Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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

The most useful Doug Scripts for me are:
Albumize Selection: http://dougscripts.com/010
Discogs Search Kit: http://dougscripts.com/476
Find Album Artwork with Google: http://dougscripts.com/076
New Play Count: http://dougscripts.com/138
Track Parser: http://dougscripts.com/287
Search YouTube: http://dougscripts.com/485
Proper English Title Capitalization: http://dougscripts.com/159
Remove n Characters From Front or Back: http://dougscripts.com/176
Search-Replace Tag Text: http://dougscripts.com/321
This Tag That Tag: http://dougscripts.com/219
Track Names to Sentence Caps: http://dougscripts.com/226
Track Names to Word Caps: http://dougscripts.com/227
Google Lyric Search: http://dougscripts.com/084

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 each track with the original year of release. In some cases I'll separate singles compilations into their original parts. For example, I broke out the Disco Inferno 5EPs comp into the original EPs, each with the original artwork and year of release.

Moving to Neofinder helped a lot too. Makes it much easier to do complex searching like "all tracks from 1971 that are over 20 minutes in length and are marked as 'psychedelic rock.'"

Smart playlists can do this too of course, but this will search everything I've cataloged - not just what's in my iTunes library.

Can't say I'm particularly consistent with the year tags. Archival releases are by year of recording, but albums released a year or two after they were recorded are tagged with release date.

I like the idea of breaking up single artist collections (as with the DI above). Not so sure about single artist compilations, when each track is from a different year.

I let iTunes organise everything... except for years, about which I am fanatical. On compilations, I amend each track with the year of its orginal release, where known. And I have a smart playlist for "year unknown", which I work on from time to time.

i stopped doing this once it got to the point where you could find and dl *anything* that exists in digital format within half an hour. most of my listening is spotify + records these days.

i do have 3 500gb hard drives which have everything i downloaded from the audio galaxy days up until about 3 years ago. i think there's enough music there to last me the rest of my life.

you guys that have these super organised collections, are you quite protective over them? do you share them with your friends?

Oh, by the way: never leave an external HD sitting on top of a sub-woofer! I learnt that one the hard way. Magnets, y'see.

I need to organise my MP3 collection very badly. Never needed to before I started using Apple products, but basically I have everything arranged into the correct folders a-z/artists/album/ but everything's inconsistently tagged. What's annoying is that once a file has been used in Acid Pro, it messes up the ID3 tags and your file gets lost in non-indexed space if you put it on your iphone. I hate iTUnes SO MUCH!

Oh, I never use iTunes on the iPhone, ugh. Spotify/iTunes integration with offline playlist handles that just fine.

As I rarely need to access mp3s directly, i.e. outside iTunes/Spotify, I'm pretty relaxed about how iTunes chooses to name and file them.

if you're not using itunes to put music on your phone, how do you do it? I just can't get my head around the concept of "Media Libraries". The files are on my computer in the order that I want - that's a library, right? So why does iTunes want to rearrange it into a horrible mess that doesn't make sense?

You can use Itunes without it controlling where it stores them - ie, keep the files where you want and it will play them from their current location instead of trying to take over

xp I do it via Spotify playlists, which I maintain on the laptop. Spotify search pulls them in from the iTunes library. Then if the playlist is marked as offline on the iPhone Spotify app, the tracks auto-sync whenever my phone's on the same wi-fi as the laptop, and plugged into the mains. Dead easy, requires minimal effort.

if you're not using itunes to put music on your phone, how do you do it?

I guess this depends on the phone, and whether it has a native music player. On my HTC Desire (Android), I just drag-and-drop the files/folders into the phone's "Music" folder using the regular Windows Explorer, and the music app on the phone takes care of the rest (which basically means it builds its own library consisting of what happens to be on it at any given moment).

which basically means it builds its own library

to be clear: it does this without disturbing the file/folder structure on the phone as well.

you guys that have these super organised collections, are you quite protective over them? do you share them with your friends?

Protective only with regard to regularly backing them up. I have no hesitation with sharing with my friends (though I won't upload to a file sharing service. The ethics of scale, I suppose.)