriented terms, but this fixation on what amounts to containers and external organizations (CD albums and file structures) seems like "old" thinking.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: thinkum dinkum on 2008-05-12 18:47:34
I'm a sw engineer so maybe I'm more used to thinking in object-oriented terms, but this fixation on what amounts to containers and external organizations (CD albums and file structures) seems like "old" thinking.

but we still feel young inside 

seriously, i'm just used to physically manipulate my music, cut paste copy here there usb backup etc etc

btw. how do you display artwork if all files are in one folder?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: plnelson on 2008-05-12 18:51:31
I'm concerned not so much with the file/folder structure, as with tagging.  Who should be "Artist" for a a Classical performance?  Sometimes it is the performer who is the highlight (e.g., Glenn Gould/Luciano Pavarotti), and sometimes it is the piece being performed that is the star (e.g., a second-rate philharmonic performing Beethovan).  Sometimes, it is the conductor who is given top billing.  How do you tag it, and how do you organise/display/sort it in your player of choice?


The ID3 tagging scheme was devised by geeks who didn't know or care anything about music.    It's crippled in many ways, ONE of which is that it has no built-in universal support for subtags or multiple or'ed-together values of the same tag.    I put ALL of the stuff you mentioned in the "Artist" tag -  ensemble, conductor, soloist(s), etc.  But that still doesn't make it easy to display on my iPod for, say, all the tracks featuring Alfred Brendel or all the works featuring the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, if any are the same tracks, unless I do a manual search (and thank god for that feature on the iPod!).

Likewise "Genre" needs to accept multiple values.  The same piece of music could reasonably be more than one genre - rock and Latin, Latin and jazz, jazz and classical, pop and soundtrack, etc. 

And classical fans widely use "Album" for the opus because it's a tag that practically every music-playing device supports. 

I advocate using tags instead of file structure for searching/cataloging/organizing because tags are self-contained, portable, and universal, and not dependent on any particular OS or platform, NOT because I think tags are very well-designed.

And FWIW I almost never use the tags from any of the online databases - I hand edit all my own tags for accuracy, completeness, and consistency.  It's more work but you only have to do it once.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: plnelson on 2008-05-12 19:03:48
I'm a sw engineer so maybe I'm more used to thinking in object-oriented terms, but this fixation on what amounts to containers and external organizations (CD albums and file structures) seems like "old" thinking.

but we still feel young inside 

seriously, i'm just used to physically manipulate my music, cut paste copy here there usb backup etc etc

btw. how do you display artwork if all files are in one folder?


You embed it in the file itself.  Some people think this wastes too much space, but really, if your music file is 6 MB (a 3 minute pop song at 256kbps) then what's a 300x300 album art JPEG?  40kB, maybe?  Even a much higher-rez image would be such a small potion of the music file that it would only increase the file size by a trivial percent.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: thinkum dinkum on 2008-05-12 20:32:51
ok, that's cool
but these days of cheap drive space, i rip my cds to flac, and scan to 300dpi png, with cue&log
maybe cues are not necessary, cause i rarely burn anything, doing it out of habit i guess

sort of a backup and music database at the same time
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: gasmann on 2008-05-12 21:37:26
I used to have the 3 Level: Music\Artist\Album\T# - Title.codec schema, and for some times I tried a different 3 Level approach: Music\Genre\Album\T# - Title.codec but hell it is not worth the effort for me.
Hence I switched to 2 Level: Music\Artist - Album\T# - Title.codec and it works fine for me.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: k.eight.a on 2008-05-12 23:30:04
Most of the time I use structure as:

2 Level: Music\Artist - Year - Album\T# - Title.ext

SomeTimes also:

3 Level: Music\Artist\Year - Album\T# - Title.ext

Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: plnelson on 2008-05-13 02:00:00
ok, that's cool
but these days of cheap drive space, i rip my cds to flac, and scan to 300dpi png, with cue&log
maybe cues are not necessary, cause i rarely burn anything, doing it out of habit i guess

sort of a backup and music database at the same time


OK, but how big is a 3 minute pop song in FLAC?  Bigger, I assume, than a 256 kbps MP3 or AAC.    And how big is a 300 DPI scan of CD album art?  In a high-quality JPEG it will only be a few hundred K, (I haven't tried PNG but I assume it would also be pretty small) so as a percentage of the music the cover art is still small.  (I don't use FLAC but I assume it will take embedded images).  And, of  course a 3 minute pop song is the worst-case scenario.  If your music tracks are longer then embedding the image in the file extracts an even smaller penalty.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: milesmonk on 2008-05-17 19:05:32
I'm still particular about file names and folder structure — but a bit less particular about folder structure now.  The reason for this shift is the discovery that one can transfer files by dragging and dropping straight from foobar2000 (my music player of choice).  The idea to try this out struck me when I saw a friend doing so using iTunes media player.  Tracking down the location of a file, and transferring whole albums is now easier.

Parenthetically, I'm still particular because things like album art, artist art, etc., are stored in the album/artist folder alongside the music files.  Thus, a neat organisation along those lines is a must for me.  If a way to delink those is possible without too much hassle, I would jump on board.

Note: while my preferred option for album art used to be embedded art, I've come around to merely placing the art in the music (album) folder these days.  If there is an easy way to resize the album art to less than 100KB, and then embed the files properly as front cover, back cover, etc., could someone please inform me?  Currently I use foobar2000 and mp3tag.  (Handling of multiple covers is not yet perfect in mp3tag... Though it apparently works in Tag/Rename and MediaMonkey.)  Thanks in advance for the help, if any is forthcoming.


My only comment is that I don’t understand why one is so concerned about file structure.
Any decent player uses tags to browse your collection.
Using WMP I can select a composer say Beethoven. I can sort all his works by title, genre and as I have given a couple of tags a very distinct use, by opus number and by year of composition.
Why do I need a complicated file naming convention when filtering and sorting by tags (not to mention the search box) do the job?

If I read these postings about directory/filename structures, I have the feeling that a lot of people simply don’t understand where tagging is about.


I agree completely.  The behaviour that I (and some others in this thread) exhibit is most definitely anal-retentive.  But it's not only about file-structure.  The way I see it, file-structure is only a reflection of metadata.  (After all, renaming files in accordance with the scheme I've outlined above is only a click away in foobar2000/mp3tag/[your mp3 renamer of choice].)  Changing file-structure isn't all that difficult.  But coming up with a consistent and intelligent metadata system is.

So, you see, at the root of things, I'm concerned not so much with the file/folder structure, as with tagging.  Who should be "Artist" for a a Classical performance?  Sometimes it is the performer who is the highlight (e.g., Glenn Gould/Luciano Pavarotti), and sometimes it is the piece being performed that is the star (e.g., a second-rate philharmonic performing Beethovan).  Sometimes, it is the conductor who is given top billing.  How do you tag it, and how do you organise/display/sort it in your player of choice?

The questions I had raised for the file structure also apply directly to tagging.  Do you tag it uniformly as "OST: [Movie Name]" or "[Movie Name]" or "[Full title as provided on the CD]"?  AMG has a habit of using "Soundtrack" as the Album Artist for all multi-artist soundtracks.  Do you follow that, or use "Various Artists"?  These are questions about tagging as well.

Sure, most people never think twice about such questions.  But then, those people aren't following this discussion, are they?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: collector on 2008-05-18 15:01:00
..and some people keep their photos in bulk in shoe boxes, no matter when, where or why they were taken and by whom.  It's a choice.

I prefer album before artist, because I can hear and remember who's the artist, but most of the time I don't recall which album it is.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: bwiberg on 2010-01-18 08:46:22
Quote
But the vast majority of the time the songs are just songs and the "album" is just a container - the physical polycarbonate or vinyl disk the record label decided to put them on.    I'm also a photographer and it's like if I bought a bunch of photographic accessories - filters, lens caps, straps, etc, and they all came in the same box so I decided to always store them together after that because of the box they came in.

Many times the SAME song will appear on more than one album  - a first release, a later "best of" compilation, and then a late-night TV "greatest hits of the 90's" collection.  Other times the "same" album will have DIFFERENT versions of the "same" song -  for instance, when the Moby album "Play" was first released it had one version of "South Side"  and then later they CHANGED it to include the version with the Gwen Stefani vocals!    Also sometimes the US and EU versions of the "same" albums will have different content.

If you feel the album is significant you can always include that information in the tag.  But why make it part of the directory structure?  As I said above, I keep ALL the songs by a given artist in one flat older.  The songs may have been ripped from a CD, bought online, or stream-ripped, it doesn't matter.    I've never had any problem with this scheme and it's very easy and simple.


Hope it's alright to revive an old thread and that plnelson is still reading... Anyway I tend to agree with your arguments. I would however like to know how you handle the situation ripping a cd containing a version of track you already have? If your file structure is Artist/Tracktitle.codec you would either overwrite the existing version or have your new entry rejected. So you must have come up with something additional to uniquely identify the track. Recording date might be a candidate, but even that is sometimes not known or ambiguous. Another approach could be to just name all tracks track000001, track000002 and so on. I would like to hear what you have chosen?

Bendt
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: bwiberg on 2010-01-26 09:06:18
OK - settled on this file structure:

Album~CDDBid/Artist~Track.codec

Should also work for compilations. CDDBid is there to help keeping folder names unique...

/Bendt
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: jeremija on 2010-01-27 07:45:47
%codec%\%album artist%\%date% %album%\%tracknumber% - %title%
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Goratrix on 2010-01-27 10:48:37
all my music is LAME 3.97 -V0

directory structure:

regular albums:
D:\MP3\Artist - Albumname CD#\01-Trackname.mp3

compilations:
D:\MP3\VA - Albumname CD#\01-Trackname.mp3

every folder is an exact rip of a physical CD and all further sorting and management is done with tags. simple and effective, no unnecessary subfolders.

I'm using the Album Artist, Band, and Itunescompilaton tags to sort out VA compilations in Itunes, works pretty good with the intelligent merging of Artist and Album Artist that Itunes does in the Artist filter.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: antropoid on 2010-01-27 15:03:17
Well I like as follows

Music/artist/album

in the case for multidisc albums

Music/artist/album/cd1
Music/artist/album/cd2
Music/artist/album/cd...

all my music are complete albums, works like a charm in foobar
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Brian.Audio on 2010-02-23 02:32:51
Well, thanks to this forum, I've learned how to rip perfect FLACs with XLD and convert them to MP3s in a weekend. So before I create my music directory I was wondering whether people typically put the Artist's (First Name) first or their (Last Name) first ?
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Drexl on 2010-02-23 19:05:37
Well, thanks to this forum, I've learned how to rip perfect FLACs with XLD and convert them to MP3s in a weekend. So before I create my music directory I was wondering whether people typically put the Artist's (First Name) first or their (Last Name) first ?


I use the first name, as that seems a bit easier to me.  I'll omit "The" from the folder name, but I'll use it in the tag (i.e., folder is Beatles but tag is The Beatles).  I would suggest doing that if you decide to use last names first.  For instance the folder would have "Dylan, Bob" but the tag would be "Bob Dylan."

BTW, the structure I use is "Artist - Album/T% - Track name.flac."  Then I'll separate those into something like A-F, G-L, etc. when they get too unwieldy.  I don't do a separate folder for each artist, because there are cases where I only have one album, and it seems kind of silly to create a folder that leads just to one more folder.  With soundtracks I don't use "Various Artists" but rather tag each file with the individual artist and year, and compilations also get individual years.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Meeko on 2010-02-27 12:47:36
I seem to be in the majority.

Music \ Artist \ Album \ # - Title.flac

Just is easy to find what you want by whom.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: a13xth0rn3 on 2010-02-27 15:10:59
C:\Users\Alex\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Genre\Artist\Album\01. Filename.m4a

If it's a double disc:
C:\Users\Alex\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Genre\Artist\Album\Disc 01\01. Filename.m4a
C:\Users\Alex\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Genre\Artist\Album\Disc 02\01. Filename.m4a

If it's a vinyl rip:
C:\Users\Alex\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Genre\Artist\Album\A Side\01. Filename.m4a
C:\Users\Alex\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Genre\Artist\Album\B Side\01. Filename.m4a

If it's a compilation:
C:\Users\Alex\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Genre\VA\Album\01. Filename.m4a

All files are ID3 Tagged e.g.

Artist: XXX
Title: XXX
Album: XXX
Track: X
Genre: XXX
Album Art: XXX.jpeg
Compilation: 1 (For compilations only)

I delete any other tags using dbpoweramp e.g. year, comment, bpm etc because i don't find them useful.
I currently archive my music in Apple Lossless (ALAC) for iPod compatibility. I do favour FLAC but i don't wish to use rockbox.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: trelain on 2010-03-22 03:48:57
I use

file type\Artist\Year_Album\Artist_Album_Track#_Title.xxx 

I use the underscore as the logical separator instead of the dash since the dash can sometimes appear in an album or song title, which screws things up.    I redundantly put the Artist and Album in the actual file name also because I wanted to keep enough info in the file's name so basic tag info could be rebuilt from the file name in the event that the tags get corrupted or deleted.  Also this method allows you to copy only desired files anywhere without having to rely on tags to figure out the Artist, Year, or Album.    But in using this method I'm finding that when the Album and Title are both long, I have run dangerously close to exceeding the 256 char path name limit on some files once you include parent folders, e.g., "The Beatles_The Beatles (White Album) [Disc 2] [2009 Mono Remaster]_04_Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey", so I'm considering going to just 

file type\Artist\Year_Album\Track#_Title.xxx

and if and when tags ever have to be rebuilt I'll at least have the folder structure to pull Artist, Album, & Year from (provided the folder structure is never messed up).  But this removes the convenience of viewing Artist,Album & Year along with title & track# when copying only selected files to, say, a portable flash player, so I'm still debating what to do (which brought me here for opinions).
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: TechVsLife on 2010-03-22 05:35:19
I have two formats depending on genre (there are only two genres):

I.  For classical music, like this:
Always start with composer and year of birth and death, then

1. if works are multi-track or major/long (symphonies, masses, operas), then group by work (and use the name of the work for the "album" name, with performer if I care)
\Bach (1685-1750)\Mass in b minor\01~Kyrie Eleison.m4a 
the filename is the movement number and the name of the movement.

2a.  if works are single tracks (or only two/three tracks), can group by type instead:
\Chopin (1810-1849)\Nocturnes\Nocturne No. 1~Op. 37.m4a

2b.  and if performer and album are important then can use album title/identifier (but #1 overrides--always break out major works as "album" though can add performer to that):
\Chopin (1810-1849)\Rubinstein~RCA Basic 100 Vol 20~C311860E\


II.  For all other music (i.e. pop music), like this:
\Pop\
then if have several songs by one band/artist:
\Pop\Sherman, Bobby (1943-)\Waiting At the Bus Stop.m4a
(sorry for the example!)
filename is songtitle (optionally with year of release at the end).

else:
\Pop\1990s\Sixpence None the Richer~Kiss Me.m4a
filename is "artist~song title"
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: passenger on 2010-05-10 00:35:51
I organise music like this:

D:\MUSIC\FLAC

or

D:\MUSIC\MP3

Further, it looks like D:\MUSIC\FLAC\ARTIST\ALBUM

For various artists compilation i add VA before name of compilation, example D:\MUSIC\FLAC\VA - THIS IS THE COMPILATION

Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: spile on 2010-05-10 13:23:48
Can someone please explain what this fixation so many people have with the album is all about?

I will grant you that SOMETIMES the songs on the album are related to each other in some specific artistic way -  "Sketches of Spain" (Miles Davis), say or "Tommy"(The Who).  And house or DJ mix music has to be kept together so you can gaplessly transition from one track to the other as the DJ intended.



(I know I've made this rant on HA before, here, but I still don't "get" what the big deal with albums is)


The album "package" is important in the same way that a meal is made up of various foods that go together. Playing tracks from an album out order just doesn't sound right.
An album of mine that has related tracks is Neil Ardley's Kaleidoscope of Rainbows.
An album that doesn't have related tracks but the order and collectiveness is still vital - Faust's So Far
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Bjossi on 2010-05-10 19:02:32
Folder structure:
\Music\Artist\Album\Title.wv

Tag structure (in correct order):
Title
Artist
Track Artist (Various artists only.)
Album
Disc (2+CD albums only.)
Track
Genre
Date
Original Date (Remaster releases only.)

I keep the folder/name structure simple and make the tags and player take care of detailed data and sorting. Works great for me and my still tiny music collection.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: vassie on 2011-03-14 19:22:02
I've decided to restructure mine, from...

Album Artist\Album\Track Number - Title

to...

Album Artist [Year] Album\Track Number - Title

I much prefer a flatter structure
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: trelain on 2011-12-26 07:51:23
Can someone please explain what this fixation so many people have with the album is all about?

I will grant you that SOMETIMES the songs on the album are related to each other in some specific artistic way -  "Sketches of Spain" (Miles Davis), say or "Tommy"(The Who).  And house or DJ mix music has to be kept together so you can gaplessly transition from one track to the other as the DJ intended.



(I know I've made this rant on HA before, here, but I still don't "get" what the big deal with albums is)


The album "package" is important in the same way that a meal is made up of various foods that go together. Playing tracks from an album out order just doesn't sound right.
An album of mine that has related tracks is Neil Ardley's Kaleidoscope of Rainbows.
An album that doesn't have related tracks but the order and collectiveness is still vital - Faust's So Far


Sorry if the bump offends anyone, but this thread is an ongoing discussion, right?
The "album" is a part of the presentation of the song from the artist, so I keep it important to retain that as part of the default organization of the songs.    We of course don't have to listen to them that way, but artists generally release songs in a specific sequence on the album to convey subtle relationships to each other and to tell a larger story, which I try to retain when storing my digital music.    Even the "album" artwork can contribute to the cohesiveness of each album song and to their listening experience and interpretation.    On the other hand I am not very concerned with transferring to the tags the original physical medium arrangement, e.g. CD Disc 1, Disc 2 aspect of an album or song - for instance, The Beatles White Album was released on two records, (or two compact discs), merely because of the physical limitations of the medium.  I rather combine them into one album's combined collection of tracks, since they are presented by the artist as one album.  Whereas now in the digital world an artist that is not hampered by that, could, although unlikely, release 500 songs as part of one "album" if they so choose.  Quite ironic that artists who in the past were more impeded by physical limitations of records or CD's still released double or triple albums worth of work, but are less likely to do so today despite more freedom to do so.    Perhaps today's digital world is more demanding, i.e., "we only want the good stuff", so it is harder to get per-song obsessed consumers to be interested in handing out double or triple album-priced collections to get the "big package" story that the artist is trying to tell.    Back when the record companies controlled everything, you had to buy the whole triple album just to have the one song that never made it to a single, which = more album sales for them and more $$.  It seems to be more of an all or ala carte world nowadays - give me "one song" or "discography box-set".
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: ainz on 2011-12-26 11:00:07
I use
/Album Artist/Album Artist – Year - Album Title [Bitrate Codec]
e.g. Autechre/Autechre – 2010 – Oversteps [320k mp3]

...except for compliations and other VA releases which I organise under
/Record Label Name/Various - Year - Album Title [Bitrate Codec]
e.g. Horizons Music/Various – 2008 – Dream Thief [320k mp3]
...which avoids having a single huge 'Various Artists' parent folder.

I still the use the ancient 'Album list (panel)' tree view which lets me view & navigate by folder structure.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: lunkhead on 2011-12-26 14:06:43
\Music\Letter\Artist - Album (Year)\Track - Title

I don't have a lot.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: yakkady on 2011-12-26 17:31:23
I've just got mine separated by genre. A whopping five subfolders!
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Bright Star on 2012-01-04 19:53:36
Here is my settings

I've folders named Music 1,Music 2,,,Music n (currently I'm at Music 11), and inside each folder the files are separated by genre (Alternative, Pop, Rock, Jazz and more, where Black Music has more folders inside, such as Rap, Soul, Hip hop and more).
At the bottom of each folder, I save the albums named Artist - Album name.

The reason (historic somehow) for Music 1 & etc is because when I've started to collect mp3, I've quickly lost space and needed to transfer the entire collection couple of times, between folders, hard drives and etc.
The Music n helps me know when I've downloaded the album (more or less of course) and navigation this days is pretty much strait forward for me (although I've to admit that I'm considering changing structure, hence my appearance here :-)).

As long as Foobar is able to correctly read the tags (consider that when I've started to collect, tagging wasn't much in fashion and now thesedays, the manual task looks quite annoying to me), I'm quite happy.

C&C are welcomed.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Nessuno on 2012-01-04 22:25:55
My main music library is made solely of classical CD ripping, one directory per CD and one file per track: a two level structure that allows me to reference at once the physical medium where that file comes from. CDs are univocally identified by label name & catalog number.
Actually there are two distinct directory trees, one for lossless FLAC files, replicated on three different external drives and one for 256kbps VBR AAC on internal drive for actual listening. So a typical full pathname is:

[parent dir]/[FLAC|AAC]/Alia Vox AV9818 A/Track 01.[flac|m4a]

Directory of CDs who belong to a box which has only a catalog number as a whole, are added their progressive index number.

E.g.: ../Brilliant 92136-1/* ../Brilliant 92136-2/* … ../Brilliant 92136-60/*
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: The Seeker on 2012-01-24 21:25:56
C:\Users\Gavin\Music\Dawnbringer\(2010) Nucleus\1.06. Like an Earthquake.mp3
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Porcus on 2012-01-25 10:20:04
Usual ones:
Harddrive:\single_char_folder_name\Artist {year} ~ album ~ [code with disc id and rip accuracy]\Artist {year} ~ album ~ tracknumber ~ title.flac

... that single character prevents paths from exceeding the length limit.


Classical music follows different pattern, as I don't want to sort by performing artist.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: justsetmefree on 2012-02-02 18:22:13
F:\Musics\A\Apocalyptica\Apocalyptica - 7th Symphony
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: pandino on 2013-02-14 20:01:09
I use

MUSIC / "*" / Artist / Year - "CD/EP/Single etc" / #T - Title .mp3/.flac/.wav etc

For example:

-"Music"
- - "A"
- - - "Amplifier"
- - - - "2004 - CD - Amplifier"
- - - - - "01 - ...mp3"
- - - - - "02 - ...mp3"
- - - - - "03 - ...mp3"
- - - - - ...
- - - - "2011 - CD - The Octopus"
- - - - - "CD 1 - 01 - ...mp3"
- - - - - "CD 1 - 02 - ...mp3"
- - - - - ...
- - - - - "CD 2 - 01 - ...mp3"
- - - - - ...
- - ...
- - "T"
- - - "Tool"
- - - - "2001a - CD - Lateralus"
- - - - "2001b - Single - Schism"
- - - - "2002 - Single - Parabola"
- - - - "2006 - CD - 10,000 Days"

And so on.. :)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Jplus on 2013-02-15 17:41:42
I use a 4 level arrangement where the artists or composers are grouped by genre or period. In non-contemporary periods I subdivide by composer and concerto, in the contemporary genres I subdivide by artist and album. The year is often included in the folder name of an album, but I always sort by album title.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: eahm on 2013-02-15 18:26:24
"D:"
- "Music"
- - "Artist Name"
- - - "Year - Album Name [FLAC/WV/APE]" ([] only for lossless albums, nothing for lossy)
- - - - "Track Number.Song Title.ext"
- - - - "600x600.jpg"
- - - - "800x800.jpg"
- - - - "1000x1000.jpg"
- - - - "1500x1500.jpg"

- - - "Box Set/Compilation Albums/EP Albums/Live Albums/Single Albums"
- - - - "Year - Album Name [FLAC/WV/APE]" ([] only for lossless albums, nothing for lossy)
- - - - - "Track Number.Song Title.ext"
- - - - - "600x600.jpg"
- - - - - "800x800.jpg"
- - - - - "1000x1000.jpg"
- - - - - "1500x1500.jpg"

- - "Random"
- - - "Artist Name - Song Title.mp3/m4a"

- - "ToDo" (for temporary conversions)
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: o-l-a-v on 2013-02-15 18:34:30
Lossless:

- "FLAC"
- - "Artist Name"
- - - "[Year] Album Name"
- - - - "Disc Number(If multiple discs).Track Number - Song Title.flac"

Lossy:

- "MP3"
- - "Artist Name - Year - Album - Disc Number(If multiple discs).Track Number - Song Title.mp3"

Would be like: "El Caco - The Search - 05 - Substitute.mp3"
My lossy system makes LONG file names. But different portable devices handle folders differently. This is the best solution IMO in order to get the same system on any device.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: The Milkman on 2013-02-16 15:56:47
It has been interesting to read over this topic, as I thought I had it all figured out but I think there is at least one change I want to make to my file structure now. Normally I will let my media player handle finding my audio for me, but I still like to have it organized in such a way that if I ever want to quickly copy a track out for whatever reason, I can do so with ease.

My system right now is:

:\Music\Album Artist\Album\d# - Title.EXT


I use "Album Artist" instead of "Artist" because that avoids the problem where an album may have one or two tracks with collaborating artists showing up in the "Artist" tag, and it works well for compilations that have "Various Artists" in their Album Artist tag.

d is the disc number, which I only include if it's a multi-disc album. That way I know if a track starts 01 - Title.EXT, it's from a single disc album.
In a multi-disc album, track numbers are shown as:

101
102
..
114
201
202


Anything more than that, and you're ending up going through too many subdirectories to find what you were looking for.

From reading through this topic though, I think I may now change my naming scheme to:

:\Music\Album Artist\[Year] Album\d# - Title.EXT


It also has me reconsidering my filenames. I have them named in such a way that they make sense inside that directory structure, but I am now wondering if I should be naming so they will automatically sort, and make sense in any folder, if I were to just grab a selection at random and copy them to a USB stick for example.

Something along the lines of:

<album artist> - <year> <album> - d# - Title.EXT

might work better, as they will automatically be displayed in the correct order.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: jkauff on 2013-02-17 15:01:13
I start organizing at a higher level. I have a folder called Hi Res Music that is then organized by artist-album/track no - title. This is all my HDTracks and needledrop stuff. I have separate folders on another drive, one each for lossless Jazz, Rock, and Classical, with the same artist -album/track -title scheme.

I have another folder for Live Music, which is organized with the same scheme except with artist - date - venue. If I have a lot of shows by one artist, I'll make an Artist folder and put all the shows in there.

I also have an iTunes media folder for iTunes lossy files, mostly because I got tired of fighting with iTunes. I've got plenty of disc space, if it wants to make a copy within its own file structure, fine. I have another folder for MP3, which includes everything from iTunes organized the way I want it, and stuff that I never put in iTunes. It uses the same artist -album scheme as the rest of my music.

I can always find what I'm looking for without searching and without foobar2000's library function (although my collection is in there if I want to use it.). I also have lots of stuff on DVD data discs, which I keep track of using a highly recommended program called Where Is It?.

EDIT: I also have backups of most of this stuff organized exactly the same way. I use a very nice free program called Allsync that automatically updates my backup folders.

I'm also a heavy user of Mp3tag, so I made a donation. I encourage others to do the same.
Title: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: roebeet on 2013-02-25 03:50:41
/Music/Genre/Artist/Album/<Track #> - <Track Name>.codec
Title: Re: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Fairy on 2016-11-21 13:49:46
I love to know how people are doing this nowadays.
I'm in the middle of doing a quite huge reorganizing to my collection because it is growing. I never used tags and deleted every one of them and kept everything in the folder structure. These days applications tend to only show files that are tagged, like Plex.

My current structure for albums is (for example):
\Music\Artist\Eva Cassidy\Eva Cassidy - Songbird (1998)\01 - Eva Cassidy - Fields of Gold.wv

For CD's with variaus artists I use this:
D:\Music\Artist\Various\Various - Dance Classics - The Ballads Vol 1 (1989) (CD1)\01 - Bill Withers - Ain't No Sunshine.wv

Now comes my question also. I want to tag them all with Foobar, so using (1989) can give problems, because I also have albums without a yeat stamp or with different information between the ( ) marks.

I was thinking about something like (Y1989) or (YEAR1989) or (Y#1989). Still have no clue what is the best option to get a decent link usable in the autotagger. I can quickly rename them with "Flexible Renamer", which works perfect for me.

Anyone who has better folder structures that are compatible with autotagging I would love to know!
Title: Re: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: andrew_berge on 2016-11-21 14:53:53
I might use the file path as a starting point to tag a large amount of files, but i'd never use it regularly because of all the characters you can't use such as : / ! and even periods in some cases.

Here's a sample of how i'm currently organised. Still a work in progress in a couple areas:
Code: [Select]
Music\01 Primary\Arcade Fire\2004-09-14 Funeral\01. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).flac
Music\01 Primary\Various\1996-11-12 Space Jam\01. Fly Like An Eagle.flac
Music\02 Secondary\Classical\Erik Satie\1984 3 Gymnopédies And Other Piano Works\01. Gymnopédie No. 1.flac
Music\02 Secondary\Classical\Various\2008-09-01 101 Classics - The Best Loved Classical Melodies\Disc 01 - The Great Waltzes\01. An Der Schönen Blauen Donau, Op. 314.flac
Music\02 Secondary\Soundtracks\Movie\Gravity\2013-09-17 Gravity\01. Above Earth.flac
Music\02 Secondary\Soundtracks\Video Game\Final Fantasy\1997-01-31 Final Fantasy VII\1997-02-10 Final Fantasy VII Original Soundtrack\Disc 01\01. Prelude.flac
Music\02 Secondary\Soundtracks\Video Game\Final Fantasy\1997-01-31 Final Fantasy VII\2007-09-14 Voices Of The Lifestream\Disc 01 - Crisis\01. Deliverance Of The Heart.flac
Music\02 Secondary\Soundtracks\Video Game\Final Fantasy\2001-07-19 Final Fantasy X\2002-02-20 Piano Collections - Final Fantasy X\01. To Zanarkand.flac
Music\02 Secondary\Soundtracks\Video Game\Various\2011-02-07 Heroes vs. Villains\01. The Bounty Of A Brain.flac
I always have the exact date whenever possible, since several of my artists have multiple releases in the same year.
I am considering removing the period after track numbers, i've been on the fence with that for a while.
I originally had movies with their release dates but found i preferred browsing by name. Also, since movies with several albums are relatively few (and i don't have any at this time anyway), i'm considering removing the album folder altogether and just having:
Code: [Select]
D:\Music\02 Secondary\Soundtracks\Movie\Gravity\01. Above Earth.flac
Finally, video games. UGH. Video games. Multiple composers, sometimes unknown composers, theme composed by one person and rearranged by another... To make things worse i also get albums from OCRemix, which are usually from various games, too. Sorting by series/game/album has been working alright, though.
Title: Re: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Fairy on 2016-11-22 08:54:30
There just isn't an industry standard? Everyone uses his own approach en uses a method that suits best I guess.

Thanks for your answer.
Title: Re: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: KozmoNaut on 2016-11-22 09:05:27
Oh no, there are plenty of "standards", but no one can ever agree on which one is best. See the MP3 ID3 v2.3 vs. v2.4 debacle.

Personally, I use the following layout:

/Music/[Album Artist]/[Year] - [Album Title]/[Track Number] - [Artist] - [Song Title].[Format]

For the song title, I add version information such as variants of the same song and featured artists in parenthesis, for instance "(Orchestral Version)", and I add Live/Bonus tags in square brackets, to distinguish between studio/live versions, and standard/bonus tracks.

I also combine multi-disc albums into single albums. If each disc has a subtitle, I use a discsubtitle tag to keep that information.

I'm sure someone could comment that I'm leaving out information, but it works for me.
Title: Re: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: dhromed on 2016-11-22 11:29:45
I'm so lax in terms of organization, I don't even make a special case of "The".
Title: Re: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Chibisteven on 2016-11-22 12:54:55
A single track maybe listed in the root of the music folder as "Artist - Title".

A single album may be listed in a folder as "Album Artist - Album Title" or just the"Album Title" for soundtracks.

Multiple soundtracks of the same thing or same series of anything are arranged in "All [INSERT MOVIE, VIDEO GAME, TV SHOW. ETC. NAME HERE] folders"

-----
LAYOUT FOR SINGLE ALBUM FOLDER EXAMPLE

01.flac
02.flac
03.flac
ALBUM PLAYLIST


----
LAYOUT FOR A MULTI DISK ALBUM

ALBUM PLAYLIST (ROOT)

DISC 1 FOLDER
01.flac
02.flac
03.flac
DISC 1 PLAYLIST

DISC 2 FOLDER
01.flac
02.flac
03.flac
DISC 2 PLAYLIST

PLAYLIST CUES FOLDER.


----
LAYOUT FOR A MULTI ALBUM BUT SAME SUBJECT (i.e. separate vocal and score releases)

NAME OF SUBJECT PLAYLIST (ROOT)

ALBUM 1 FOLDER
01.flac
02.flac
03.flac
ALBUM 1 PLAYLIST

ALBUM 2 FOLDER
01.flac
02.flac
03.flac
ALBUM 2 PLAYLIST

PLAYLIST CUES FOLDER.

----
LAYOUT FOR A SERIES OF ALBUMS RELATED TO SOMETHING (i.e. 1st movie and it's sequels)

SERIES PLAYLIST (ROOT)

1ST IN SERIES FOLDER
01.flac
02.flac
03.flac
1ST IN SERIES PLAYLIST

2ND IN SERIES FOLDER
01.flac
02.flac
03.flac
2ND IN SERIES PLAYLIST

PLAYLIST CUES FOLDER.
Title: Re: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: Arnold B. Krueger on 2016-11-22 13:04:01

Can someone please explain what this fixation so many people have with the album is all about?


An artist may release a given song on multiple albums. They are often different performances or different masterings.

"Hotel California" by the Eagles must show up on 4-6 or more different albums representing at least 3 different performances.

A number of ZZ Topp songs have been released with vastly different remasterings on "Best of" CDs..

I've seen seemingly innumerable redited/rap versions of some Motown songs.

There may be distinct different versions by the same artist(s) for: studio, live, radio, 45 single, dance, audiophile, and different sampling/editing/rap versions.

With Classical, the same title can show up by different conductors, orchestras, venues, and as played at different festivals.

My song folder structure is:

Ripping session\artist\title\song name-track.

Title: Re: Your Music Directory Structure
Post by: smok3 on 2016-11-23 10:15:49
album/XY_artist-song.ext (Most stuff is deleted in less than a week this days)