How do you organize your mediafilez

[Anakor]

I store all flac, mp3, ogg -media files on a special drive, let’s call it M:\ for music. This directory includes 3 subdirectories MP3, FLAC and OGG. These directories have all the same structure, which is Artist* \ *Album \ *Tracks.

The *Tracks Filenames include the original track number, e.g “01 - Roundabout.flac”. So in a view, the tracks will show up in the right order.

*Album has the original release year and the number of the studio album the Artist has created, e.g “1971-04 Fragile”. So in a list Albums in the correct order. Live Albums have no album number, but have “LL” for double live, “L” for single disk live. Samplers could have “SS” or “S” but I don’t like Samplers.

According to the said, a valid Path name would be m:\MP3\Yes\1971-04 Fragile\03 - We Have Heaven.mp3.

What is your structure?

[Weblate]

@Anakor you can read this thread:

How do you organise your collection? ( - so you can maintain it with Picard)

Most of us have music from various sources such as CD’s that we’ve ripped, Basecamp and many other sources like amazon etc. Perhaps we have flacs from vinyl… It’s common to want to use KODI (@IvanDobsky) or Plex to play the music. It’s usually in flac files or mp3s. These files can be tagged using Picard (other taggers are available). It’s a common desire to keep the original files and then have a seperate copy of the Picard tagged files… How do you organise your collection?

Some people even boast that they used the Darknet and TOR.

[Jim_DeLaHunt]

I encourage you to search this forum. You will find many threads over the years where people have shared their filenaming schemes.

My high-level advice is not to expect any one structure to meet all your needs. Sometimes you will want a list of music by primary artist. Sometimes you will want a list by release name. Sometimes you will want all recordings of songs by a particular songwriter. Sometimes you will want a list of all the FLAC files.

No one filename hierarchy will give you all of those. Instead, software which reads the music files and presents you sorted lists can give you those. And then the filenaming scheme almost stops mattering.

[Aszazin]

I don’t divide different format in different directories. The aim is to have everything lossless (flac preferred), but in some cases it’s impossible.

Directory names used to end on the format (-flac, -320, …), but now I changed that simply into the source ([BC] for Bandcamp, [Q] for Qobuz, [CD] for CD-rip, etc.), because I always take the same format from the same provider, or when ripping, so additionally listing the format became redundant.

All music was in one big directory, no subdirectory for artists. But I split of classical, because of the very different nature (different artists: composer, performer(s), equally important, vs single artist which can simply sort alphabetically).

I also split them of in Plex, tagging the classical ones so the Composer is always the “album artist” (even on multiple composer albums, these get split in Plex). But I do keep the directories. So to play a release, a simply enqueue it in foobar2000. To have a sight of recording per composer, I can use Plex. (Which actually is able to read directories to, if I wish to when playing remote.)

For classical, I sometimes need to shorten the directory and/or file names, as Windows has a max. character count for the full path.

Filenames differs per release. Often I keep them if convenient. For non-classical this is mostly the case and mostly straight forward. Just Track# and Title , or Track#, Artist and title for VA-releases. Classical it depends. For Various Composer releases, I want the composer in the filename, for Various performers, I want the performer(s) in the filename. For completely VA, I want them both.

So, for non-classical I have: E:\Archive\Music\Artist -yyyy-mm-dd- Title [Source]

For classical: E:\Archive\Music-Classical\Composer; Performer(s) -yyyy-mm-dd- Title(s) [Source]

That is if I don’t need to shorten the pathname. yyyy-mm-dd is for the initial release date of an album, except for live albums, where it would be the date of the performance

Compilations focussing on a certain period for an artist, will have the periods, but in reverse order: for instance 1932-1938 will become -1938-1932- in the directory name. (I want it sorted on the latest date). When the recordings on a compilation are not of the nature a date range is of any interest, it will just be the initial release date for that compilation. Various Artists are entered as VA (shorter, and clear enough)

So, albums by the same artists are always shown in chronologic order of release, when sorted alphabetically.

No system is perfect, but both Plex, Foobar2000, and even just Windows Explorer (or most other file managers) allow searching. I buy a lot of files, more than I can process, so my most common way of finding stuff is… sorting on date, so the latest incoming is on top. More than half of my music is still in the “incoming” folder, to be entered in MB & Discogs, tagged, checking if filenames are ok, etc. The same for records and CD’s. I’m always surrounded by vinyl and CD that need to be input.

It’s fun, I can always choose what to take!

[Beckfield]

Since there were multiple replies suggesting that there were existing threads for this question, I chose to post mine in the thread that Weblate linked:

https://community.metabrainz.org/t/how-do-you-organise-your-collection-so-you-can-maintain-it-with-picard/711630