Topic: What do you use to organize your music?

[idolminds]

I've tried to be good with my music collection, ripping tracks into a Artist\Album directory structure. But with some downloaded music *cough*, I've ended up just sort of dropping those into a directory. And not in my one music folder. So now I have music in the MyMusic directory, music in my downloads directory, music in my torrents directory...its a bit of a mess.

So has anyone used a program to get it all organized? I know iTunes supposedly can, and Songbird, and MediaMonkey, just want to know if people had experience with these (or anything else). I've looked at Songbird and it has a similar organizational method that I started with, but I hear it has issues with albums with various artists (making a directory for each artist on the album...ugh), and it will copy the songs to a single directory. Thats not bad, but its a copy and not a move, essentially doubling the size of my music collection until I go through and delete all the old directories. Might be worth the effort though, because after that keeping it organized would be pretty simple.

[iPPi]

I've typically just used File Explorer and organized my music through the use of folders and stuff.

Recently however, I've had to organize my music in order to place it onto my phone.  My phone is very picky about how it organizes the music and things were all over the place when I just used File Explorer.  I tried Sony's MediaGo program but that was a bloated mess.

I am currently using MediaMonkey and so far it's pretty good.  I'm not a big fan of using it to play content, but for organizational purposes it suffices.

[Xessive]

In general, I sort everything myself. I have this OCD system of sorting files as soon as I get them so I don't have to worry about it later. I try not to let them stack for too long.

I tend to use iTunes since it handles multiple files quite well and does a good job with album art. It seems to be alright with various artists, as long as they're in the same album or compilation it works out quite well.

My current system is very similar to iTunes' organization: artist|album|song. The only difference is that I separate mine into a set of categories: club albums, chill albums, general albums, soundtracks, radio (shows and podcasts), and audiobooks. The folder structure inside is organized in artist or publisher (i.e. Ministry of Sound) then album then song.

If your ID3 tags are in order iTunes will do a good job of sorting stuff out for you. You may still need to go through just to make sure everything's right.

I also use XBMC and it has a pretty decent system of matching everything online either from allmusic or Last.FM but it takes a while to download all the data.

[Cobra951]

I sort everything into album folders under a master music folder.  Individual sundry tracks that I may have gotten in odd ways go into a folder called "Not Organized".  I duplicate the master music folder to another external drive for safety.  I add all the music to Windows Media Player and more recently iTunes (for the iPod) as long as these can recognize the formats.  Through a couple of plugins, my WMP can now deal with FLACs.

Edit: I work at this result.

[Quemaqua]

I do everything by hand, but now that I'm actually using an iPod, I've been using CopyTrans in place of iTunes.  I tried iTunes out since I hadn't seen it in years, and it was the most worthless thing.  It crashed a bunch of times and did a bunch of stupid crap.  I have no idea how people can use the shit.  CopyTrans Manager is perfectly functional and does a really quick job with everything.  No problems at all so far, and it's nice and lightweight.  It's annoying because it's part of a suite of programs and you have to choose it from a menu, but that particular program is free and it doesn't push ads in your face or anything.

But that isn't getting to your question, because as far as I've used it, it's just been for doing stuff with the iPod.  No idea whether or not it'll organize anything outside of that.  I do all of that stuff manually, like I said.

[W7RE]

\Artist\Album\ directory structure, with the year of the album in the name.
example:

D:\music\Five Finger Death Punch\2007 The Way of the Fist\04 Five Finger Death Punch - The Bleeding.mp3



Then I add everything to iTunes and browse/play it that way. I also set iTunes not to organize my music for me. I do have a few individual songs where I have nothing else from that artist, and those are just thrown into my D:\music\ folder. It bugs me though and I want to put them in the proper folder structure, but there's so many that it would take a while, so I just don't do it.

[scottws]

Foobar2000 has something where you can have it run through your library and automatically put music into folders based on information from the tags.  But you have to have your music all tagged properly and it might screw up various artists.

[Cobra951]

I often have to modify tags by hand anyway.  Things like "artist" vs "album artist" often trip up the media library db in the player app.  And then there's the wrong or missing information.  Creating folders as I go along is the least of the work.  Now if I had to reconstruct my entire library for some reason, such a tool would be a blessing.

Let me take this perfect opportunity to plug MP3tag, which handles a lot more than MP3s.  It's very useful, and includes a function to create tags from filenames (and viceversa).  You can also embed images into your music files (or remove them).  If you dump the purposely scrambled contents of an iPod's music folder to your hard drive, it will read the tags, let you sort by album/artist, and even replace all the cryptic file names with tag-based ones.  We've talked about this before, and it belongs here too.

[Ghandi]

I use my own method that I describe as "mindless clusterfuck". Everything is all over the place. I would organize it if I wasn't so lazy.

[Pugnate]

All my music basically consists of secret audio recordings of Ghandi going about his daily life.

So basically the folders are organized by activity and files by date.