Digital Audio Files: How do you organize?

[tekbro]

Ok, I admit it. My music collection is a mess! Even with CDDB and ID3 tags, a lack of attention to detail and putting off tidying up my metadata has led to GBs of barely manageable music files.

So how do you organize your files? Do you use your computer's file management system to create a tree of folders to organize your music? If so, do you do it by artist, by album, or what?

Or, do you put all of your files in one big folder and just rely entirely on your metadata to do the work?

The folder structure on my portable player makes it so hard to navigate. It seems like the latter strategy is best: just move all of my files out of the individual folders and paste them all into one folder."

Have you found success organizing your music in these ways, or using some other scheme?

 

[jaguarskx]

On my computer I do the following:

1. I create folders to categorize music by genre.
2. Within each genre is a folder for the artist.
3. Each artist then has a folder for each album.
4. File name for each song in the album begins with the track number then the song title.

The same is done for on my Cowon S9 media player. It allows me to search by the same file system as on the PC. But the S9 also allows for search by Artist, Album, Song, and Genre which are driven by the metadata.

Relying solely on metadata without reviewing the information can become a real pain. Depending on where the metadata originates from it could be missing information and/or classifying the artist and/or song to the wrong genre or sub-genre.

I try to take it slow and review all metadata and edit them as need be for each song.

 

[MEgamer]

do so by artists, then make a subfolder of albums.

 

[MEgamer]

if ur going to play it through a software music player, then the computer should sort it out for you, windows media palyer does this automatically.

 

[ssddx]

DriveMusic/Artist/Album/Track.ext

Genre, Artist, Album, Photo - meta tags at the very least included on each file

This is how itunes organizes my music folder and it is quite easy to find the right files. in fact if i never had itunes i'd organize it in much the same way.

 

[MEgamer]

yes ssddx is right, tbh, most music software palyers do this automatically, like itunes, and WMP.

no one goes to a music folder and search for a song to play, --> everyone goes to their software player, and choose it from there.