Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.)

anybody fuck with ratings? i figure everything i have is either great or i get rid of it

i don't do ratings, but i do try to get the original years for compilation tracks, which is a pain for stuff like soundway comps

original years for compilation tracks

I also do this, because I have auto-updating mixes that sort by year. 60s, 70s, etc. God forbid a late-'70s track show up in my 2008+ mix because the compilation came from 2009.

you guys that have these super organised collections, are you quite protective over them?

The original purpose was to make them navigable on SLSK.

FWIW, I went with
<Genre>/<Subgenre>/<Artist>/<Album Artist> (<Year>) <Album Title>/<Track#:2> <Title>
and don't regret it. I can start a genre, subgenre, or artist shuffle in 2 seconds in MediaMonkey.

What if an album belongs to multiple genres?

i do ratings. main reasons are 1. to get rid of the crap 2. not to jam the ipod with not so good stuff. so my ratings are:

***** masterpiece, love it to deat
**** excellent, very good
*** ok, just good enough to stay on ipod, can also mean i am not sure and want to check out more
** average, stays on the hard disk but leaves the ipod
* crap, gets deleted from hard disk

What if an album belongs to multiple genres?

Not sure how iTunes handles this, but with foobar you use a semicolon to separate under the "genre" tag.

e.g. Jazz; Fusion; Progressive Metal ... etc. can be attributed to the same file. So the album, which is stored only once on your HD, appears under each respective genre when the list is sorted as such.

i have always found genres entirely pointless and never use them. i usually put in the record label instead

i use ratings sometimes - mainly for reminding me to relisten to stuff i know i liked the first time i heard it

oh no, I meant how uses genres in a file structure allow for albums with multiple genres. I see their utility, it's just I would reduce myself to a puddle on the floor deciding on a comprehensive genre tag set, so I just don't use any.

Yeah, it can be daunting for some collections. I started with "jazz" and "not-jazz" as my first set of tags. I refined it somewhat after that.

I never touch genres; if I tried, my head would explode. Crap gets marked with one star, which acts as a reminder to delete. I have smart playlists based on 4/5-star ratings, but I'm not an obsessive rater.

In itunes, I use the "grouping" field to add the record label or a more general genre. It's helpful when sorting things.

what's the diff btwn the 'grouping' and 'genre' tag?

It's just an extra field to use. Someone up thread mentioned "What if an album belongs to multiple genres?" and the "grouping" field is perfect for that.

I wish I could customize/add fields

I feel equally ashamed and proud that I've written a couple of perl scipts to handle MP3 tagging. Whenever I get something new I run it through my filter and can re-write tags, attach images, strip extraneous tags, etc. I've got it set to filter out things I don't want in my tags, deal with roman numerals, tag as a compilation, make sure that "DJ" is always capitalized that way, and so on. Kind of OCD makes sounds about right.

I duplicate all the files on a shared network drive, and really should get a new hard drive to keep a backup at work, but I don't bother with my iTunes library because I don't really care about playcounts and playlists and such.

i've got all my files on a NAS but not my itunes library files; those are on my computer because otherwise everything slooows way down. what this means is that podcasts, purchased music, etc all end up on my computer instead of with their brethren. i wish they were all in the same place but whatcha gon do

i too don't have any use for playcounts

Re: ratings. I spent, I don't know, years slowly rating all 10K+ songs in my itunes. I forgot to find out how to transfer those to my new computer before getting rid of the old one. I think I'm going to just start over with 2012 songs onwards. Bloody hell.

I don't bother with ratings, year or genre tags - if I was starting my library from scratch now I'd probably put the year in, maybe genre too. Otherwise it's the kind of thing I'd perhaps embark on if I found myself bed-ridden for a week. I'm really obsessive about other aspects of my library (artwork, track/album titles) though.

how do all you lot deal with classical music?