[Pltinum]

What about classical music? Sort by composer or performer or ... What about compilation cd's?

 

[Detroit]

I love organizing! My library works like this:

Music\Artist\Album\%artist% - %album% - %tracknum w/ 2 places% - %tracktitle%

I feel like my filenames are really overdone, but I just like having all the info right there. That, and I like seeing the order of everything. Various artist stuff really messes that up. I have a folder called Various Artists that I throw soundtracks and compilations in unless I feel there's a dominant artist in the compilation. My Classical library is very small so I haven't dealt much with organizing that.

 

[xnor]

I use foobar and my music is organized this way:
Songs are grouped/organized by artist, [release date] album and ordered the same way in the main playlist.
Playlist is configured to show the track no., title, duration, genre, rating, file extension, (replay)gain, and other fancy stuff

I also have autoplaylists for specific genres, ratings, recently modified files ...

 

[ROBSCIX]

File names can get out of hand, then add in the full paths and they can get way out of control very fast.

 

[Stein]

Format / Genre / Artist / Albums.
I guess that's pretty standard.

 

[EugeneK]

Two giant folders - one for lossless music, the other for not lossless albums

Subfolders are named:
"<Album Artist> - <Album name>"

Then sort takes care of everything.

300GB organized this way.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Autobiographically.

P

 

[Ham Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pltinum /img/forum/go_quote.gif What about classical music? Sort by composer or performer or ... What about compilation cd's?

For tagging classical music I generally follow the MusicBrainz Classical Style Guide. I deviate a bit to suite my own selfish preferences, but mostly I try to follow the style guide.

Classical CDs are given a "Multiple Artists" album artist when they feature works by several composers, not when several different orchestras or performers play works by one composer. I don't split multiple composer CDs. So if a CD contains piano concertos by both Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky the CD is a multiple artists CD rather than splitting it and putting the Rachmaninoff in with the Rachmaninoff and the Tchaikovsky in with the Tchaikovsky. That causes a bit of a mess if searching the file directory structure for all of the Tchaikovsky (the Tchaikovsky will be found both under multiple artists and Tchaikovsky). But I use J River Media Center and it is able to group by composer when I want it to so it all works fine.

Files are organized by composer or "(Multiple Artists)" in the case of compilation CS.

CD titles are something to identify the work(s) and I also add something short to ID the performer or conductor at the end inside if parenthesis. So for example with one of my Beethoven CDs the title is "Symphonies 1 & 6 (Roger Norrington)". That's enough for me to know which performer it is. Fuller conductor and performer info is in the tags for conductor and performer.

 

[hjf]

I use "Music Organizer" software by Primasoft (Windows software: database software and ftp tools). Every album is numbered and entered in the database. Hard copy albums, CD's and tapes are shelved in numerical sequence, and backup music data in my external hard drive has the same number. The database can be searched for any descripter such as artist, composer, type, individual selection, etc. The resultant numbered item can then be pulled from the shelves, or its copy retrieved from the hard drive and played. I have over 1500 albums and downloads entered and can quickly find any item quickly.

 

[Equus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ROBSCIX /img/forum/go_quote.gif I didn't say it was useless. I said for some albums their Genre can be unclear.

Didn't mean for it to sound as confrontational to anyone as it probably did. I agree that genre is a little odd. It's all a matter of opinion and the actual naming convention is different depending on where you get it. I've misplaced Game OST's because instead of my standard as "Game Soundtrack" it ended up under "Soundtrack" or "Game". It's a little bit of a pain to maintain consistency, but it's the system that works for my somewhat convoluted brain. Given that, I could totally see someone wanting to subdivide classical into smaller groupings, like baroque or something, if they have a large collection and needed to delineate. Guess the organization will probably naturally be driven by an individual's needs.

If 80%+ of my collection was rock, for instance, I probably wouldn't use genres at all.

 

[UNHchabo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Equus /img/forum/go_quote.gif If 80%+ of my collection was rock, for instance, I probably wouldn't use genres at all.

More than 80% of my collection is rock, and if I could still divide it into meaningful genres if I felt like it.

Metal (Metallica, Black Sabbath)
Rock n Roll (Boston, ACDC)
Progressive Rock (Rush, Dream Theater)
Alternative Rock (Stone Temple Pilots, Tool)

It's not perfect (Tool is rather progressive), but how many of you can draw a bold line between Jazz and Fusion?

 

[Equus]

Point taken. Guess it all depends on how organized you feel like being and the scale of that organization. Probably could use the ability to drill down more if you have a larger collection. Then again, some people are more prone to wanting to organize things than others. I think I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 600-700 DVDs that I keep alphabetically organized, but some of my friends think that's crazy. Conversely, my collection of paints for miniatures and garage kits is in absolutely no order.

 

[Ham Sandwich]

Genre is difficult. So many different ways to do it. All choices are a compromise.

My general rules for tagging have a lot to do with how things will look and be organized when loaded on a portable player like an iPod. The iPod can sort by genre so it is somewhat useful to have genre classifications that groups the music in useful clumps. If everything is "rock" then browsing by genre isn't very useful. The more important thing is to be consistent. I divide my rock into useful sub-genres for me, based in part on how convenient those classification groups will be on the iPod. If you start getting so specific that groups start to contain only one album then the usefulness of that classification breaks down. So I keep it reasonably general.

My jazz I do a little differently though. I have both a genre and a styles tag in J River Media Center. Genre is general and covers Jazz, Big Band, Latin Jazz, Swing, Vocal, Fusion. Then style is a "many" kind of relationship. Each album can have many styles. For styles I generally list what AMG (allmusic.com) lists for the album, but I'll also add my own as I see fit). I do that because I'm not as familiar with jazz artists as I am with rock and classical. I can't look at my jazz collection and pick out all of the hard bop. So if I want to know what is hard bop I do a query in J River Media Center and there it is. I don't need the styles help with rock and classical so I haven't bothered tagging those files like that (yet). The iPod knows nothing of my styles tagging so isn't helpful for when the music gets put on the iPod.

 

[ROBSCIX]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Equus /img/forum/go_quote.gif Didn't mean for it to sound as confrontational to anyone as it probably did. I agree that genre is a little odd. It's all a matter of opinion and the actual naming convention is different depending on where you get it. I've misplaced Game OST's because instead of my standard as "Game Soundtrack" it ended up under "Soundtrack" or "Game". It's a little bit of a pain to maintain consistency, but it's the system that works for my somewhat convoluted brain. Given that, I could totally see someone wanting to subdivide classical into smaller groupings, like baroque or something, if they have a large collection and needed to delineate. Guess the organization will probably naturally be driven by an individual's needs. If 80%+ of my collection was rock, for instance, I probably wouldn't use genres at all.

No,no, I didn't take it as confrontational at all. I just wanted peoples opinion but it seems in many cases it is the same as mine. In that Genre seems the most difficult for most of us.

 

[Equus]

Yeah. Probably because, unlike artist or title, the genre is up for interpretation. I take the soundtrack for "Howl's Moving Castle" and put it under anime, but you could also put it under soundtrack. Use any auto-tagging or anything and you'll probably get differing results too. Fixing the data after ripping and maintaining internal consistency is a pain, only made slightly easier by automatic file renaming and moving. Even given that though, I sometimes "lose" albums that I've ripped because I auto-moved them to a genre that I didn't expect. Heh.