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[McTaggart]

Everything that I do and more

I don't have the artist folders split up into separate alphabetical folders, but I don't really think that's nescessary yet. I'll leave that for some day that I'm feeling vulnerable. The root folder for all this is 'My Music' and I just let Media Player 11 populate it's database from there. I really like Media Player 11.

People featuring on other people's work end up in the song name so it doesn't play hell with MP11's sorting. Two things I haven't sorted out yet: Collaborations - Sunn0))) and Boris or Boris and Sunn0))) - and bands changing their names, I like to keep my Bill Callahan together with my Smog, though that's only really an issue with storing physical cds.

[pulpfiction21]

When you've got the folder the way you want it, you can go to the menu item Tools->Folder Options, and on the View tab click Apply to All Folders.  But that will cause your non-music folders to be sorted the same way.

The forgetting the settings bit is because the number of folders that Windows can remember the settings for is limited, and so older settings get forgotten.  You can increase the number, but I can't remember how - it's probably a setting that can be changed by Microsoft's "TweakUI PowerToy".

Okay well I have windows vista and there is no "tools" option at the top of the folders anymore (or at least not visibly, i could be missing something here though). I searched for "Folder Options" in my Windows search bar, and I found where you are talking about "Apply to All Folders", but it is not clickable because dumbass Windows doesn't know what folders I have open.

Is there a way to be in the folder and click on "tools->Folder options" and I'm just missing it, or does Vista make things that used to be easy very difficult?


EDIT: Nvm. Of course two seconds after I posted, I figured out where the damn Folder Options was within the folder. Thanks for the help, that seemed to work. Do you know if it will save all of them like this, or is it still going to forget after a few days and revert back?

[scarred]

I'm another one of the iTunes kids... and frankly, I think it's a beautiful system. Plus, whenever I download anything, I don't copy the files into the iTunes Folder, I copy them directly into the player. iTunes creates its own copies of the files in its own folder, and then I discard the download (which just lands directly on my desktop in the first place).

Everything, of course, is backed up to my own 250GB external hard drive, and now that I'm living back home again (economy booo), my dad's terabyte drive.

[WriterofAllWrongs]

I store the actual music in various folders on my computer, but most of it is a Folder called Music on my external hard drive.  I obsessively organize my iTunes, though.  It is actually really fun in a really pedantic and bureaucratic way!

[pwhodges]

Windows should remember the default OK - it's what it sets the ones it forgets back to!  Unless Vista has changed the rules; but they've been the same for ever.

[bbq]

i had it sorted in music > artists > albums, but now it's just scattered in various different music folders. Still in the artists > albums ordering system though.

[Thrillho]

Question:

how do you guys deal with remixes, featuring, etc?

On the artist name or on the song name? I still haven't decided which one is best. Song name works best for iPod, but it's not very accurate I think.

Depends. If it's on someone else's record, then I put it in the song name. If it's an individual single I kinda figure out who is the dominant party (or who is credited as the main person) and work off that.

[Zingoleb]

Hay guise I have problem

I generally let my computer sort by firstname/lastname (shame on me, yes). Eric Clapton is under E, Warren Zevon is under W, Tom Waits is under W...wait, what?

Tom Waits is filed under 'W' and the lack of continuity there is DRIVING ME FUCKING BATSHIT

Any help?

[Scandanavian War Machine]

i think everyone has that problem with Tom Waits.
he shows up on my iPod twice, once under T and again under W with different albums under each one except for one album that is on both for some reason.

Tom Waits?
Processing...processing...proces...
DOES NOT COMPUTE. BEEP.

[Zingoleb]

Tom Waits please stop fucking with my computer that is just not cool man

[Harun]

i think I already said it but I don't think anybody noticed/cared: foobar2000's built in file operations plug-in is so awesome. It's basically a manual version of iTunes' 'keep my folder organized' feature, so it can order/rename your files any way you like.

[sunexplodes]

OKAY DUDES I HAVE A QUESTION

My collection which I sort by /<ARTIST>/<YEAR> - <ALBUM> in the folder structure is becoming large enough that I'd like to structure it like /<GENRE>/<ARTIST>/<YEAR>-<ALBUM> but I'm having a lot of trouble with genre distinctions.

I'd like to keep it kind of simple, but not mindnumbingly simple as /rock/pop/hiphop/etc. But it's hard to make the distinctions like post-rock, avant, jazz, shoegaze, etc, without a lot of overlap and shit like that.

Do any of you guys sort by genre? and if so, HOW?

[Touch Me Im Sick]

Whatever is on iTunes, is under C:/My Music, in m4a format.

Whatever albums I haven't listened to yet are together in one giant folder on my desktop.

[Hat]

OKAY DUDES I HAVE A QUESTION

My collection which I sort by /<ARTIST>/<YEAR> - <ALBUM> in the folder structure is becoming large enough that I'd like to structure it like /<GENRE>/<ARTIST>/<YEAR>-<ALBUM> but I'm having a lot of trouble with genre distinctions.

I'd like to keep it kind of simple, but not mindnumbingly simple as /rock/pop/hiphop/etc. But it's hard to make the distinctions like post-rock, avant, jazz, shoegaze, etc, without a lot of overlap and shit like that.

Do any of you guys sort by genre? and if so, HOW?

I've recently had a similar problem and the best way to do it is just go by what genre YOU think they're in, you're going to be the one accessing them so you need to be intimate with the system. Don't overspecialise either, my basic genre distinctions for organizational purposes are "siiiiiiiiiiiiiiick beats", "gee-tars" "beep beep boop" "bubbles and kittens and shit" "funky shit" and "mashups and other", to make the distinction between hip-hop, rock music, electronic music, pop music, funk/soul music and miscellaneous.

Genre lines are so arbitrary that being too specific for the purposes of organising your music library is often pretty counter productive unless you have a lot of spare time and unimpeachable music geek knowledge.

Maybe if you're REALLY keen to do this, just start of with a really simple system like mine (maybe minus silly names?) to begin with, and then as you look at the artists you have in those genres you might intuitively know that certain artists should be split up more and so you can build on that slowly, without the demand of retagging and reclassifying your ENTIRE MUSIC LIBRARY as part of a giant project because you will almost certainly get bored and give up

[celticgeek]

I tend to organize by <Genre><Artist><Album> myself, with the genre list kept fairly short:

Celtic
Christmas
Classical
Compilations  (compilations I have made)
Country
Flamenco
Folk
Guitar
Humor
Jazz
Miscellaneous
Popular
Renaissance
Rock
ShowTunes

I also have no problem with keeping albums in two different genre folders, such as Classical and Christmas, or Classical and Guitar, for example. 

Occasionally it occurs to me to separate a genre folder into two folders within the genre folder, but I actually have never done it.

[The Joker]

I have my music folder, and all my music is in there, organized alphabetically by artist, album, and track number.  The file name is just the song name, no artist.

[Moo Cow]

itunes does everything for me.

In all honestly, I totally agree. All I really need is Itunes, and Last.fm also i have Time Machine to backup my music.

[MrBlu]

OKAY DUDES I HAVE A QUESTION

My collection which I sort by /<ARTIST>/<YEAR> - <ALBUM> in the folder structure is becoming large enough that I'd like to structure it like /<GENRE>/<ARTIST>/<YEAR>-<ALBUM> but I'm having a lot of trouble with genre distinctions.

I'd like to keep it kind of simple, but not mindnumbingly simple as /rock/pop/hiphop/etc. But it's hard to make the distinctions like post-rock, avant, jazz, shoegaze, etc, without a lot of overlap and shit like that.

Do any of you guys sort by genre? and if so, HOW?

I couldn't possibly do that.

[sunexplodes]

I've recently had a similar problem and the best way to do it is just go by what genre YOU think they're in, you're going to be the one accessing them so you need to be intimate with the system. Don't overspecialise either, my basic genre distinctions for organizational purposes are "siiiiiiiiiiiiiiick beats", "gee-tars" "beep beep boop" "bubbles and kittens and shit" "funky shit" and "mashups and other", to make the distinction between hip-hop, rock music, electronic music, pop music, funk/soul music and miscellaneous.

Genre lines are so arbitrary that being too specific for the purposes of organising your music library is often pretty counter productive unless you have a lot of spare time and unimpeachable music geek knowledge.

Maybe if you're REALLY keen to do this, just start of with a really simple system like mine (maybe minus silly names?) to begin with, and then as you look at the artists you have in those genres you might intuitively know that certain artists should be split up more and so you can build on that slowly, without the demand of retagging and reclassifying your ENTIRE MUSIC LIBRARY as part of a giant project because you will almost certainly get bored and give up

This what I'm leaning toward, something simple like this, I just have trouble with a lot of bands really overlapping genre.. Oh well. I'll figure it out, and I won't have to retag, as I'm pretty anal about using the artist/album/songtitle/date/tracknumber convention as the ONLY tags I use.

Fuck it, I'm giving it a go. Not like I can't go back.

[Zingoleb]

Whatever is on iTunes, is under C:/My Music, in m4a format.

Whatever albums I haven't listened to yet are together in one giant folder on my desktop.

I fucking hate m4a formatting because I've run into so many incompatibility issues with it. I realized once a couple years ago that everything I was ripping was m4a and promptly switched over to mp3, and then had to convert several thousand songs into mp3.

[Sir-Namin]

My music folders are sorted into 3 sections right now: cds I own, which I have ripped with WMP at 128 kb/s, Music I have downloaded that is organized, and music that is completely unorganized and scattered all across my desktop/my documents/downloads folder. I am in the process of buying all the music that I listen to, but until then it's kind of a huge mess. the music that I do have organized is in the /artist/album/## Track name.mp3, because that's what works best for me right now.

[Sir-Namin]

iTunes still consolidates your library the first time you install it, I got all of the music off of my old iPod that way. but I've tried Media Monkey and for some reason I wasn't able to figure out anything. so I stick to the old fashioned method of letting WMP figure it out for me, lol (if you let iTunes rip it the files are like 10x as big and sonically aren't that much better than WMP ripping the mp3s.

[Zingoleb]

This is why I love MediaMonkey - you can set it up to auto-sort all the music you add into folders. iTunes used to have this function (then called "consolidate library") but Apple cut it out once they realized that this was basically only useful to people who illegally download music, and gosh, we don't want anything to do with criminals do we.

Uh...what?

It still has that feature.

[Be My Head]

Right now it's like this.



It's organized by folders of album or whatever the hell I download or rip, because on the frontend in whatever media player I'm using at the time (Banshee on Lunix, Foobar on Windoze) it shows up perfectly fine. I don't see the need to organize folders, I just scan it into my media player.

As far as *tagging* goes: If it's a band, I follow the tracklisting/names I find on the internet, if it's a composer's works I go by the full name of the composer and then add in the performers/conductor in extra fields, if it's a cover or compilation or something, I go by the name of the artist performing the cover.

If there's someone featuring in someone else's music, I suppose you could add a "Feat. name of person here". But I would add them in an extra field.

[look out! Ninjas!]

This is why I love MediaMonkey - you can set it up to auto-sort all the music you add into folders. iTunes used to have this function (then called "consolidate library") but Apple cut it out once they realized that this was basically only useful to people who illegally download music, and gosh, we don't want anything to do with criminals do we.

Uh...what?

It still has that feature.

It's been moved. It's now under File>Library

[Zingoleb]

I'm on Mac, and it's just under Advanced > Consolidate Library... for me.

[Zingoleb]

Mac OS X 10.4.11; iTunes 7.0

Was that a feature they ripped out with the 7 to 8 upgrade? I love Apple's products but the way that they handle business just frankly pisses me off (you used to be able to upload music from your iPod to your iTunes, but they removed it with one 'upgrade').

[a pack of wolves]

Nope, it's there for me under File>Library>Consolidate Library and I'm on 8.2.1 which seems to be the latest release.

[Zingoleb]

iTunes still consolidates your library the first time you install it, I got all of the music off of my old iPod that way. but I've tried Media Monkey and for some reason I wasn't able to figure out anything. so I stick to the old fashioned method of letting WMP figure it out for me, lol (if you let iTunes rip it the files are like 10x as big and sonically aren't that much better than WMP ripping the mp3s.

Did not see this post the first time.

I at first had this issue, years ago, which put me off ripping music to the computer until I figured out the problem - iTunes was automatically set to import music using an AIFF encoder, which makes the files fucking massive. Under Preferences, go to Advanced, click on the 'Importing' tab and you can change it from AIFF to MP3 and also choose the bitrate you want (the presets are 128, 160, and 192 - I have mine set to 256).

[Leon7386]

home/Music/"Letter"/"Band"/"Album"/"Songs"

After my first music collection was lost I decided I wanted to organize my second and I love it. I use amarok to edit tags but because our desktop is too slow I use this bitchin mp3 player.

[Tuke]

Everything I download I sent through Winamp's Auto-Tag to make sure it has correct ID3 tags, then I send it through a format converter so it gets renamed with the naming and organizational scheme that I rip all my CD's with, <Artist>\[<Year>] <Album>\## <Title>  Everything in a folder called Music, and about 80% of it is properly organized with that naming scheme. I'm slowly working on getting the last 20% finished. The Beatles was a bit of a head scratcher to get organized chronologically, since they have a lot from the same years, so I added the full date, month day and year, to each folder for them. Multiple disc albums sometimes become a hassle, only because it outputs them with each disc its own folder, instead of in one folder with DISC#-## <Title> like I'd prefer it. Then it all gets thrown onto my Zune and it's out the door I go!