Originally Posted by innerspaceboy

While I don’t use Spotify, (the service fails to meet any of my personal musical needs), I’ve made an art of cataloging and indexing my libraries.

Physical media (vinyl) is organized primarily by genre, then by artist, then chronologically by date of release. EPs and singles are filed with full-length LPs and comps, but solo and side projects follow each artist as these sometimes number in the hundreds for each member.

Digital media is tackled slightly differently. My Linux-based media server is folder structured. Artists have a primary folder, with an expanded tree of subfolder systems for full-length LPs, singles, EPs, official live recordings, unofficial boots, and further subfolders for solo and collaborative side ventures. All releases are prefixed with a bracketed year value so that folders populate in order of release.

Other primary folders are used for large collections, like record label archives. Any complete label discography has a dedicated folder with each release in a subfolder prefixed with its catalog number. This also keeps them in chronological order. I use similar primary folders for genre map archives, with subfolders for each affiliated label, artist, or project.

When accessing this content in a desktop environment, I use a customized interface of gMusicBrowser which is unparalleled in the Linux community for large library management. My server software manages metadata indexing so that I can browse my library by folder, artist, genre, year, or any other piece of music metadata, making library navigation from a mobile device a snap.

I hope that helps. Good luck!