Hello,
I have a small collection that is currently a complete mess because I mostly use id3 tag to browse them instead of relying filesystem path. Right now I want to sort it into a more organized structure and I would like to ask how are you organizing your music collection, especially with compilation album with “Various Artists”.
Hope this is the right place to ask, thank you very much!
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Organize them by beats per minute.
album artist/ album/ [disc#-]track# track name
A compilation album will either be under the album artist (think of Greatest Hits compilations or a tribute album of covers like the Encomium and Nativity in Black series) or under a ‘Various Artists’ directory (like movie soundtracks where there isn’t really a singular logical album artist).
I let tag-aware software do the actual directory and file naming for me.
I let iTunes (now Music in Mac) automatically sort folders years ago and this is pretty much how it organizes files. Except for “Various Artists” albums it has a separate Compilations folder. Most tag editors I’ve used besides iTunes/Music have the tag available to tag something a compilation.
For VA comps centered on a particular Album Artist I sometimes just uncheck the compilation tag and instead of Various Artists, I put the main artist the comp deals with in the Album Artist field.
Yeah there’s an ID3 tag for compilation. But I got irritated with tribute albums being put under Compilations instead of under the original artist they’re in tribute to.
Yeah me too, I started putting those type albums under the artist , but movie soundtracks and other comps still get filed as compilations.
And for some bands I’ll include solo albums by members as part of the band discography (by putting the band name as album artist), since I would put them on the shelf that way if they were discs. Unless they have a long established solo career, then I don’t bother.
I do:
Music > Artist/band-name > Almum-title(Year)For “various artists” discs I do:
Music > VA > compilations/OSTs/Splits (organize them in what type of VA disc they are) > Album-title(Year)I let the tags take care of the more detailed info.
MusicBrainz Picard is a very, very powerful music library managing tool. You can set it to monitor any import folder you want and follow a specified template.
Personally, I use a simple
[Drive]\Music\[Artist]\[Year]-[Album]Anything more than that gets tricky with the media server
music/artist/album/songs & use a various artists folder for soundtracks, etc…
When I was still mucking about with files (before the death of my NAS), I put them into nested folders by genre. Artists that don’t fit into any prevailing genre, had their own separate folders if I had more than a little of their music.
I now use my notes app for the music collection, with links to online services. It’s an outliner, so I still have the hierarchical structure as the basis — it’s more involved now, with top-level sections like ‘favorites’, ‘music from my childhood’, etc. Basically, it’s organized by the criteria that I use when I’m looking for an artist or an album (just like other notes are tailored to me looking for them). But also, the app allows tags for the notes, so I can list e.g. metal records from the entire collection. Can’t really do that in the filesystem unless you put something like ‘#metal’ in the artist/album directory names, or use a file manager that can read id3 tags, like Total Commander.
MacOS supports tagging for files, but it’s not portable between platforms, the tags might not be preserved by some apps when copying files, and idk actually how to search by the tags.
It depends on the album type:
- ~/Music/<artist>/<album>/<tracknumber> - <title>
- ~/Music/<artist>/<album>/<discnumber>-<tracknumber> - <title>
- ~/Music/Compilations/<album>/<tracknumber> - <title>
- ~/Music/Compilations/<album>/<discnumber>-<tracknumber> - <title>
Multi-artist albums go in Compilations, multi-disc albums are separated to prevent tracks with identical titles overriding eachother.
It’s really down to personal preference. I just got used to how iTunes did it and I’ve been doing that ever since. I don’t use iTunes anymore, Strawberry for playing and fre:ac for ripping.
