[HerrSchnaufer]

Firstly, I make no apologies for the spelling of organise. 
 
Anyway, I'm using a macbook, and iTunes for my media library, VLC (and sometimes VOX) for flac, and spotify for ... well ... spotify crap.
 
The trouble is, my flac collection is growing larger and larger, and obviously iTunes isn't renowned for its love of flac, or even the ability to sort it into a library.
 
So how do you sort your flac collection? Obviously, my low quality music sits happily in the iTunes folder and I avoid that like the plague, but I'm getting more and more folders appear in random places with strange flac files I forget about. I need organised chaos, not outright chaos.
 
My biggest issue though, is the second I start to sort it, I get more and more anal. Dumping all my flac albums in one folder won't do. If I'm going to go to that effort, I might as well do it properly. But then, do I sort by artist, composer, personal appeal?
 
When you've got 4 different FLAC versions of the same piece of classical music, do you put them in one folder called "Messiah" (for instance), or do you put them in 4 different folders, called "Academy of Ancient Music", "Toronto Symphony Orchestra", etc. etc.?
 
This wouldn't be such an issue if iTunes just supported flac. Then I could dump all my flac folders and files in with the iTunes mess and be done with it.
 
Anyone else have this issue, or am I just weird?

 

[Roseval]

[size=medium]Apple doesn’t support FLAC natively but Fluke or Xiph can be used to play FLAC in iTunes[/size]
[size=medium]http://thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/OSX/OSX.htm[/size]

 

[Centauri]

Why not just convert your FLAC to Apple Lossless using XLD or Max? FLAC offers no inherent advantage over ALAC, so if you're iTunes-centric there's no reason to not convert.
 
Quote:

Firstly, I make no apologies for the spelling of organise. 
 
Anyway, I'm using a macbook, and iTunes for my media library, VLC (and sometimes VOX) for flac, and spotify for ... well ... spotify crap.
 
The trouble is, my flac collection is growing larger and larger, and obviously iTunes isn't renowned for its love of flac, or even the ability to sort it into a library.
 
So how do you sort your flac collection? Obviously, my low quality music sits happily in the iTunes folder and I avoid that like the plague, but I'm getting more and more folders appear in random places with strange flac files I forget about. I need organised chaos, not outright chaos.
 
My biggest issue though, is the second I start to sort it, I get more and more anal. Dumping all my flac albums in one folder won't do. If I'm going to go to that effort, I might as well do it properly. But then, do I sort by artist, composer, personal appeal?
 
When you've got 4 different FLAC versions of the same piece of classical music, do you put them in one folder called "Messiah" (for instance), or do you put them in 4 different folders, called "Academy of Ancient Music", "Toronto Symphony Orchestra", etc. etc.?
 
This wouldn't be such an issue if iTunes just supported flac. Then I could dump all my flac folders and files in with the iTunes mess and be done with it.
 
Anyone else have this issue, or am I just weird?

 

[Gradoman]

\artist\album\track - title
 
but I guess for classical pretty difficult.

 

[psone]

Composer\Piece\Performance thats how i sort my classical anyway.

 

[EnOYiN]

Quote:

My biggest issue though, is the second I start to sort it, I get more and more anal. Dumping all my flac albums in one folder won't do. If I'm going to go to that effort, I might as well do it properly. But then, do I sort by artist, composer, personal appeal?
 
When you've got 4 different FLAC versions of the same piece of classical music, do you put them in one folder called "Messiah" (for instance), or do you put them in 4 different folders, called "Academy of Ancient Music", "Toronto Symphony Orchestra", etc. etc.?
 
 

 
Depending on the amount of music you've got the first thing I would do is to sort by genre. Since I haven't got a huge amount yet I sort by Popular and Classical, but the more music you've got the more genres I would make I suppose. In popular will go anything that isn't classical pretty much. For popular I then sort by "Artist" > "Date" - "Album Name" > "Track Number" - "Track Name" ( I've got most discs in FLAC images these days though)
 
So to give an example of the folder structure:
 
Popular
Pink Floyd
1975 - Wish You Were Here
(if an album consists of more discs I insert another folder for disc 1, disc 2, etc)
01 - Shine on You Crazy Diamond (Part I-V)
 
For classical I sort by "Composer" > "Artists" > "Date"- "Album Name" > "Track Number" - "Track Name"
 
Another example:
 
Classical
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Takács Quartet
2005 - The Late String Quartets
Disc 1
Takács Quartet - No.11 in F minor, Op.95 - ''Serioso''.flac (which is a FLAC image so it looks a little different, but you get the point I hope)
 
I hope that helps you out a little. I also agree with the above posters that if you're only using Apple products you might as well go with Apple Lossless.

 

[Achmedisdead]

Artist/album/tracknumber/title, and multi-disc albums I do as (Disc 1) and (Disc 2). I have very little classical music though.

 

[hdufour]

Why not just convert your FLAC to Apple Lossless using XLD or Max? FLAC offers no inherent advantage over ALAC, so if you're iTunes-centric there's no reason to not convert.
 

I second this idea. Doing that allows you to keep iTunes as your organization program. To add to this - I have iTunes manage my library folders so it's all in one place. Im also using max to do my conversion, ittakes a few minutes to learn but its really powerful. Another benefit is that you have front row to play music through since it references iTunes.

As far as quality goes, my ears cannot hear the difference between an iTunes lossless and flac. I suppose some higher grade ears and equiptment Might show some difference, but I'm not there yet.

ITunes also has some powerful organization methods by using the additional info you can assign. There's another thread here that is more detailed but I dont have it at my fingertips. It's called "my music server" if memory serves right. Pretty detailed using iTunes and front row.

I'll follow this to see how you turn out. I would also be interested to see if anyone has other suggestions for flac on Mac that is easy to use like iTunes.

H

 

[ekliptiko]

i use:
 
/alpha letter/artist/artist-ablum(year)[codec]/#-artist-title.filetype
 
for example; artist: Exile, album: Radio, song: #1 Frequency Modulation
 
/E/Exile/Exile-Radio(2009)[FLAC]/01-Exile-Frequency_Modulation.flac

 

[Volkum]

I use Foobar in Windows and Exaile in Linux.  Here are my naming schemes:
 
Normal (16/44) FLAC:
     Artist - Album - Track number - Track title.flac
     i.e.  Slayer - Seasons In The Abyss - 03 - Spirit In Black
 
Better than CD quality FLAC:
     Artist - Album (media type, bit rate, sample rate, channels) - Track number - Track title.flac
     i.e.  Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral (DVD-A, 24bit, 48KHz, 5.1) - 03 - Heresy.flac
 
I keep everything in a single folder for all files of a similar format (CD FLAC, better-than-cd FLAC, audiobooks, etc).  My classical music is a mess right now, but I've found this works fine for everything else I have.

 

[Centauri]

Quote:

...my ears cannot hear the difference between an iTunes lossless and flac.

 
And if they ever do, it'll be entirely placebo effect. Lossless is Lossless, whether it be WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless [ALAC], FLAC, ape, Windows Media Lossless... They all contain the same bit-for-bit information when all is said and done and are thus cross convertible; you can convert a FLAC to a WAV and back again a hundred times and you'll never lose anything in the process. It's just that newer encoders like ALAC, FLAC and the like don't waste space by writing data for parts of the audio spectrum that are bare.
 

 

[ramicio]

I keep all my Redbook FLAC files in one folder, then I have a sub-folder for each DVD-A/Vinyl and another for MP3, "low-fi" and "hi-fi".  That is on a PC, though.  I would just go ALAC with a Mac, as iTunes doesn't like FLAC too much.  I have Winamp just scan the folder and sub-folders, then I go by artist, then album, and then the songs.  All my tags only have artists, album, track number, title, genre, and art.  File names I do "artist - album - track - title" all lowercase.