How do you organize your music?

[Crow25]

Fan of <grouping>

Here goes...
All identified as <grouping>
Album - All albums that are not any of the rest. i.e. Coldplay, sigor ros, Rolling Stones, etc. All listed by @3, i.e. 0-9, ABC, DEF...YZ
Soundtrack - Soundtracks written for film
Compilation Movies - Movie compilation albums that contain non-composed music, i.e. Notting Hill, Beverly Hills Cop...
Compilation Club - Club compilation albums that have random assortments of songs. dance/techno albums go in here.
Compilation Chill - Same as previous only with chillout albums
Compilation Pop&Other - Random compilation albums - Christmas Albums, Irish Punk Drunk Song Compilations
Top 40 - Top 40 compilations according to date, and chart
Classical - Classical Music
World - Anything foreign language
Singles - Anything downloaded by itself or, from the previous collection that didn't have the full album.

I'm slowly getting rid of the singles grouping/directory.. If it's not a full album, i usually won't get it. If its a single song, but its by a well known band -i.e. i have more of their stuff, then it goes under albums.

Grouping allows me to set up auto-organize rules for a specific filter set to a grouping...

Anything unorganised get put into the unorganised folder, then once its been tagged correctly, it gets labeled with a grouping and auto-organizes it away to where it should be.

Sounds a lot more complicated then it is.

\Music\Albums\JKL\Kenny G - Greatest Hits - 1998\10. Kenny G - Havana.MP3
\Music\Albums\JKL\LCD Soundsystem - 2007 - Sound of Silver\09. LCD Soundsystem - New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down.mp3
\Music\Albums\ABC\Air - The Virgin Suicides - 2000\01. Air - Playground Love.mp3

H:\Music\Soundtracks\Craig Armstrong - Love Actually\01. Craig Armstrong - On the Beach.mp3
H:\Music\Compilation\Club\Ministry of Sound - Annual 2004\01. Benny Benassi Presents The Biz - Satisfaction.mp3
H:\Music\Compilation\Top 40\Top 40 UK 05-10-08\1. P!NK - So What.mp3
H:\Music\Compilation\Movies\2 Fast 2 Furious\03. Trick Daddy - Represent.mp3
H:\Music\Singles\Bette Midler - Wind Beneath My Wings.mp3

There are a few more groupings for random types of mp3s.
H:\Music\Less Used\Audiobooks\Jeff Linsley - Darkly Dreaming Dexter\02. Jeff Linsley - 002.mp3
H:\Music\Less Used\T.V Themes\Randy Edelman - MacGyver.MP3

[MusicBringer]

Hello Pokeycat, I have just read your post.
What a joy to read
Your thoughts and ideas are sooo similar to mine.
Genres defined in similar ways too.
Plus you have given me some ideas.
Furthermore your collection is/was comparable to the size of my collection (75k+).
The only difference is our choice of music, but that's healthy.
I just wanna say thank you for posting your Opinion.
Thanks,
MusicBringer

PS. AND, I have copies off-site in case of fire, ha ha.

[kazadharri]

That certainly has merit, but I would not consider anything with genre as being 'easy' unless you keep only a handful of primary genres... what I do is keep 3 special types as <album artist> that I organize separately, ie

Soundtrack <album artist> = \Music\_Soundtrack
Various = \Music\_Various
Techno (techno/dance/etc compilations) = \Music\_Techno

everything else gets dumped into the
\Music\<album artist@1>

tree.

It would be possible, although a bit complicated, to setup special album artists or other fields to have specific organization while everything else gets sorted to some other main organization. My mask that does the above should already be posted to the thread somewhere.

Technojnky:
Question??
I like your mask, but am not a good coder, and couldn't follow it totally, can you please help me out?

What I would like in the folder structure you use, without the Techno, and then the ending file name would be <track#> - <Album> - <title>

Not sure why I would need the artist name in the file name, but might be willing to change.

Thanks for you Help.
/Jeff

On a side bar at what point do you think you should reorganize your library. I have about 20,000 tracks which about 95% have perfect tags, and all most all the duplicates have been eliminated. I also have almost 200 GB more music, (returned from a recent deployment) that is not in MM, but just sitting in a bunch of folders, but tagging, and organizition it is a mess. Do you know any way to work with those folders, at least to catagorize it so I can start to pull it in to MM without messing up my nice clean library?

/Jeff