Is it worth to maintain a folder structure?

[stax76]

I'm still maintaining a folder structure though I can't see benefits in this. It's similar to organizing mail in folders, I stopped doing that some time ago and did not regret yet. How about you?

[trixmoto]

I do so because then it's easier to find the physical files should you need to. I use Nero as my burning software because it can do multiple copies (please MM include this functionality!) so I can easily find the album folder to burn the tracks, if they are well organised.

And it's such a doddle to do in MM anyway!!

[Teknojnky]

The difference between organizing mail and music is, mail is generally temporary of nature that you only read once or a minimum of times and then usually deleted (or never deleted and let your inbox get huge).

Music however is much more long term, rarely will most people delete songs (other than corrupted or duplicates etc), most people will listen to music more than once (altho with very large libraries that gets to be impossible to listen to everything).

At work I use a handful of rules to automatically sort some known important mails to their folders, while most everything else goes to inbox/deleted. After a month or 2, I move the mails to an 'archive' folder that I empty out every 6 months to a year or so.

I keep my music folders generally simple and boils down to:

\Music\<album artist@1>\<album artist>\

I keep soundtracks, various, and techno organized in their own separate folders.

[Nebbin]

I'm also a fan of keeping a file structure. If for nothing else, than as a backup in case the DB / Tags get corrupted (or I do something silly). I'm using a structure something along the lines of:

\Music\BasicGenre\Source\Album Artist\Album [Year]\[Track #] artist - Title [DanceType]{BPM}


BasicGenre: helps me sort out tracks into broad categories such as comedy, world & latin, classical, ballroom and ... other I cannot wait until MediaMonkey allows multiple Libraries to be utilised, as these will then become seperate.

Source: groups tracks depending on whether I've purchased it online (iTunes or eMusic), ripped from a CD, or it's a promo / free track downloaded from an artist's website. It lets me know where I got the song from if I ever find an error in the track and need to re-import it. The greatest help though is keeping those nasty DRM'ed tracks out of the way of general playback software.

DanceType: since I have a selection of Ballroom music, it made sense to store the associated dance (cha cha / samba / waltz etc).


This has been especially useful for when the DB sometimes overwrites the artist tag with the album artist (eg "Various Artists"). I have yet to discover why this sometimes happens. The file structure has also been essential when using other programs such as Sound Forge or Acid.

[Lowlander]

I wonder which is faster if there is any speed difference.

I myself now maintain a folder structure for the same reason as Nebbin, it's a backup of tags in case anything goes wrong with the tags in the files.

[MCSmarties]

I use a VERY involved sorting scheme.

The main reason why I bother with it is because of my portable media player - a Cowon A2 - which is awesome but does not have a tag database (it displays ID3 and Ogg tags but does not sort using them).

Since my music is well sorted in MM, I can synchronize it while duplicating the folder structure to still end up with a perfectly organized music collection on my player!

MM's auto-organize feature is one of the main reasons why it is by far the most popular music manager on the Cowon (iaudiophile.net) forums. I'm doing a lot of advertising for MM there

[zyb]

I physically sort by genre/artist/album/artist_album_track#_title.[mp3] and there were tons of occasions where I was so glad to have taken the pains, really!

It can always happen that you delete a database entry by mistake - finding the files to re-add them must be terrible if you have thousands of files in one folder. Especially if many of the files are badly named (like "track# - title.mp3" or so), which happens just as easily when adding files from external sources (I still have hundreds of those, although I generally rename files right after properly tagging them, just because I forgot or was in a hurry). Also, although it's not that easy to corrupt the MM-Database, it's still possible.

And maybe there will be a time at which you want to access your music from a parallely installed Linux system, via a player that doesn't create a database to begin with.

So, I'd say: It's definitively worth your time to maintain a folder structure. At the very least it will give you a _feeling_ of control over your music. And when you _need_ this control for whatever reason, you have it.

My advice would be: Make the physical structure the same as the one you use to browse your music in MM.

Cheers, Zyb

[tbessie]

I keep a folder structure as well... basically it's:

Music/Source/Genre/SubGenre/AlbumArtist/Album/{Track#} Title [Artist].ext

(I can't recall exactly, since I'm not on my home computer right now).

Source is where I got the music from (downloaded vs. CD, etc., like one of the above posters mentioned) -- I prefer to keep separate parallel hierarchies based on the Source of the music, since music from the same Source usually share similar properties (eg. I can't count on the completeness of tags, nor the format/quality of a downloaded title, but I can for CDs, etc.).

SubGenre is what I call one of MediaMonkey's user-defined fields. Since I'm an organization maniac, I like things to be very specific, and since there is no "official" genre hierarchy in MP3 tags (nor supported by MediaMonkey), I created one myself. I keep the folder structure organized that way, and use Magic Nodes to find things that way as well, until such time as MP3 and MM evolve to the point (if ever) where an N-depth Genre hierarchy is supported.

So I think it's worth it to keep a folder structure -- another useful bit is that my Slim Devices SqueezeBox accesses my music via SlimServer, which allows browsing by folder structure, so I can find things the way I like them.

- Tim

[Onweerwolf]

I wonder which is faster if there is any speed difference.

This is something I wonder too. I do not maintain a folder structure and have over 18.000 files in one single folder. Since al 18.000 files are perfectly tagged and named, for me this is the smartest way of browsing my files and finding duplicates or replacing them with better rips.

I just get the feeling that a folder structure will speed things up, certainly on older machines, anybody know if this is true?

[Teknojnky]

The more files that are in a folder, the longer it takes for windows to read/process the files from the hard drive.

So yes, limiting the number of files and folders within a directory will speed things up.

How much depends primarily on hard drive/cpu speed, and ram (to cache file/directory info).

[SlasherMCT]

I find it interesting that people organise by genre. Personally I organise the folders by the album artist, then the album. Within the album folder the file names contain the track number followed by the title.

I also put "The" at the end of the artist name - before that I was confusing tracks by "The Beatles" with those marked "Beatles" for example. Putting "The" at the end helps these stand out in the file system.

For me the Genre is somewhat arbitrary and many albums cross genre these days - I guess I am primarily interested in the artist.

It is definitely worth using the file system for organisation - and folders containing very large numbers of files will give slower performance.

Of course I did most of this organising before I bought media monkey...

[trixmoto]

I agree, I rarely consider genre, in fact most of mine still say "Blues" because I haven't gotten round to fixing them all yet. I sort mine into albums, sorted into album artists, so that I can always find the album (or all the albums by an artist) that I want to!

[Teknojnky]

I don't organize via genre (aside from separated soundtracks/compilations/techno), as that makes it so much easier for dupes to sneak in and also to have artists/albums spread out across multiple genre's doesnt make sense for me.

[tbessie]

I don't organize via genre (aside from separated soundtracks/compilations/techno), as that makes it so much easier for dupes to sneak in and also to have artists/albums spread out across multiple genre's doesnt make sense for me.

How is that so? I organize like so:

Code: Select all

L:\Multimedia\Audio\Categorized - CD Archive\<Genre>\<SubGenre>\<Album Artist> - <Album>\{<Track#>} <Title:32> [<Artist>]

and never get dups. Oh wait, I see, you don't mean overwriting because of similar names, but having actual multiple copies of the same song.

Well, I actually WANT multiple copies of the same song, from different albums and/or performers, and I cull them out after deciding which ones I like best, usually, so my system works for me.

- Tim

[Teknojnky]

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.