getmusicbee.com
General => Beyond MusicBee => Topic started by: jbercx on December 16, 2013, 07:27:44 AM
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Hello
I would like to know, at what location you are keeping your music files / collections?
I have them on 2 different external discs, both 4 TB (in fact both have the same content, Disc 2 is a backup of Disc 1)
Since I am using MB, for about 1 month now, wheereby I am very impressed with MB.
It is the best software package that I have tried util now. It is now my standard software package for managing my music files.
I am thinking to make a new setup to organize my files
Now I have them in folders A-Z and then per artist or band a separate folder. Probally this is oldfashion, but I know at least where a band or artist is stored. Any other suggestions are welcome, whereby I am very interested on how you guys are organizing your music files.
I am very interested in very old music, I mean, I am looking for the 1st ever recordings done. I have some recording from the early 20th century (1905). If someone has some interesting stuff, please let me know.
Then, I am not sure yet if it is on this forum, would be nice to have a toppic where we could discuss music itself, like as before, very old recordings, or new releases comming up etc.etc.
best regards
J
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Now I have them in folders A-Z and then per artist or band a separate folder.
If this means what I think you're saying, then I do the same thing. Since I'm on Windows, I have "Libraries" for Documents/Pictures/Music/Videos. And ofc, my music (or any audio files for that matter) go into the Music Library. But it doesn't just end there. In "My Music" I have many folders. One folder for music from Youtube, unsorted in anyway, just thrown in there. Too lazy to do that. Two folders for music I need to sort, one folder for artists that I can easily get the info for, the other for the newer artists that don't even have album art... *gag* For these files, I change the dB to 90, I remove the genre tag and clean the file names as well as tags.
And last but not least, my "Music" folder. This is where all my Music is, sorted, clean tags and good to go. This is the folder I put things in once I'm done cleaning the files to my liking, and only then. This is the folder I'll select to sync with devices or for example, the folder I told MusicBee to use.
Inside this folder I have folders 0-9/A-Z titled as the Artist/Band. In those folders I have folders 0-9/A-Z of the title of the Album. And in thooose folders I have the .mp3 files themselves.
Maybe it's crazy or something, but to me, music means a hellovalot. So I like to keep it all nice, neat, and tidy. :3
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The '"F'' Partition is where I store/install most of my stuff.
In there I have a folder called ''Docs''
In there is ''Music'' ''Music I should tag'''and also ''Video Game Music''.
In Music I have a seperate map for each artist, each artist has folders for their albums, with only the albums name(No year or whatever)
In Video game Music it's sorted by Game Series, than the game.
In Music I should tag there are genre folders, than in those band folders, and in those albums. These are albums I still plan on tagging correctly, but since I use musicbee now I don't use the folder often. Musicbee has the awesome Inbox feature ^.^.
The things I hate though is that sometimes when I click an album folder, there's another album folder I have to click to get to the songs. I ususally remove one when I come accross those. I also remove all of the non music files in each album folder(No images, no playlist files,etc).
The thing that really annoys me is that the filenames are ususally done wrong ,but I don't feel like renaming every damn song I have.
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I am just crazy.... well not really but I was very ill a couple of years ago so I worked on my music collection quite a bit to keep busy.
I have a 2 TB hard drive, with a music folder in it. I then have folders named A-Z with an additional one I named # which used to be a number sign (LOL). Within those folders I have a folder for each artist and then album. Every album and song I have re-tagged, put in proper art at 300x300 (which is large enough for me), created a playlist for the full album, and created a folder icon for.
I have placed a toolbar on my taskbar next to the windows 7 start button so I can easily access it all.
I also keep 2 copies on my server.
End result looks like
(click to make larger)
(http://www.katzz.me/image2.png) (http://www.katzz.me/image1.png)
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I have my music in two NAS's in the cellar. One is for Blues and Jazz (separated)
One the other one I hace Albums (which is everything but jazz and blues) Classical and Collections.
Classical is dived into composers and artists and Collections in genre,
All then has subfolders A-Ö (I'm Swedish)
When naming individual folder I use: Artist Name (year) Album title (Flac), then I get all the albums in continious order.
New Years ressolution 2009: If it aint FLAC it's WHACK ;D
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I have my music in my laptop and usb flash drive. I also have them on my phone. :)
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That is my biggest problem LOL. I re-organize EVERY time. I get confused if I want it by genre, album, singer, title of the song. Whatever way I choose I always end up having a difficult time finding songs.
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I'm on a windows platform and foolishly decided to just drop individual files into folders organized by Folders named from A to Z. I would use what ever tool I could to complete the tags and name the files by Artist - Title. The A to Z Folders all live within My Music / Prime Collection. I also have Folders under My Music for Staging and Cleaning Required.
Once the A to Z Folders grew to 1,000's of files each it became painful to watch windows repeatedly attempt to index them.
I'm now trying to restructure my Folders to My Music / Prime Collection / Artist / Album / Title. @Katzz I do like and recognize the value of putting the A to Z folder structure in front like you've done.
My biggest challenge is over the years I've spread my collection across multiple drives. I'd be interested to learn if anyone has found a tool or created a simple process to bulk compare Directories? I realize there a slew of Compare utilities out there, I own a few myself, but I have yet to find one that cleanly points out deltas you want to keep and readiness all the dups for the recycle bin.
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There was another thread discussing pros and cons of different naming strategies, hyar:
http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=14088.0
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I'm now trying to restructure my Folders to My Music / Prime Collection / Artist / Album / Title.
If you're about to embark on a large scale reorganisation project, the best advice I can give is to spend a little time at the outset to decide on a tagging and file naming structure that meets your needs now, and your forseeable needs in the future. What you want to avoid is tagging 1000s of files, only to decide then that you wanted to set a mood tag for each track, or add release notes for your favourite albums, or realise your folder structure is still confusing... Of course you can go back and fix them later, but your motivation the second time around might wane. :P
Get it right the first time, and with a bit of luck, your music library will still be up to date in 10+ years. :)
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@Zak, point well taken...
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I am just crazy.... well not really but I was very ill a couple of years ago so I worked on my music collection quite a bit to keep busy.
I have a 2 TB hard drive, with a music folder in it. I then have folders named A-Z with an additional one I named # which used to be a number sign (LOL). Within those folders I have a folder for each artist and then album. Every album and song I have re-tagged, put in proper art at 300x300 (which is large enough for me), created a playlist for the full album, and created a folder icon for.
I have placed a toolbar on my taskbar next to the windows 7 start button so I can easily access it all.
I also keep 2 copies on my server.
End result looks like
(click to make larger)
(http://www.katzz.me/image2.png) (http://www.katzz.me/image1.png)
Oh, wow...
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I have my music on my laptop, phone and external hard drive. I have a folder for each artist, it's easier for me to pick for my playlist. :)
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have 35000+ songs at best bit rate i can find some of them are studio version 50 MB for 3 minutes, hmm after years of messy stored music i am now using language/years/month/album i have three different language music why i store it yearly because some songs/albums are duet so where they go :s one female singer have given vocal to 400+ albums on past 5 years almost 300 different male singers yes bitch.i m using mediamonkey when i need to find music in any way like genre/singer/album/years all are there in left side bar or just use search or use column browser and you can also user auto playlist.
but from a week i m trying musicbee hope it will last for decade with me :D
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If MusicBee doesn't play a trick on my my library currently spans 121.000+ songs (9.137 albums -> 1.558 GBs). I started collecting digital music in 2005 to have it with me when traveling. I'm not realizing that my 9.000+ CDs collection is practically outdated.
I'm running two external hard drives of 2TB each (drives F:\ and G:\). I have two more discs for monthly backups. This works well for me. As for the sorting I'm strictly going by either the artist's last name, or the band's main name (suppressing "The" in front of a band name). So this would look like this:
F:\Artists from A to L
G:\Artists from M to Z
Example:
G: \ (...)
\Rodgers, Kenny
\Rolling Stones, The
\Ronstandt, Linda
\Rose Royce
Within an artist's/band's folder I go by the year if more than one album is available:
Year - Artist - Album name:
1975 - The Rolling Stones - It's Only Rock'n'Roll
1975 - The Rolling Stones - Black and Blue
(etc.)
On top of that I'm taking care that all my files are neatly tagged. In most cases I even take the time to tag the composers, producers, label, catalog number, etc. I guess I'm a freak too ;)
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The A-Z root-level folders seems a little redundant to me since you could just press a letter while looking at File Explorer to jump to that section. But I have mine setup in a fairly standard way (Artist > Album > *). I'd like it if the album folders could be displayed in release order, but that's what meta-data is for, I can still sort by release year within MusicBee, so no drama. I have a pretty good memory for this stuff, so I can usually locate any given song in my collection in explorer just by remembering what artist/album the song was on.
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I have my main OS and frequently used files on an SSD, and then all my music/photos/videos on a 2TB "media" HD. My MB playlists are all exported to a dir within the music library (use the export playlist option whenever creating a new playlist). That drive is synced daily with my NAS which feeds playlists to my Sonos, so all my music is available to the Sonos. I also backup the entire media drive to an external/portable drive and keep that at my office.
The dir structure is mostly artist/album, however I have a "various artists" folder and a "Misc by Genre" folder with genre sub-folders for a lot of stuff that falls between the cracks (especially classical which can be composer/artist/conductor/orchestra driven so "artist" or "composer" don't really work consistently).
MB has very powerful moving and retagging options, so with some time, but really not that much effort, you can rework an entire library into the format of your choosing.
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On an external 2TB HDD (need to upgrade soon).
Here's my sorting formula under I:\ (work in progress):
$If($Or(<Genre>="Alternative",<Genre>="Rock"),"Alternative and Rock",$If($Or(<Genre>="Anime",<Genre>="Game"),"Soundtrack - "<Genre>,$If(<Genre>="New Wave","80s, New Wave, and Synthpop",$If($Or(<Genre>="House",<Genre>="Acid Jazz"),Dance,$If($Or(<Genre>="Gothic",<Genre>="Post-Punk"),"Gothic or Post-Punk",$If(<Genre>="Rap","Hip Hop",$If(<Genre>="Jungle","Drum & Bass",<Genre>)))))))\$If(<Album Artist>="Various Artists","VA - "<Album>,<Album Artist>)\$If(<Album Artist>="Various Artists",<Track#>". "<Artist>" - "<Title>,$IsNull(<DateCustom>,"("<Year (yyyy)>") "<Album>,"("<Year (yyyy)>.<DateCustom>") "<Album>))\$If(<Album Artist>="Various Artists",,<Track#>". "<Title>)
Basically:
I:\<Genre>\<Album Artist>\(Year.Month.Date) <Album>\Track#. Title
For compilations (album artist = various artists): I:\<Genre>\VA - <Album> (Year)\Track#. Artist - Title
Soundtracks: I:\ Soundtrack - <Genre>\<Album> (Year)\Track#. Title
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On an external 2TB HDD (need to upgrade soon).
Here's my sorting formula under I:\ (work in progress):
$If($Or(<Genre>="Alternative",<Genre>="Rock"),"Alternative and Rock",$If($Or(<Genre>="Anime",<Genre>="Game"),"Soundtrack - "<Genre>,$If(<Genre>="New Wave","80s, New Wave, and Synthpop",$If($Or(<Genre>="House",<Genre>="Acid Jazz"),Dance,$If($Or(<Genre>="Gothic",<Genre>="Post-Punk"),"Gothic or Post-Punk",$If(<Genre>="Rap","Hip Hop",$If(<Genre>="Jungle","Drum & Bass",<Genre>)))))))\$If(<Album Artist>="Various Artists","VA - "<Album>,<Album Artist>)\$If(<Album Artist>="Various Artists",<Track#>". "<Artist>" - "<Title>,$IsNull(<DateCustom>,"("<Year (yyyy)>") "<Album>,"("<Year (yyyy)>.<DateCustom>") "<Album>))\$If(<Album Artist>="Various Artists",,<Track#>". "<Title>)
Basically:
I:\<Genre>\<Album Artist>\(Year.Month.Date) <Album>\Track#. Title
For compilations (album artist = various artists): I:\<Genre>\VA - <Album> (Year)\Track#. Artist - Title
Soundtracks: I:\ Soundtrack - <Genre>\<Album> (Year)\Track#. Title
Where did you set this formula, I assume, somewhere in Preferences?
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either in edit> prefs> library> autoorganize library or file> organize files (in mb 3.0)
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either in edit> prefs> library> autoorganize library or file> organize files (in mb 3.0)
Thank you, got it!
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Hello
I would like to know, at what location you are keeping your music files / collections?
I have them on 2 different external discs, both 4 TB (in fact both have the same content, Disc 2 is a backup of Disc 1)
Since I am using MB, for about 1 month now, wheereby I am very impressed with MB.
It is the best software package that I have tried util now. It is now my standard software package for managing my music files.
I am thinking to make a new setup to organize my files
Now I have them in folders A-Z and then per artist or band a separate folder. Probally this is oldfashion, but I know at least where a band or artist is stored. Any other suggestions are welcome, whereby I am very interested on how you guys are organizing your music files.
I am very interested in very old music, I mean, I am looking for the 1st ever recordings done. I have some recording from the early 20th century (1905). If someone has some interesting stuff, please let me know.
Then, I am not sure yet if it is on this forum, would be nice to have a toppic where we could discuss music itself, like as before, very old recordings, or new releases comming up etc.etc.
best regards
J
I currently have mine on a 2TB external drive, which is also used for movies/videos, however, as I have a huge amount to add (from CD rips and vinyl) it will run out of space, so I'm currently looking for an alternative option. The obvious option is to just buy a 5 TB disc, but I'm not sure even that will be big enough. Whatever I buy I'm gonna have to get 2 so I can have a backup.
As for organization, it's organised the default way. I folder for each artist, and then a filder for each album. I embed album art in the file. I used to check tags with mp3 tag, but since switching players to MusicBee now have to use it very rarely as MusicBee does pretty much everything I want wrt tagging.
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I keep my music in D:\Music, but only sorted and tagged music. The rest sits in my download folder, regardless if I burned it or downloaded it or whatever.
I also like only MP3s in my active library so I try to convert them before adding them.
Then I sort by: Artist\[year] - [album]\00 Track Name.mp3
The only files in here are the tracks themselves and one "Cover - Front.jpg" (or whatever extension). Nothing else.
Discs are separated into "Disc 1", etc. if that applies
Artist name is always the English version for folders (I have a lot of Japanese artists so this is for easy searching in Windows). Filenames I TRY to have a Latin-alphabet version but sometimes I get lazy.. oh well. (the "artist album" field i also use for anglicized artist name, while the "artist' field has the artist in the original language)
All soundtracks are in a Soundtrack folder, and random compilations that don't belong anywhere are in a Various Artist folder.
Soundtracks are further divided into Anime, Games, TV, Movies. Games are even further divided by the game series (or else this folder would be a living hell).
I've been using MB's Inbox feature to double check newly added files for tags I don't want. It's so nice... I really love that feature. I manually tag all my music. It's a hassle, I know, but I just think it's better for my library... especially since auto taggers like to really mess up anything not in English, I have to fix it anyway. I'm very particular about it ever since I started collecting MP3s... at first it was an utter mess but I knew if I was actually going to collect stuff like this I better think of a sorting system or else I'd never find anything ever again. Also by manually editing all my files myself I can check what I'm adding to my library. I don't usually use more than one playlist at a time and that's for sleeping. I mostly just put either my whole library on shuffle/auto DJ, or listen to an artist or album all the way through.
It honestly took me years to come up with my tagging/sorting system but it was worth it; I can find anything in my library or on my computer in seconds.
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I manually tag all my music. It's a hassle, I know, but I just think it's better for my library...
I did so too for the longest time until I rolled up my sleeves and decided to learn MP3Tag scripting. MP3Tag + StrokeIt (mouse gestures) make tagging much faster now.
https://youtu.be/JrXekn8N_PE
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I manually tag all my music. It's a hassle, I know, but I just think it's better for my library...
I did so too for the longest time until I rolled up my sleeves and decided to learn MP3Tag scripting. MP3Tag + StrokeIt (mouse gestures) make tagging much faster now.
https://youtu.be/JrXekn8N_PE
Ah well I use mp3tag; I love that program. (Especially for English releases, it's so easy... in the end I usually have to change foreign language tags anyway.)
That's the first I've seen it used with mouse gestures, though. That's really cool.. I never even thought to do that.
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I manually tag all my music. It's a hassle, I know, but I just think it's better for my library...
I did so too for the longest time until I rolled up my sleeves and decided to learn MP3Tag scripting. MP3Tag + StrokeIt (mouse gestures) make tagging much faster now.
https://youtu.be/JrXekn8N_PE
Ah well I use mp3tag; I love that program. (Especially for English releases, it's so easy... in the end I usually have to change foreign language tags anyway.)
That's the first I've seen it used with mouse gestures, though. That's really cool.. I never even thought to do that.
Here's documentation on how strokeit implements keyboard inputs (PDF from archive.org): https://www.mediafire.com/?y4upl4avdv65j7m
For example, I have mp3tag's discog's source file (with my own edits) set to D and then A (filename: %AppData%\Roaming\Mp3tag\data\sources\&Discogs#&1 Search by &AlbumArtist + Album.src). Note the filename where "&" sets the key mp3tag selects the source file. "D" for Discogs submenu and "A" for Album Artist source file; the "#&" denotes a separation for a submenu: Tag Sources > Discogs > 1 Search by AlbumArtist + Album
MP3Tag's keyboard shortcut for the above source is "Alt+S d a" (without quotes; Alt+S brings up the tag sources menu).
Under stroke it, this input sequence is "[ALT_DOWN]s[ALT_UP]da" (without quotes) under Strokeit's configuration menu for "Keys - Send Keystrokes". I've been using strokeit and mp3tag for many years and, until about two months ago, it didn't occur to me to use them together.