Is it worth to maintain a folder structure?

[tbessie]

If your extremely on top of keeping your genre tags consistent, then organizing by genre might be great... but for me I have far too much music to keep that up (altho I'm constantly working towards perfection).

I mean having a single artist or album with inconsistent genre tags that would get organized out to multiple folders.

I keep my genre node under 20something base genre's, however the accuracy and consistency of artist/album genre's still is not up to my liking.

I see what you mean -- well, I'm pretty on top of things, but then I only have about 5000 tracks (both from CDs and downloaded, which I keep separately).

I keep all tracks in the same album in the same genre, which makes it easier to keep everything together, but then isn't really accurate. I usually mean "the genre of the album" if it's from a ripped CD, whereas it's "the genre of the track" if it's from a downloaded track and I don't have the full set of tracks from the album; that ends up working fine.

Ideally, of course, we'd have a tagging system that let you tag tracks with multiple genres, and have an N-depth hierarchy running through any set of genre labels (that is, as they say in the biz, a DAG -- Directed Acyclic Graph). That would slow down MediaMonkey and other music organizing programs, but would be lovely for a categorization freak like me.

- Tim

[SlasherMCT]

Yes but genre's are arbitrary, depending on the listener.

[zyb]

@ Slasher: That's the exact reason for me to sort by Genre -- my list of Genres ist quite limited and the entries are as specific or broad as suits my collection of music. For instance: Because I have not much 'rock' music in the broadest sense I call that Genre "rock.metal.punk" an put anything in it which _to me_ fits in there. Because I have many many tracks from the 'electronica' sector I put them in Genre folders like "ambient", "drum and bass", and so on. Genres to me are not a matter of objectively categorizing my music but of remembering where what is. For me, this works perfectly because I easily forget how a band or an album was called, but I never forget what Genre I associated with an album (in my mind and in my library).

But it also depends on your listening habits, of course: If you're used to listen to mixes with tracks from multiple albums, which share the mood, but not necessarily the associated Genre, then 'my' system is not ideal at all. I listen to complete albums mostly, though, or to selfmade 'best of'-playlists from an artist or genre.

But, of course, there is no point in being dogmatic about music sorting, really, the best way depends on how you listen to your music and how you mindmap your collection.

Cheers, Zyb

[Brian2]

Yes, it's definately worth it in the long run, for more reasons than I care to rant on about here.

Personally, one of the biggest issues is keeping various formats and bitrates seperate. Here are some examples:

Z:\Music\mp3.high.VBR\<artist>\<album>\<Track#:2> <Artist> - <Title>
Z:\Music\mp3.low.CBR\<artist>\<album>\<Track#:2> <Artist> - <Title>
G:\Music Archives\flac\<artist>\<album>\<Track#:2> <Artist> - <Title>
Z:\Music\mp3.pro\<artist>\<album>\<track#:2> <Artist> - <Title>
O:\linux-tank\Music\ogg\<Artist>_<Album>_<Track#:2>_<Title>

I keep stuff divided according to the format it is encoded in, and I also further break that down into bit-rate groups, and sometimes even wether it uses VBR, Joint-Stereo, or other encoding options.

This helps me in a number of ways....especially when I want to sync to handheld devices. I know at a glance what format it's in, and I can import things into various other music softwares with a minium of fuss and conversions. Sometimes I really do need a CD ripped in more than one format for various reasons, but I don't necissarily want them all hanging out in the same folder.

I Also use SAM to do webcasts (streaming audio).....so it really helps to use Media Monkey to quickly and easily shove things around into various directories for various reasons.

So yeah........for me it's deifnately worth it!

Brian

[mjs93]

My folder structure used to be Artist/Album/Track # - Title. However, as I started using MediaMonkey, I saw that I didn't really need individual folders anymore. Now, all of my tracks just stay in one folder.

[SlasherMCT]

Try that with 90k tracks. Explorer would never open the folder ...

[Nebbin]

mjs93 - Even though it's not necessary, I would suggest you use at least a basic folder structure. Two reasons being as a tag backup and, as Brian2 noted, it's faster to access smaller directories.

[mjs93]

Try that with 90k tracks. Explorer would never open the folder ...

Well, I only have 1400 tracks. But if I had that many tracks, I probably would want to split them into folders. Although, I rarely access the files themselves. I pretty much just use MM for any tweaking.

mjs93 - Even though it's not necessary, I would suggest you use at least a basic folder structure. Two reasons being as a tag backup and, as Brian2 noted, it's faster to access smaller directories.

Don't worry, I'm quite OCD about my MP3s and back-ups. My file names are structured and I also back up my cover art, database, lyrics, etc., quite often onto a separate hard drive. Also, I don't have that many MP3s, so accessing the directory isn't a big issue for me (I rarely access them directly, anyway). In my case, I don't see the need for folders. However, I agree with your points for people who have bigger collections and not as rigorous a back-up routine.

[liger_trainer]

I 've been following many of these thread and implementing new ideas slowly over time.

I have found that the Ctrl+R and folder structure has greatly improved my cpu performance and the organization of my collection.

Here's what I use:
H:\Music\<Genre>\<Album Artist>\<Album> [<Year>]/<Album>_[<Track#>]_<Artist>_<Title>

I group genres into broad categories (i.e. Calassical, Rap, Reggae, Rock, Jazz, Blues, R&B etc.). I used to have some folders organized by album artist and album, and other organized by genre with just a crapload of files thrown in it.

I have over 9GB of reggae music and it was all in one folder. It used to take five minutes to open the folder; not any more!:)

Also, I've got about 36GB of music.

[Nebbin]

9GB of Reggae????

oh wait... I have 21GB of '80s music... oops, my bad (shhh)

Why do you put an additional <Album> tag in the filename? I find that too I've occasionaly run into problems (especially with classical music) of auto-organised file names overstepping the legal number of characters for the file path. This has led to keeping my organise mask fairly trim - repeating data only if necessary.

[pah68]

9GB of Reggae????

oh wait... I have 21GB of '80s music... oops, my bad (shhh).

Doesn't everybody

But 9GB of Reggae Wouldn't all the Reggae ever composed and ripped at a massive bit rate still only add up to 500MB

[liger_trainer]

But 9GB of Reggae Wouldn't all the Reggae ever composed and ripped at a massive bit rate still only add up to 500MB

I just got home and checked to make sure. I guess I embellished a bit...

It's only 8.4GB. The total number of files is 2,475 and the running time is 124:00:57.

It's nearly all dancehall reggae. Contemporary stuff like Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, Sizzla etc.

It's a lot, but dancehall reggae is produced in enormous amounts. I'm actually selective about the albums I download believe it or not:)

[Peke]

No.

[liger_trainer]

No.

No what?

[Big_Berny]

No.

No what?

Was probably adressed to pah68.