Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

i assume you're backing those CDs up

right?

iirc you don't have children who scratch your CDs into unplayability but you do have cats?

The cats back up the CDs.

xp

I let iTunes do it. I usually have to edit some tags by hand when I import tracks, but filenames and folder names are based on the song and album titles, which is convenient if I'm poking around the directory structure.

I just have four big folders called A-D, E-K, L-R and S-Z and all the album subfolders go in those by artist name. I don't have any "orphaned" tracks which aren't in an album subfolder. I suppose I could rationalize it further by making artist-specific subfolders within the four main folders, but I don't have enough album subfolders to make that necessary really.

so you mean in each of those four big folders the subfolders are called things like "Joan Jett & the Blackhearts - Up Your Alley"?

also curious if anyone here has used TuneUp or MusicBrainz Picard

yes, except I don't have any Joan Jett & the Blackhearts files

xp

did you do that organization yourself or did you use some kind of batch renaming thing?

Be careful if you automate your file renaming based on ID3 tags... chasing down missing tracks resulting from duplicate song titles on the same album can be really annoying.

Anyway, I go with this:

ARTIST/ALBUM TITLE/ARTIST - TRACK NUMBER - SONG TITLE.mp3

This sidesteps the problem of duplicate filenames I mentioned by including the track number. Some people omit the artist from the filename, but I share a lot of individual files with people and hate not knowing what I have from glancing at the filename.

You'll have to make a call on compilations. If you're using file structure to manage your collection, I'd group them under a "Various Artists" folder by compilation title (and consider putting track order first in your filename, otherwise compilation folders will display out of order), but if you're using iTunes or whatever, it can group those based on metadata. I use iTunes, so compilation tracks are sorted into folders by artist for me.

And yeah, you're mad if you don't use an ID3 tag -> filename automatic renamer.

I created the four main folders myself and drag'n'dropped the album subfolders into them. I didn't rename the album subfolders myself, they came out that way in iTunes (I think)

xxp

i have separate folders for jazz, metal, classical, v/a, bootlegs, and everythingelse. (solitary songs are in another folder.)

in each of those main folders, album folders are named 'artist - year - title' (slightly different for classical and v/a). if an artist has like five albums then i'll make a subfolder called 'artist'. songs are usually 'artist - track - title'.

if the album is something i have on cd, i'll add a ° after the title (depending on the size of my backup drive, i may not have room to back everything up, so those might get filtered out).

i did the organization myself. it's pretty ocd.

Lex had a "maintaining a digital music collection" fail the other day. Reminded me why I buy everything on CD.

i've decided to let my old music collection go and rebuild it from scratch rather than pay silly money for data recovery (the attempt at cheap data recovery failed, it'd need a "clean room").

i actually still have a lot of it on CD! never got confident enough to sell off the CD albums i actually love.

and i figure the rest of it must be ~out there~ right? it feels a bit liberating, there was so much shit on that hard drive i surely never needed and would resent paying money to retrieve

a question though: is it possible to transfer music from an ipod to a hard drive?

if you have a PC, it's trivial. if you have a mac, it takes like 5% more effort.

lex, you luddite you

Yes, it's all in folders under Ipod_Control\Music, you can just copy it from there.

That folder's hidden though so you'd probably have to enable displaying hidden folders (if you use Windows, dunno about other OS)

xps

lex has a good attitude! i think i would probably be gutted.

for Mac there is a great program called Senuti (iTunes backwards, geddit) that does this very easily

xps

Yeah; you'll need to download some freeware program or other, but I remember doing it ages ago.

Xposts; may have used senuti!

i am gutted! when it happened i kind of sat there quivering for about 15 minutes. i was actually more gutted this morning - the friend-of-a-friend who said he could do data recovery cheaply had been v v optimistic when i took it round to him last night, this morning he called to say it wasn't happening, just after i thought everything was gonna be ok.

i currently could afford data recovery but i really resent spending money basically. even now thinking about the enormity of what i have to replace is terrifying me.

senuti, excellent. will do that

lex i hope you're going to back up your new external HD!

xp Tracer Hand:

I don't think it's worth it to rename your files. You are listening to them in iTunes, where they are tagged, so what's the point?

My files are spread around a few folders but they are easy to find with the "show in finder" option in iTunes.

Back up your files everyone!

lex i hope you're going to back up your new external HD!

well when i can afford a second external HD, sure

that was why i never backed it up in the first place

why get the files organized? possibly just ocd, a bit

i also make little zip compilations for friends occasionally and renaming the files is a drag

so nobody uses Picard, or TuneUp?

I installed TuneUp for a day but then trashed it. It seemed like one of those big applications that takes over everything and had a weird interface. I don't know I just found it annoying.

also curious if anyone here has used TuneUp or MusicBrainz Picard

I use musicbrainz.org with Picard. I esp like that they maintain strict style guidelines wrt capitalization and stuff.

is there a free version of senuti anyone?

trial version of senuti will only let me transfer 1000 songs - i have 3000+ on my ipod

xp

well as long as your files are tagged correctly, letting iTunes organize them should work.

I keep everything old on the external. artist name - track name. Then new stuff gets downloaded to the laptop and is sorted same way (artist name - track name). Then at the end of the year, on the external I make a new folder (music 2011, say) and move everything bought that year from laptop to the new folder on external. Then laptop is empty of music until new things arrive again in 2012

<a href="http://getmusicbee.com/";>MusicBee</a> has a built-in tagger that searches FreeDb, MusicBrainz, Amazon and others. I use Picard for the odd mix cd or v/a comp that it can't handle. I heartily recommend it, it's like iTunes' ugly sister design-wise with all the functionality of foobar.

Forgot to convert to bbcode. Hopefully this works

File renaming on a Mac OS sounds unbelievably arduous. For Windows, I use the mp3tag freeware, and can batch file rename pretty much instantly.

But I agree with Skip, there's little need to rename files if they're already tagged. Hey, that's the point of metadata.

Data entry temps, the lot of you.

Mac OSX has plenty of free batch renamers and batch audio file processors.

dw: yeah I also use mp3tag occasionally, especially for non-album-oriented collections/directories.

Great Cthulhu people, if you're on OS X and NOT using AppleScript to manage tags you're on the path to madness.

Also, get (or write yourself) some sort of database that reads tag info. I created a FileMaker database that did this, but I've since switched to NeoFinder as the performance was significantly better.

haha yeah I learned AppleScript just for this purpose

come again? that is a bit over my head

yeah I wouldn't say it's the path to madness to not mess with AppleScript, but I wanted simple text things done, like changing parentheses to brackets for "featuring" credits, & it was easier to learn the script language than to do it by hand. OCD obviously.

I'm still happy with Tag for handling my flac files but I wish the tags were compatible with ID3, especially artwork (which Tag doesn't handle as far as I can tell, my PMP recognizes most image files if they're in the folder that's playing).

Folder structure is A-Z under flac (CD/LP/tape rips or lossless DLs). I don't do sub-folders for artists in this section, I like seeing a whole screen of Nurse With Wound CDs and LPs. Since I started out ripping with "artist - title" folder format it's been easy to group everything, but I am considering the OCD madness of putting a date field before title so that releases display chronologically.

My Dime and MP3 sections (also sub-rgouped A-z) just have artist folders because the album folders themselves often have non-standard names and I don't wanna deal with renaming them all.

RGOUPED

oh i actually use doug's applescripts for itunes.. like.. A LOT. but that's on an ad-hoc basis.

i'm particularly fond of this one - http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=trackparser

so you mean in each of those four big folders the subfolders are called things like "Joan Jett & the Blackhearts - Up Your Alley"?

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, January 31, 2012 3:52 PM (8 hours ago)

Mine would be like this so all my JJ stays in chronological order:

Joan Jett [1988] Up Your Alley (hopefully that doesn't mess itself with html)

I really don't like the embedded folders and it's the fault of poorly designed players that causes these stupidly long file names.

I kinda like the simplicity of "artist - date - album" but my grandfathered format isn't so flat.
genre / (subgenre) / artist / date - album

Not sure why I kept the genres in the file manager. More important though is the ability to sort files in the actual player, based on the tags. Label discography for On-U Sound by catalog number? Jazz albums released in 2009? Or even just all artists? I love foobar (even if it is a memory pig for the first few minutes after I open it, as the library indexes 1TB of data.)

I've yet to tackle the year tag. Do you tag the tracks from compilations, reissues and archival releases when they come out or when each track was released? Ugh...

i always tag it with the year the compilation was released