noise

my normal pattern is to organize albums like this, within folders named after the corresponding artist (showing the first few entries from my Björk folder)



compilations go in a Various Artists folder
soundtracks go in a Soundtracks folder

i also make generous use of tags, and of the incredible flexibililty of foobar.

for compilations i fill %album artist% with just Various Artists, and i fill %artist% with the track's artists.

soundtracks are done similarily, but %album artist% is set Soundtrack simply so that all my soundtracks show up in the same place. then for the %release type% tag, i put either Soundtrack or Score.

in foobar, mixed-artist albums show up like this:



when i throw music on my ipod however, i replace %artist% with %album artist% to avoid apple's horrible implementation of compilation albums.

here is a screenshot of the end result:

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my flac collection

Guybrush

Thanks noise

I thought about doing it the way you've done it some time ago, but I thought renaming Artists to Various Artists and so on was somewhat unsatisfactory.

Here is a screenie showing my Winamp, currently browsing the mixed artist compilation album "Kanon im kanon".

On the left hand side, you can see the filters. The active filter in the screenie is "Mixed Artist Compilations", so only those albums albums show up and they're organized by album first instead of artist, thus eliminating the need to rename artists to Various Artist.

Although Winamp does everything I want, I've just installed Foobar2000 because I think it looks pretty sweet. Hopefully, I can get the same kind of functionality out of it.

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Something Completely Different

noise

foobar has a steep learning curve. the screenshot i posted is the result of several months of customization and adjusting to get things just right. but the beauty of the program is that it is so flexible that with a little effort, it can become your perfect music player

if you need any help with it at all, feel free to PM me.

anyway back to organizing. i only rename Artist to Various Artist for my ipod. otherwise i have two separate tags - Album Artist and Artist. that lets me keep track artists intact for compilations and soundtracks.

so for a normal album - say, a Massive Attack album, Artist is set to Massive Attack, and i just ignore the Album Artist tag.

but for a soundtrack, the Album Artist is set to Soundtrack so that all my soundtracks show up in the same place on my filter. then each track gets its own Artist tag. ultimately, it is the Album tag that holds everything together.

i also use Genre and Style tags, along with Rating, to provide more layers to work with when building autoplaylists.

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my flac collection

someonecompletelyrandom

Google Earth.



Zooming in on a geographical location reveals more artists. I enjoy geography but my main motivation for this style of organization was my love for world music. It's quite fun to get a little info on where your music is coming from, you learn a lot about the area of the world and for me gives me greater insight into the music. You can also use the flight simulator to fly to your favorite music... i've got on some "african expeditions" that way - haha. Posting a full tutorial video soon.

anticipation

i have a folder titled "music", in that folder are folders labeled with various genre names "soul, funk, blues, etc etc", and in those are folders labeled with artist names who fit the corresponding genre. in each artist's folder there is everything i have by them.

Guybrush

Sorting stuff by genre I think has been my greatest sorting challenge so far

The reason is of course there's no consensus on genres and new ones are invented every day. Also the conventional tags don't support genres in the way I'd like them to. I think any music file should support multiple genre tags so that you can for example tag them with super genres and sub genres, f.ex Jazz and Bebop.

Weird that the guys who designed ID3 tags don't seem to have thought of that ..

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Janszoon

Shouldn't Michael Jackson's pin be in Indiana?

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

someonecompletelyrandom

I haven't cataloged everything yet but I'm planning on putting The Jackson 5 in Indiana and Michael as a solo artist in LA because the majority of his albums he released while living and working in California.

Freebase Dali

It really shouldn't matter. It's your music collection, thus, your categorization.
If you think something borders between Breakcore and IDM, go with your gut. It's your call.

Personally I find genre sorting is the most natural and easiest way for me.
I don't understand why people sort by date, or alphabetically.
That would become unnecessarily confusing for me. When I listen to music, I do it on a mood-by-mood basis, and the easiest way to relate mood to music is first through genre for me.

So for me, it's simple:

File structure:
D:\Music\all genres I have\all artists I have\All albums from artist I have\All songs from album I have

When I obtain new music, I edit the genre tags individually for each song. When I make playlists, I have absolutely no problems. It's a workflow that works for me.

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Cadrian

My Harddrives are in order of sorting of programs, Videos, Music, pictures and junk . Then I have music under artist then their albums. Compilations just get an artist slot.

I am have 2 TB drives both have the same files just in case something may happen.

MY ID tag on some of my music is jacked up.... I think it happened when my old computer crashed and I lost alot of music and had to add what I had on my IPOD back into the computer with some hack software, because I was slack to upload the cds again.

I wanting to look for a decent MP3 tag software so I can manual fix alot of it... but just haven't got around to finding one

Itunes is my sorting device I guess....