autobiographically. -_-


on itunes they are sorted, very fussily, into artists alphabetically, but any random songs/various albums I sort to the letters ZZZZZZZZZ so that it doesn't look messy and they go at the bottom out of the way.......god.

I go alphabetically. But I just listen to my music in my itunes. My CDs are mostly alphabetical, but I also have a lot just stacked in no order.

Colour of CD spine, ordered to create a colour spectrum effect.

Like this:

http://i986.photobucket.com/albums/a...g?t=1255365518

http://i986.photobucket.com/albums/a...g?t=1255365574

http://i986.photobucket.com/albums/a...g?t=1255365699

I take great pride in keeping my music organized.

It's funny how at the beginning of the thread, we're talking about CDs and then it mutates into talking about digital files. :p:

When I first started buying CDs, I kept them alphabetized by artist. When I got to around 100, I got tired of shifting everything around every time I bought a new CD...especially if it was early in the alphabet. At the time, I had a CD rack with slots so I wasn't able to just slide everything over...I had to move each one individually. PITA. So since then I've organized by genre. I group artists and order them chronologically within the artist group. This used to be easier...but over the past decade or so has gotten more confusing for two reasons: 1) I've run out of room and my CD book case is doubled-up...Every shelf has nearly 2 full rows in front of 2 back rows; 2) there is much more genre cross-pollination than there used to be, and I struggle to classify things. It's honestly been kind of a big mess for the past 5 years, but without buying an extra bookcase, it's pointless trying to fix it. And when I get new CDs, they get ripped to my computer right away anyway. It's only a pain when I want to hear an oldie that happens to not be on my computer, and I have to dig it out of the mess. I usually have a good idea of approximately where it is, but often have to dig it out from behind others.

Should always have solid gaps to make shifting easy, and when you borrow stuff(well not really in modern age), you could slot it back in rather easily. I've always had shelves over CD racks for that purpose really.

Artist, then album.

And I can't stand lowercase where it isn't supposed to be. xD

Yeah I switched to shelves a long time ago...and leaving slots would have been helpful to keep things organized alphabetically. But too late now...and no room for slots! :p:

Speaking digital I assume. I completely agree. In fact it pisses me off when my properly tagged stuff scrobbles to last.fm as all lowercase because of the idiots that first scrobbled it.

Exactly. I don't mind Last.fm as much, though, since I skip so many of those songs. They recommend some of the worst music to me. It's because of the fact that one band will have ten genres. And then I'll get recommended ten more bands with ten other genres. It's really a mess.

With the music I physically own, I have it in Japanese order.

By that I mean, you read it backwards instead of forwards. It makes more sense to me when I'm looking for something, I don't know why.

I was referring to listening to my own music/albums, which gets tracked on last.fm...not using their radio feature. So, I'm not going to skip my own music. ;) If something I play is already in their "database" in all lowercase, that's how it's going to show up.

Oh, oh. I understand. ^_^ That sucks. xD

The music on my computer is alphabetical, however iTunes or lala does it for me. I know what I want to listen to, so digital music is never a problem. As for my records, it gets a bit more complicated. Music from the current year I keep separate, sorted by how much I like it. Outside that, I have music from the 70's, music from the 80's, and music from the 90's sorted in a combination of alphabetically and how much I like it. My favorite albums (excluding from this year) I keep separate.

V That's how it happens usually, the colors play a big role in this.

http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w...-capture-7.png

All my music is organized by artist then album ... i don't keep many single songs ... the ones i do have just kinda get lumped into the root of my Music folder ... i'm definitely an album kind of listener ...

What do your colours mean? I also do colour-coding on my mac :D

Always nice to not be alone :P I got so happy when I discovered the color markings in mac, cause I used to do them on paper lol.

I use Red - Orange - Yellow, and each section has its own explanation:

Full Discographies Folder:

Red >> Listened to all their albums [The albums in that case are marked in Red]
Yellow >> Listened to the ones marked [As 'listen' I mean more than basic shallow listening]

Unfinished Discographies:

Red >> The discographies I got nearly finished
Orange >> My 60s Psych Artists
Yellow >> In case of empty folders in my discographies, I mark the ones I have in Yellow

M [or my scattered songs, but still in Artist folders]

Red >> The ones I should seek

What do your colors mean?

Chronological.

Hardly at all...

all the rubbish albums I don't like anymore go in a draw out of the way, and my CD shelf is just in a pretty random order - except some bands are vaguely grouped together from ages ago when I got half way through organizing them and then got bored. Also, there are rubber ducks amongst my CDs on my shelf - dunno why, but it looks good.

As for digital, just the basic alphabetical layout that iTunes does.

You've got some capitalization issues going on there. :p:

Personally when it comes to digital organization, it's just artist folder and album folders within that. I don't see a need to complicate it beyond that (and I'm not criticizing those that do). Comps are in a Compilations folder, with the title of the comp for each folder. I keep everything nice and organized in iTunes and my actual folders reflect that same organization.

The options given are kind of vague, as they leave out many options. For example, I organize my CD collection rather broadly by genre. (My vinyls are in a box, horribly unorganized. They will eventually be replaced by CDs.) There's 4 sections:

metal/classic rock/grunge
jazz/blues
classical/ambient
miscellaneous

Within those broad sections, I sort by artist alphabetically. However, I don't organize the albums further. The advantage is that I can find roughly similar sounds easily, yet still retain the advantages of alphabetical organization.

However, I almost never use the original CD. I make a physical backup and a digital backup after purchase and use those.

On my PC, I have several ways to organize my collection in I-Tunes. There's by genre and artist, of course. I love using Smart Playlists. Using Smart Playlists, I can keep Agalloch, Reverend Bizarre, and Judas Priest in separate metal subgenres, yet conglomerate them into just 'metal'. Same with jazz subgenres. I also use Smart Playlists to organize by time period as well.

That's a good idea...mine are by genre for the most part but then I try to group them by label or sub-genre and it's gotten too confusing in the last 10 years, and as my tastes expand. I like your idea. Once I get more space (who knows when that will be) I'll consider this method. I'm sure it'll still be tricky trying to classify things. Might just go full alphabetical...who knows. Maybe my current system isn't so bad, I just need space to clean it up.

I've tried straight alphabetical order by album, but it becomes unwieldy, because I can never remember the name of some albums. I try to keep some semblance of order to my physical collection, even though I rarely use it. It's really not necessary if one digitizes the albums, I suppose.

One question for those who have their music in alphabetical folders: when I've tried this, I-Tunes removes the albums and labels them by artist after I import them. How do you prevent that? Or should I just ditch I-Tunes?

For the actual albums, I just put them in order by genre, and I works pretty well because it flows from one genre to the next so well.
For example:
Despised Icon->Suicide Silence->Chelsea Grin->Bring Me The Horizon->The Devil Wears Prada->Chiodos->A Day To Remember->Four Year Strong
And so on and so forth.

I'd ditch iTunes. It's too problematic, has a high chance of crashing and corrupting your entire music library, etc. WinAmp's probably the best media program I know of.

alphabetical CDs, digital stuff i have tried to split into genre playlists accurately, if you just listen to stuff off the main iTunes 'music' list too much gets lost in the shuffle. I am afraid to update iTunes because i think it destroys the old settings and i would be back to square one.

tried winamp several times and it pisses me off

it doesnt destroy the old settings, i just updated mines, unless the 64-bit version is different than the 32-bit version i would do it :)!
and CDs are now sitting alphabetically, digital files are done on itunes by genre :D or artist :)

Actually, you can export your playlists from I-Tunes and then import them again. This is useful when moving things to another computer, but not necessary if upgrading the version. Still, I've heard of problems with the latest version.

I like to divide my collection into subgenres and them set up Smart Playlists to combine these subgenres into a genre or other category. For example, I have 22 metal subgenres (Go ahead. Laugh!) in the main window, but I can make a Smart Playlist which will combine all those, plus Hard Rock into a single playlist without affecting the basic classification system. I also created a Smart Playlist to lump all the subgenres with extreme vocals, as well as an Unplayed playlist, which shows the tracks I've not listened to yet. I like this because I can both lump and split the music into various categories -- whichever works better for a particular usage.

I don't care for Winamp either. Media Monkey is better than I-Tunes, except that its version of Smart Playlists is far less useful than in I-Tunes.

I would never even think of alphabetizing by album name...makes no sense to me that multiple albums by the same artist would not be grouped together. :crazy:

And I think this is the kind of thinking that got me to organize stuff the way I do...I wanted side project CDs to sit next to the bands they were an off-shoot of, and bands that otherwise shared members were often of the same genre, sometimes on the same label and I wanted those together, and so it developed into categorization by genre.

Lately, I haven't been keeping up with the music organization. I have like... three songs by the same artist. I was trying to listen to an album today while I was working out and I kept hearing the same songs played at least twice.

It was horrible.

I have found using a digital device has increased the efficiency of my artist and album searches tenfold... the state of my actual hard copy CDs as far as organisation goes..... well lately that leaves a bit to be desired...hmmmmm...

thanks for the feedbaque, now i can blissfully continue my simple-minded existence as an iTunes user with its nice unintimidating layout

I normally go alphabetically by artist. I find it easier to find songs!

With my CD collection: alphabetically by artists, then for multiple albums by an artist, alphabetically within the set based on album title.
iTunes: album by artist. It's basically set-up by artist (when I want Patti Smith I just hit P), but compilation albums and such are filed by the "album artist." So, for example, I'm Not There, essentially a Bob Dylan cover album, is listed among the Dylan albums despite the various artists. I find this arrangement to be very convenient.

I do this too. I've also in the past year started sorting the list not just by Artist, but "Album by Year", this way it's alphabetical by artist, but albums are in chronological order instead of alphabetical.

In iTunes it's like that:

http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w...capture-11.png

^ By year? Really? Seems like it would get complicated with artists who have discographies over longs periods of time

^ But that's how I track the artist's evolution in time (Bob Dylan in the 60s is not Bob Dylan in the 90s), or just the music in time. As I prefer the 60s I know where to look ;).

Ha how many albums do you have from 67? Seems like a lot

not a lot, only 20.