How do you organize your music files? (itunes, mp3 player, genre)

Guybrush · 04-14-2010, 01:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by noise

tore - sounds like you're still struggling with mixed-artist albums. how do you do things now? do you dislike the idea of using "various artists" as the album artist?

since you use foobar, you can make use of further tags to keep things sorted. i have an "album type" tag which could be set to "soundtrack", "mixtape", "compilation", etc. it helps me divide all "various artist" albums into finer categories for easy sorting.

Hehe, not really. I'm just wondering how people sort these albums (where they store the files) as it seems to be the only real difference in how we do things.

When it comes to tags, I do like you. I use Various artists for album artist and of course I also have album types tag to let me find stuff like soundtracks, studio albums, best ofs and so on. With foobar, I also like using multiple values in the artist field now and then, for example on songs like "Islands in the Stream" by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. It should of course show up under both these artists in my library tree and with foobar, I can make that happen.

When it comes to the physical location of my files, my goal is (still) to include searchable information in the path and filename, so all mixed artists compilations are organized in a folder called "!Mixed Artists Compilations" rather than f.ex under V for Various Artists. That way, a search query for "%path% HAS Mixed Artists" will give me all mixed artist compilations despite what album type is or if I've somehow forgotten to tag them .. Not that I I'm forgetful!

edit :

I also include album type in filename (f.ex "1972 - Close to the Edge [Studio album]") and all that together made the transition to foobar and retagging albums a breeze, for example by automatically filling %album type% with the information from that directory. Not sure what the benefit is right now, but if somehow my tags get screwed, it'll be of use.