Organizing your music folders

Dear Cred Forums,

I've recently started reorganizing my music folder and I'm a little stuck on how to order my music. I have music from all genres and throughout every decade. I'm not much of an album man, I usually sift through albums and keep only what I really like.

Currently I have folders per genre on my harddrive and in iTunes I have playlists based on mood or style of music.

How do you group your music? I'm talking about music you have on your laptop or computer. Do you make folders by artists' name, by genre, by date?

Thanks.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_music_genres
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_forms_by_era
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Music > Artist Name > [Year] Album Name > Songs

that looks nicest I feel, never saw the point in sorting by genre. If your tags are accurate foobar can automate that, I assume the other players do too

though since you don't keep full album I dunno

Thanks for replying.

That is a decent way of doing it, but it wouldn't work for a big part of my music collection. For instance, I have a lot of obscure rocksteady songs from artists who only ever released a handful of singles. How do you order them? It'd be best to do it by genre or not?

I'm too lazy to organize shit these days tbhfam

I used to do Artist > Albums

now its some folder > songs and random albums

iTunes and most players automatically organize the folders for you. I have home folder/music/itunes media/artist/album/00 - song title

Man I dunno, its so hard to stay consistent when you start including things like compilations and classical releases as well. I hate having a 'Various' folder but i also hate having a folder for an artist I have a single song for

Exactly, it can be a bit of a pain in the arse at times.

Do you make playlists in whatever program you use to play your music? I generally make them based on genre but sometimes it's more of a playlist based on mood and I lump several genres into the same list.

>I have music from all genres
Orly?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_music_genres
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_forms_by_era

the only genre playlists I have at the moment are for indian classical and american primitivism (for background/guitar inspiration), others are more about mood

Usually I just listen to albums though. I've thought about going through and fixing up my genre tags so I can sort threm better but thats a big undertaking

>but thats a big undertaking

I know the feeling. That's why I'm doing it while it's still somewhat manageable. Also, I recently bought an external harddrive which I will use to back up my music files. I'd rather organize them before I do so.

Thanks for the links, they're quite handy. But it still doesn't solve some "problems" I have with certain songs.

Take, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates' Shakin All Over. It's classed under rhythm & blues and rock & roll, but it'd feel slightly out of place in both genres if you compare it to other songs from that decade in that. It has more of an early psychedelic/garage rock feel to it, if you ask me.

I'm well aware of the fact that I'm a total music-novice, so I could talking complete bollocks.

Art > Audio Visual Art > Audio Art > Music > Pop Music > Musicians from Britain > British Musicians born in the 1940s > Male British musicians born in the 1940s > John Lennon & Associated artists > The Beatles > Beatles' Albums Released in 1965 > Rubber Soul > Alphabetical Songs > A-F > Drive My Car
is how I do it.

Its your library, do whatever your comfy with and easiest t find what you want.

Don't do it in the C: folder though, just do...

>Artist
>[year] Album/Single

I separate the artists with at least one album/ep/compilation from those with just a handful songs.

1. All these releases are in the same folder, Releases (or something like that).

AlbumArtist/Year - Album/Track - Artist - Title


2. All these songs are in the same folder, Various Songs (or something like that).

Artist - Title

That looks like an enormous amount of work if you want to compile playlists on a music playing program. Or if you download something and want to add to a folder. Or have you got some type of technique which makes it an easy task?

I think that's probably the most important thing for me; it must be easy to find and readily available, yet correctly organized.

I think my plan is to keep my folders as correctly as possible and order music by genre, but have my playlists on iTunes based on mood and likeness.

the problem with organising by genre is there's so many decisions to be made. How specific do you want to be in your folders, do you want to classify this artist as folk or blues, this artists first album was prog, second was metal and so on

Then you gotta remember what you actually decided to classify it when it comes time to find it again

>- GENRE/EXOTIC COUNTRY/LABEL / [catalog number for EDM releases only] Artist - (year) Album [EP/single]
I create a Artist folder eventually if I have several releases from them.

The tricky part is about some artists that can be sorted in several folders:
ie. - JAPAN\Joe Hisaishi\Joe Hisaishi - (2001) Meets Kitano Films
it can be sorted in JAPAN or OST :/

Music/Artist - Album - Encoding

I order my music folders by genres

That's exactly the reason why I made this thread. I've been bumping into this problem quite a lot already.

Take the genre Rock for example. You have to split it up in subgenres and decades, otherwise it becomes too much of an unorganized mess. But then where do you draw the line? For instance "Hard Rock" is such a vague term that covers a lot of genres (Garage, Psychedelic Rock, Blues Rock) yet a lot of songs are classed under it.

I suppose sometimes you just have to go with how a song feels.

i have a foobar copy-to script that auto organizes it for me

music library/first letter of artist name/artist/(year) - album)/track # - trackname

i never saw the point of organizing it with genres. just use the id3 tags if you want to see certain things with certain genre tags. that's what i do.

Yeah. The alphabethical sorting is the best and easiest by far. You can filter anything on your music player afterwards, assuming you have the tags correct. e.g. search for anything Punk.

Complete noob question probably, but what program can I use to apply id3 tags to lots of files at once?