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Topic: General Audio Organization and Tagging (Read 2316 times) previous topic - next topic
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General Audio Organization and Tagging

I don't believe this effects many people, but always feel stuck when trying to grow my music collection because I cannot seem to find an organization scheme that I love.  I'm probably a bit OCD, but I figure there have to be some other people similarly inclined on HA.

Anyway I have a number of problem areas but I'll try one question from 3 different categories to start:

1.  Holiday Music: in general I want to exclude it from playback and searches except when I explicitly only want to search for it.  Not sure the best way to achieve this.
2.  Single Directory or Separate Folders: I find that most programs deal better with separate directories for each album, but that means 2 full directory structures 1 for Lossless and 1 for Lossy, otherwise I get 2 copies of each song
3.  Same song different artist, different song same title: is there any good solution for identifying when a song truly is the exact same song tackled by different artists vs totally different songs with the same title?

My setup in brief:
- FLAC for lossless, AAC for lossy
- Squeezebox for home playback
- iphone/ipod for mobile


Sorry if this in in the wrong section, and doubly sorry if these have been answered before; I didn't find much with my searches.
Not directly related to my questions but there is an interesting (and inactive) thread about tag standardization for foobar plugins here.
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General Audio Organization and Tagging

Reply #1
The good news is, it doesn't matter how your files are physcally organized because your player software can use the tags to find/organize your music by genre, artist, album, song, etc. 

I've done something similar to you...  I have a big folder titled "Rock and Popular" that contains most of my music.  Then, I have separate folders for "special" genres like, Christmas, Haloween, Comedy, Mexican, and a few others.

Then, I have a folder for each artist, and a sub-folder for each album (and "singles" folder if I have singles by an artist.)

Quote
3. Same song different artist, different song same title: is there any good solution for identifying when a song truly is the exact same song tackled by different artists vs totally different songs with the same title?
My with my Artist/Album structure, the identical-duplicate song would be in a different album (or single) folder.

I use Winamp as my player software, and when I sort by song titile, I'll also see the artist & album name.    And I can also see the playing time, so that's a good clue if it's the exact same version by the same artist, or a different version by the same artist.    For live recordings, I use a include "live" in the title, such as "Song Title (Live)", so I can tell it's the live version.


 

General Audio Organization and Tagging

Reply #2
1.  Holiday Music: in general I want to exclude it from playback and searches except when I explicitly only want to search for it.  Not sure the best way to achieve this.


If you want to keep the holiday music in the library all year, then that's going to be completely dependent on the abilities of your playback software. One way that's less software dependent is to store the holiday music in a separate folder tree and remove it from your library after the holidays.

Quote
2.  Single Directory or Separate Folders: I find that most programs deal better with separate directories for each album, but that means 2 full directory structures 1 for Lossless and 1 for Lossy, otherwise I get 2 copies of each song


Yes, one folder per album is usually best. And, yes, separate folder structures for each use is how I handle it. Probably 95% of my Mp3s are from transcoding my main library, which is in FLAC, to Mp3 for my portable players. So I also have a second Mp3 folder for Mp3s found elsewhere. So my directories look a little like:

E:\flac
F:\mp3
F:\mp3-other

Of the above, since F:\mp3 is only used to load my portable players, it's kept out of my home library. If I have something only in Mp3 and happen to later get a FLAC copy, I'll remove the album from mp3-other.

Quote
3.  Same song different artist, different song same title: is there any good solution for identifying when a song truly is the exact same song tackled by different artists vs totally different songs with the same title?


Other than assigning different titles or being able to see the composer, I don't know of any. Maybe you could add the composer name in brackets to the title just for these cases. This should only really be an issue when doing searches.