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Topic: Best way to manage / organize music? (Read 9727 times) previous topic - next topic
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Best way to manage / organize music?

I want to organize my music. I have about 6 external USB hard drives plugged in / running when needed with music and some music files on an internal drive.

I am considering the following: I have a folder "Music" with sub folders containing the albums (of different genres)and many single files (of albums) in this folder "Music". Further more the folder "Music" contains a sub folder "Soundtracks" with sub folders of soundtrack albums. And the "Music" folder also has a folder "Latin" with albums of Latin music. And the folder "Music" also has folder "Christmas music" and ""Classical music".
This folder scheme I have on every drive. Is it a good idea or...? Or rather have the folders "Latin", "Christmas", etc. outside the folder "Music"?
Or should I rather separate the sub folders of the folders "Music" containing special genres, e.g. "Soundtracks", "Christmas" and store them on a single drive or more so they would contain e.g. "Soundtracks" only or "Latin" only? That would need a lot more of moving files from one drive to another.

I would add each of the folders "Music" (of each drive) to foobar's library, let them scan and monitor. And when I search for a piece of music in the library foobar displayed the drive it is stored on so I could plug it in and listen.
Newest stable foobar, portable | Win 7

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #1 –
What really matters is making sure your files are properly tagged at all times. How they are physically stored is less important when you can quickly and effortlessly reorganize them using titleformatting.

I personally avoid putting anything in the path that is likely to change over time. That includes stuff like GENRE. You would have to issue a move command every time that happens to keep up consistency. You are bound to forget it sooner or later and it ultimately doesn't matter unless you regularly browse your library using explorer. Something that sounds very inefficient compared to the various and much more robust tools provided by foobar to quickly filter and locate a track compared to going down a static path.

Not to mention the (very common) nightmare scenario where artists fit into multiple genres at once that is impossible to solve using just pathnames. Not having these premade genres should also eliminate those weird 'random' folders where people just shove in all kinds of songs with no regards to anything and/or at least encourage you to evaluate and maintain each artists on its own.

Make sure to utilize the ALBUM ARTIST tag when applicable.

Also, if your files are somewhat organized in terms of folders and filenames, but not tagged yet, you can use titleformatting to give yourself a rough headstart by batch-tagging the files accordingly.

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #2 –
Thank you, Daeron.

Quote
What really matters is making sure your files are properly tagged at all times.

Yes, that would be great, but unfortunately they aren't.

Quote
I personally avoid putting anything in the path that is likely to change over time. That includes stuff like GENRE. You would have to issue a move command every time that happens to keep up consistency. You are bound to forget it sooner or later and it ultimately doesn't matter unless you regularly browse your library using explorer. Something that sounds very inefficient compared to the various and much more robust tools provided by foobar to quickly filter and locate a track compared to going down a static path.

Not to mention the (very common) nightmare scenario where artists fit into multiple genres at once that is impossible to solve using just pathnames. Not having these premade genres should also eliminate those weird 'random' folders where people just shove in all kinds of songs with no regards to anything and/or at least encourage you to evaluate and maintain each artists on its own.

Yes, using such genres is not a good idea. So I only use some very few genre folders which will always be kept like "Christmas", "Latin" to have a raw clue what kind of music is in there. But like you say, it is less important where the music is stored when you have the files tagged correctly (but it is not like that).

Many thanks again.
Newest stable foobar, portable | Win 7

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Moto on
Or should I rather separate the sub folders of the folders "Music" containing special genres, e.g. "Soundtracks", "Christmas" and store them on a single drive or more so they would contain e.g. "Soundtracks" only or "Latin" only? That would need a lot more of moving files from one drive to another.

I'm considering separating Christmas music to a folder outside my music folder only because I don't want to hear it ever, unless it's Christmas. It's the only 'genre' I'm considering doing this for because I can't find a better way to completely exclude it.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  ;~)

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #4 –
Yes, that's an extremely good idea. Actually I would have done it already, but I had hoped, respectively was thinking I somehow could undisplay / exclude the Christmas folders and their music files in foobar during the none Christmas time...but if it is not possible...so one just would remove the separated Christmas folders from the library of foobar and add / rescan them at Christmas time?
Newest stable foobar, portable | Win 7

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: 2tec on
Quote from: Moto on
Or should I rather separate the sub folders of the folders "Music" containing special genres, e.g. "Soundtracks", "Christmas" and store them on a single drive or more so they would contain e.g. "Soundtracks" only or "Latin" only? That would need a lot more of moving files from one drive to another.

I'm considering separating Christmas music to a folder outside my music folder only because I don't want to hear it ever, unless it's Christmas. It's the only 'genre' I'm considering doing this for because I can't find a better way to completely exclude it.


Together with sound effects, karaoke tracks, ... ;-)

I have a fairly big collection of bootleg recordings, most of which is fairly unlistenable except when I want to hear what the track was evolved into blah blah blah. I used to have a second fb2k install with the big library. Too much to maintain I guess, so I linked some files. Messed up on next upgrade ...

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Moto on
...so one just would remove the separated Christmas folders from the library of foobar and add / rescan them at Christmas time?


All you need is an autoplaylist such as
Code: [Select]
NOT GENRE IS Christmas Music
.

You really should consider tagging your files in order to use the query sintax.
I'm late

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #7 –
Quote
Together with sound effects, karaoke tracks, ... ;-)

I have a fairly big collection of bootleg recordings, most of which is fairly unlistenable except when I want to hear what the track was evolved into blah blah blah. I used to have a second fb2k install with the big library. Too much to maintain I guess, so I linked some files. Messed up on next upgrade ...

Hmmm, I am not quite sure to understand...may be a second foobar for Christmas.

Quote
You really should consider tagging your files in order to use the query sintax.

Yes, yes, I do and I would like to tag them very much, but tagging about - I don't know - 50.000 to 80.000 albums would last some...

Quote
All you need is an autoplaylist such as
CODE
NOT GENRE IS Christmas Music

May be I could use such a query syntax to just exclude these Christmas folders instead of the music files in them.
Newest stable foobar, portable | Win 7

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #8 –
Like Daeron already mentioned any decent way to organize your library should always start from tagging your files in a consistent and correct manner. If you don't want to go thru the effort of tagging your files then your question doesn't really matter because in no way will you be able to decently organize your library especially if you start using genre identification as a way to organize it. Folder structure should remain as simple as possible which would probably consist of Artist name with an album subfolder and the rest should be handled by tags.
Foobar offers so much options of organizing your library in rather advanced ways but they almost always rely on tags. Sure, there are ways to get around that by using folder structure but that too requires a detailed and consistent folder structure so you might as well just tag your files.
In short, not wanting to go thru the effort of tagging your files while at the same time desiring an efficient way to organize your library is like asking how one can run a marathon without wanting to train for it, you will run it but you will run it very badly.

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: Moto on
Yes, that would be great, but unfortunately they aren't.

I'd suggest starting working on it then, otherwise it will be much worse to do so later. If you learn how to tag properly with foobar you can batch process most of your tags based on filenames/path really quickly. After that new additions to your library take barely any time to tag.

Quote from: Moto on
Yes, using such genres is not a good idea. So I only use some very few genre folders which will always be kept like "Christmas", "Latin" to have a raw clue what kind of music is in there. But like you say, it is less important where the music is stored when you have the files tagged correctly (but it is not like that).

I would however encourage you to tag use the GENRE tag extensively despite leaving them out of your directory structure. It is a very useful tool to filter your library and the bigger that gets the tags need to be more and more granular in my opinion. Consider this.

Quote from: 2tec on
I'm considering separating Christmas music to a folder outside my music folder only because I don't want to hear it ever, unless it's Christmas. It's the only 'genre' I'm considering doing this for because I can't find a better way to completely exclude it.

You could set up foo_skip to automatically skip if %genre% HAS Christmas. Library viewers can be either set up to hide based on a similar pattern or you simply don't click on the corresponding note/item. You can run a batch rename on your files to something like title.christmas.flac, then exclude them from your media library completely by setting up a pattern such as *.christmas.* in preferences.

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #10 –
Quote
Like Daeron already mentioned any decent way to organize your library should always start from tagging your files in a consistent and correct manner.

Yes, yes, I do really understand, it is very plausible, but tagging 50.000 albums or so...if tagging them would work completely automatically...but I guess it wouldn't.

Quote
Folder structure should remain as simple as possible which would probably consist of Artist name with an album subfolder and the rest should be handled by tags.

Yes, I generally use this scheme: Alphonse Mouzon - The Night Is Still Young (1996). But there are thousands - or more - of folders which have another structure.



Newest stable foobar, portable | Win 7

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #11 –
Quote
I'd suggest starting working on it then, otherwise it will be much worse to do so later. If you learn how to tag properly with foobar you can batch process most of your tags based on filenames/path really quickly. After that new additions to your library take barely any time to tag.

Hmmm, yes, I should try it. So I assume as long as the interpret and album are recognized by an online database, e.g. freedb it should work completely automatically.

Quote
I would however encourage you to tag use the GENRE tag extensively despite leaving them out of your directory structure. It is a very useful tool to filter your library and the bigger that gets it the tags need to be more and mor

Thank you for the link. Yes, I assume the genre tag will be provided by such an online database like freedb anyway.

Quote
You could set up foo_skip to automatically skip if %genre% HAS Christmas. Library viewers can be either set up to hide based on a similar pattern or you simply don't click on the corresponding note/item. You can run a batch rename on your files to something like title.christmas.flac, then exclude them from your media library completely by setting up a pattern such as *.christmas.* in preferences.

Alright, good idea. Easily done when the tags are correct, respectively available at all. I see, if the tags are available / correct it does not matter at all where / how one stores the music files, respectively you can (re-)organize the structure the files / folders are stored easily by using the tags with foobar.
Newest stable foobar, portable | Win 7

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Moto on
Hmmm, yes, I should try it. So I assume as long as the interpret and album are recognized by an online database, e.g. freedb it should work completely automatically.

You really don't want that to be automatic, at least not until the technology is good enough to not overwrite your files just because a partial match has been found and be consistent at this (while still doing its job on the large majority of files). And I was mostly referring to manual tagging anyway. You generally have at least track titles filled properly, making sure that artist, album, date, genres and couple other things are also nicely filled isn't much of a work in my opinion. If the batch processing thing wasn't clear, suppose you have all your files neatly organized in a structure of 'Artist\Date - Album\Tracknumber. Title' already. In that case you can use foobar to automatically generate the corresponding tags based on this kind of setup using titleformatting. In this case '%artist%\%date% - %album%\%tracknumber%. %title%' would do the job.

Quote from: Moto on
Thank you for the link. Yes, I assume the genre tag will be provided by such an online database like freedb anyway.

It can be, but I personally wouldn't recommend relying on it (in terms of tagging genres).

Suppose you have a bunch of genres you enjoy and among those you have a few metal bands. That's really all there is to them and you don't care about details so you can just tag them as 'metal' and be done with it. If you feel like listening to them, you can just click on metal and it works as expected with minimal hassle. However, suppose you really get into metal and you start caring things about like 'is it melodic? is it death? is it power metal?' and you suddenly need all those clarifications because feeling like listening to power metal doesn't automatically mean you also want to hear (or even just tolerate) any death metal at the time.

Suppose you tag all your files including the few metal bands you had with an online lookup. Chances are you ended up with 5+ different genre classifications within metal for those few artists, despite you only care that they are 'some kind of metal'. You just made your life slightly harder with no tangible benefits for yourself. Then you have cases where artists are between genres. What to do with them? Is it more like this? Is it more like that? What are the chances that the online database reached the same conclusion if it really isn't that obvious? Lots of online databases don't even have the kind of genres listed that I listen to personally.

The point is I feel genre classification is highly subjective within a certain margin and ultimately the purpose of the tag is to ease you at grouping certain sounding tracks together. It's probably best if you decide for yourself what kind of bubbles you want to create and these should be popped and rearranged as your library evolves over time.

Online databases are no doubt useful in terms of retrieving artist/year/album/tracknames or any other factual data that is simply as-is and not debatable, however.

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #13 –
Quote from: davideleo on
Quote from: Moto on
...so one just would remove the separated Christmas folders from the library of foobar and add / rescan them at Christmas time?


All you need is an autoplaylist such as
Code: [Select]
NOT GENRE IS Christmas Music
.

Isn't the problem with this, is it needs to be added to all number of playlists, items still show up in global searches, etc....
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  ;~)

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #14 –
Quote from: Moto on
Yes, yes, I do and I would like to tag them very much, but tagging about - I don't know - 50.000 to 80.000 albums would last some...

Assuming each album is say 50 mins long, and assuming you sleep 8 hours a day and have your music playing all your waking hours, 80,000 albums would take you about 11.5 years to listen to just the once. So you've plenty of time to tag your music while listening. 

C.
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #15 –
Quote from: 2tec on
Isn't the problem with this, is it needs to be added to all number of playlists, items still show up in global searches, etc....

You can try what I suggested. Run a rename through your library with a pattern like this:
Code: [Select]
$if($strstr(%genre%,Christmas),%filename%.christmas,%filename%)

Which will rename any file that has the word 'Christmas' in its genre to a format of 'filename.christmas.extension'.

Then you can go to 'File/Preferences/Media library/File types/Exclude' and add this to it: *.christmas.*

That will completely block them from showing up in your database (thus anywhere on the UI as well) and when you need them back you can delete that exclude pattern.

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #16 –
Quote
You really don't want that to be automatic, at least not until the technology is good enough to not overwrite your files just because a partial match has been found and be consistent at this (while still doing its job on the large majority of files). And I was mostly referring to manual tagging anyway. You generally have at least track titles filled properly, making sure that artist, album, date, genres and couple other things are also nicely filled isn't much of a work in my opinion.

But doing it for may be 80.000 albums....

Quote
If the batch processing thing wasn't clear, suppose you have all your files neatly organized in a structure of 'Artist\Date - Album\Tracknumber. Title' already. In that case you can use foobar to automatically generate the corresponding tags based on this kind of setup using titleformatting. In this case '%artist%\%date% - %album%\%tracknumber%. %title%' would do the job.

OK, I will try that, thank you.

Quote
Suppose you have a bunch of genres you enjoy and among those you have a few metal bands. That's really all there is to them and you don't care about details so you can just tag them as 'metal' and be done with it. If you feel like listening to them, you can just click on metal and it works as expected with minimal hassle. However, suppose you really get into metal and you start caring things about like 'is it melodic? is it death? is it power metal?' and you suddenly need all those clarifications because feeling like listening to power metal doesn't automatically mean you also want to hear (or even just tolerate) any death metal at the time.

Suppose you tag all your files including the few metal bands you had with an online lookup. Chances are you ended up with 5+ different genre classifications within metal for those few artists, despite you only care that they are 'some kind of metal'. You just made your life slightly harder with no tangible benefits for yourself. Then you have cases where artists are between genres. What to do with them? Is it more like this? Is it more like that? What are the chances that the online database reached the same conclusion if it really isn't that obvious? Lots of online databases don't even have the kind of genres listed that I listen to personally.

The point is I feel genre classification is highly subjective within a certain margin and ultimately the purpose of the tag is to ease you at grouping certain sounding tracks together. It's probably best if you decide for yourself what kind of bubbles you want to create and these should be popped and rearranged as your library evolves over time.

Yes, that's very plausible and I would like to have the correct genres (including the sub genres and the sub sub genres and...) very much, but tagging about 50.000 albums with all kind of genres would be...I guess, there might be 10, 20 or even more sub genres (may with sub genres of the sub genres) of "Metal", death, power, progressive, speed, melodic, gothic, melodic-progressive, 80ies metal, and so on. So just tagging this kind of tags would be an extremely effort, I assume. And one would have to do it manually, almost completely manually, I assume.

Quote
Assuming each album is say 50 mins long, and assuming you sleep 8 hours a day and have your music playing all your waking hours, 80,000 albums would take you about 11.5 years to listen to just the once. So you've plenty of time to tag your music while listening. biggrin.gif

Well, well...wait...I could reduce the sleep time...and skip bad tracks...and if I tag each single track manually (and it appears to be like that...if I cannot cope with all of that tagging technology) 11 and a half years of time for tagging would not be enough...so I need more music...which must be tagged also...may be you could calculate the rest life tagging time (by candle light) on that new base...

Quote
You can try what I suggested. Run a rename through your library with a pattern like this:
CODE
$if($strstr(%genre%,Christmas),%filename%.christmas,%filename%)

Which will rename any file that has the word 'Christmas' in its genre to a format of 'filename.christmas.extension'.

Could one do the same just be adding a tag called "Christmas" instead of adding it to the filename?
Newest stable foobar, portable | Win 7

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #17 –
You've got a lot of albums!
Do you like all of them?

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #18 –
I would say, no, I don't.
Newest stable foobar, portable | Win 7

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #19 –
Quote from: Moto on
Yes, that's very plausible and I would like to have the correct genres (including the sub genres and the sub sub genres and...) very much, but tagging about 50.000 albums with all kind of genres would be...I guess, there might be 10, 20 or even more sub genres (may with sub genres of the sub genres) of "Metal", death, power, progressive, speed, melodic, gothic, melodic-progressive, 80ies metal, and so on. So just tagging this kind of tags would be an extremely effort, I assume. And one would have to do it manually, almost completely manually, I assume.


I'm a genre obsessive compulsive manic, too. I don't have as many albums as you have, but still quite a lot. I often listen to music I don't really like that much, only to understand better what a subgenre, a music style or a scene is about, so the genre tag is very important to me. I'm also quite new to foobar, so beware that maybe these are not the best solutions possible, but I believe it's worth sharing.

As for the folders, what daeron said about genre tags being subjective and subject to change over time is definitely true, nevertheless I find that for very big libraries a higher grouping level above the mere artist folder is helpful. There is always a genre or subgenre an artist is most known for or by which they became famous. Let's say David Bowie, for example, if I look at genre tags track by track I can find almost anything, from new romantic to drum and bass, but he will always be related to the glam rock scene in my mind, and that's where I know I placed the files: in the glam rock folder. So, at first I would just tag the whole discography according to the folder genre and than, as I listen to it I will update the genre track by track (or album by album at times).

As for sub-genres, sub-sub-genres, etc. I have a three level genre tag system. I decided to use the standard genre tag for the more specific level, so rather than sub and sub-sub genre, I have a custom genre_family and genre_class tag. These are not real tags though, but virtually added via the foo_customdb. Each genre is automatically mapped to its genre family and each genre family to its genre class. This way I don't have to update three tags each time I change my mind on the genre classification, but only the more specific genre tag. Furthermore if I change my mind on how genres are grouped in genre families and families in classes, I only need to change data in the custom database without retagging my files.

This is maybe not as handy as daeron's free tag system, but it suits better my analytical approach to music genres.
I'm late

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #20 –
Quote from: Moto on
But doing it for may be 80.000 albums....

Are we talking that big of a scope here? 80k albums? Like, lets say, 10 tracks in each album, so 800k+ tracks at a really bad guess? I personally went through mine when it had around 40k tracks. That took me 2-3 afternoons, I think. The most time consuming parts in no particular order were:

1) dealing with the 'I shoved random songs here' folder (probably by scratching most of it and rebuilding each artist that was deemed worthy on a case by case basis)
2) solving the problem of different genre classification, styles, subgenres etc. with a single tag in a flexible way that takes the least amount effort to maintain (which lead to this)
3) solving the problem of grouping franchises/series together where even ALBUM ARTISTs changed over time (by just creating another tag with a similar purpose as ALBUM ARTIST but instead of joining together an ALBUM it joins together ALBUM ARTISTs)
4) fixing typos or complete outliers that I couldn't mass process using titleformatting

Anything else was fairly straightforward and fast since I had my folders and filenames mostly organized already. With foobar's capabilities copying the information stored in pathnames to actual tags was a matter of few clicks.

Quote from: Moto on
Yes, that's very plausible and I would like to have the correct genres (including the sub genres and the sub sub genres and...) very much, but tagging about 50.000 albums with all kind of genres would be...I guess, there might be 10, 20 or even more sub genres (may with sub genres of the sub genres) of "Metal", death, power, progressive, speed, melodic, gothic, melodic-progressive, 80ies metal, and so on. So just tagging this kind of tags would be an extremely effort, I assume. And one would have to do it manually, almost completely manually, I assume.

That should be done by hand, yes. But the important part is to do it smart, then. You don't have to do it all in one run. And more importantly, you can ask yourself whether you even want to do 'all' at all. I often see people using 3 different tags such as genre or styles just to define what kind of song that is. Then they struggle to painfully fill out all of them for each and every artist or they just leave half of them empty because they simply don't have the time, energy or knowledge to classify everything.

It's much easier if you simply make sure to get the broad genres down (metal, rock, pop, etc.) then you look at how dense each genre is and you only increase detail when it's necessary. Does all metal sound the same to you? Then there's really no point breaking them down into subgenres. Unless your taste and collection is already extremely wide and varied and you deeply care about every single genre or style that may come up, this should cut down the required work IMMENSELY.

davideleo's way is probably a fine middle ground too since the effort required to maintain is still reduced to at least a third if you let a background thing (such as foo_customdb) handle processing the other complementary tags after setting up some kind of parsing script/database for it to work with. Probably doable with foo_dynfil too, no idea which one is better since I don't use foo_customdb. In this version you will still most likely end up googling every single artist to get the most precise classification of what kind of music they play first, however.

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #21 –
Yes, that sounds like a very good tagging system, but it also sounds like an unbelievable effort. And it's just the tagging of the music genres.

And thank you for the link.
Newest stable foobar, portable | Win 7

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #22 –
Quote from: Daeron on
I often see people using 3 different tags such as genre or styles just to define what kind of song that is. Then they struggle to painfully fill out all of them for each and every artist or they just leave half of them empty because they simply don't have the time, energy or knowledge to classify everything.

It's much easier if you simply make sure to get the broad genres down (metal, rock, pop, etc.)


Not that I want to sell my way of tagging, I actually like yours, but my three level system with customdb allows anyway a generic tag. For every genre class (more or less the broad genres you mentioned above) I have a generic genre family with the same name that I use when I don't want to use a more specific one. So, at the more specific level I still have generic tags like "rock", which belong to the rock genre family, which belongs to the rock genre class.
I'm late

Best way to manage / organize music?

Reply #23 –
^

Actually, having thought about it a bit, having this kind of background parsing could be/is a great addition to the way I am currently storing the tags. It would solve the problem of the library viewer potentially  overflowing with keywords in the first (Columns UI filter panel/Facets) view and it would allow a nice way to offer customized views in general (essentially recreating the multi-level structures people are familiar with) while still keeping the maintaining costs to a minimum (you are still only filling a single tag with a bunch of keywords). Would certainly be less gimmicky too than the 'I guess make sure the first value in the tag is always the equivalent of GENRE, the second is what STYLE would be, etc' kind of middle ground suggestion when people consider adopting my storage method but they wouldn't go all the way.