Organizing music files?

[Hillbilly H]

My computer is like my barn,work shop... i know the stuff is in there but i will have to go looking..
So what would be the best way to organize this mess? "The music files not the junk"
FYi i have 20+ years of mp3 and wav and many multiples.

 

[KGIII]

I'm the worst person to ask, as I'm a musician with hundreds of my own files - each with many stubs (individual tracks that go into making the full song) and they're scattered across multiple devices, drives, and even backed up in multiple locations - but only parts are backed up in one location and others are backed up in other locations...

But... I do have a site where I share music. On that site, I organize it by genre and then by artist. This works pretty well.

Now if only I'd done that from the start with my own work...

 

[stan]

Like everything in life... we're all different. My preference is

MUSIC (top level folder)

ARTIST (folder inside Music, with band name or individual artist)

ALBUM (folders inside Artist for each album, sometimes needs 2 for double album)

SONGS (inside each Album... each mp3... each file should start with Track Number to keep proper album order)

Then, oh the many other things that go along with this that you may not expect. Track Number should be 01, 02, 03, etc.... not 1, 2, 3. This is because some systems will sort them as 1, 10, 11, 2, 3... grouping the 1's together.

BAND/ARTIST... one friend of mine thinks he's a librarian or something... using Last Name, First Name. If you like that idea, go for it, but I hate it. Along with that, he also keeps "The" such as, Beatles, The or Grateful Dead, The.... and again, I hate that. But you don't have to listen to me... it is strictly a personal preference. My preference is totally ignore "The" in any band. This would make the band, "The The" simply "The" in my collection.

I just read @KGIII's above... and I get that Genre is a valid option. But for me, there are too many crossover bands and musicians. That is why I avoid it.

OTHER THINGS: Compilations, movie scores, comedy, spoken word, and others, I'm sure. These could fit nicely into a Genre category... either under Music, or a top level equal with Music. There's no perfect method. Just get some ideas, and give it your best shot. I will be hard enough to actually take on the job of moving all the files into the new organization that you create. I have about a TB of mp3s, and I've quite given up on ever making it match up with my ideals.

Also top-level with Music, you may want Books and Movies.

 

[KGIII]

But for me, there are too many crossover bands and musicians. That is why I avoid it.

I use 'genre for which I most associate them', if that matters.

So, Zeppelin all gets crammed into 'Classic Rock'.

I don't differentiate much further. Even if some of their work could be considered blues or metal, it all gets crammed into 'Classic Rock'.

My PDF and EPUB type of stuff is also organized in a similar fashion, but that's locally.

 

[Condobloke]

AudioRanger - Identify, tag and organize your music collection

AudioRanger is a powerful and versatile music tagger designed to automatically identify and organize your digital music collection.

www.audioranger.com

Duplicate finder ..: https://www.lifewire.com/eliminate-duplicate-songs-with-these-free-tools-2438770

Maybe worth a look......It would take some reading and time to organise either of these programs......but at least you will have some music to listen to while you do that.

 

[stan]

So, Zeppelin all gets crammed into 'Classic Rock'.

Even too much crossover in Rock: hard rock, soft rock, punk rock, classic rock, acid rock, heavy metal, hair bands, and so on. Just ROCK for me, for this purpose. It's hard enough to draw the line between ROCK and COUNTRY or some other close ones. Gotta draw lines somewhere, but the fewer the better.

 

[KGIII]

I just go with the genre I most associate with the band. I don't worry too much about how others categorize them. If they're a classic rock band that made a blues album, they still go in classic rock.

I also use my definition. Today, Nirvana is classic rock. I'd put Nirvana in 'grunge'.

 

[Tolkem]

I have all my music collection in a 'Music' folder, I let the player take care of the rest; genres, artist, etc. That being said, I've too been looking for a way to better organize my stuff, but to be honest it's quite cumbersome and tiresome if you have a lot of files that you never took the time to organize in the first place. The only thing I do have separated by 'topics' are my e-books, PDFs and any other kind of reading material, although I use Calibre which does a great job categorizing those too. However, I recently finished cleaning my music collection from some corrupted files which wouldn't play anymore. I started "by hand"; using the file manager and some filters, but that was too much time-consuming and looking for a solution/tool to help me to ease that task, found this http://mp3report.sourceforge.net/ just extract, place the script in /your/music/folder and run, or if you're on an 'apt' based distro such as Ubuntu or Debian, it is available in their repos, probably in others too, but I haven't checked.

mp3report --help

Neon Goat MP3 Report Generator v1.0.3
Copyright (C) 2000, David Parker, Neon Goat Productions.
www.neongoat.com - [email protected]

Usage: /usr/bin/mp3report [options] [directory...]
--help shows this help screen
--printmode uses a smaller font for printing
--title=TITLE sets the title used in the report
--outfile=OUTFILE file to write report to, '-' for STDOUT
--template=FILE file to use as report template
--stdgenres use standard genres instead of winamp genres
--id3v2 enable id3v2 support (experimental)
directory... dirs to scan (subdirs included)

I can't remember the exact command I used(and it's not in .history, just checked), but it created an HTML file(can be a .txt too by using --outfile=file_name.txt) listing all the files in my music folder along with their metadata, from there I just wrote a script to delete all those with missing metadata. Maybe you can find a way to use it to do what you want.

 

[JasKinasis]

My music collection has been painstakingly curated and organised. I have all of my music in ~/Music/ for albums I listen to a lot on my pc and I have a couple of large, dedicated USB HD’s for keeping my entire digital music collection.

Each top level "Music" directory has 26 sub-directories named A..Z.
Each of those directories contains directories with artist names that begin with that letter.
e.g.
Music/A/Alice in Chains/

I also have a directory called 0 which contains artist / band names that start with numbers. E.g. 65 Days of Static

Each album in the artist directory is named in the following format: "[year] album-name"
E.g.
Music/A/Alice in Chains/[1992] Dirt/

And then each file is organised in album order in the album directory in the following format.
Track-number - title.extension.
E.g.
01 - Them Bones.mp3
etc...

Where the format allows it, all songs are fully tagged with artist/album/year/track number/disc number/genre and artwork. That way any media player/organiser can use the tags to play things by certain artists, or from certain genres.

When I rip to mp3/flac/ogg, I also generate a .m3u playlist, for when I put music onto a usb stick to play in the car.

Compilation albums are listed in "V/Various Artists/" with a directory for each album.

Any multi-disk albums (whether they be by single artists, or various artists) have an additional sub-directory for each disc, inside the main album directory.
E.g.
Music/N/Nine Inch Nails/[1999] The Fragile/disc 1/

And on my laptop, I generally use cmus (terminal based media player) to manage the library, playlists and play music.

So it’s Alphabetical by artist and chronological by album.

 

[Tolkem]

AudioRanger - Identify, tag and organize your music collection

AudioRanger is a powerful and versatile music tagger designed to automatically identify and organize your digital music collection.

www.audioranger.com

Audio Ranger doesn't seem to support Linux. I see only a Windows and macOS file.

AudioRanger - Download

AudioRanger is a powerful and versatile music tagger designed to automatically identify and organize your digital music collection.

www.audioranger.com

For Linux, I've used this one https://beets.io/ it's in most distro's repos too.

 

[Lord Boltar]

You can try Clementine which is in the Ubuntu/Mint repos

Clementine is a multi-platform music player focusing on a fast and
easy-to-use interface for searching and playing your music.

Summary of included features :
- Search and play your local music library.
- Listen to internet radio from SomaFM, Magnatune, Jamendo, Intergalactic FM,
Digitally Imported, JAZZRADIO.com, ROCKRADIO.com, RadioTunes.com,
Soundcloud, Icecast and Subsonic servers.
- Search and play songs you've uploaded to Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and
OneDrive.
- Create smart playlists and dynamic playlists.
- Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
- CUE sheet support.
- Play audio CDs.
- Visualizations from projectM.
- Lyrics and artist biographies and photos.
- Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
- Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
- Fetch missing tags from MusicBrainz.
- Discover and download Podcasts.
- Download missing album cover art from Last.fm.
- Native desktop notifications using libnotify.
- Remote control using an Android device, a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the
command-line.
- Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
- Queue manager.

It is largely a port of Amarok 1.4, with some features rewritten to take
advantage of Qt4.

 

[Hillbilly H]

LOL i found debstep and i know i did not downloaded it!

i downloaded Clementine and it is helping. On this drive i only have 400+ with unknown song, artist, and album lol.
As for genre this will be a tough one for me separating Hillbilly, country, and bluegrass music. much of it copped from reel to reel tape recorded back in the 60s.

 

[khedger]

I keep my music files on an external drive (optional, it's just what I do). On that drive I have a dir called 'mp3s'. It could be called music or 'wavs' or whatever....I chose 'mp3s' way back when.
Within this dir are subdirs for each artist. Within each artist dir are album dirs, and within each aldum dir are the files (tracks) for that album. Things like genre etc. are handled in each track with ID tags.
Sometimes I'll have multiple artist dirs like: 'Cannonball Adderley' and 'Cannonball Adderley and Nancy Wilson'. I tend to handle these things on a case by case basis. For instance I might have an album whose artists are Bob, Frank, Ted, and Alice. In that case I'll ofent list it under the most prominent artist's name and note the others in the ID tag comment field.
I use Quod Libet as my player application and I like it a lot. Your mileage may vary.

keith