[Halluci]

I spend way too much time, since I've probably got OCD when it comes to my music. On the bright side, my digital collection is at over 17000 songs, all hand tagged, arranged on a 1TB external hard drive by genre/artist/(year) album/, with album covers in 500x500 and artist pictures as well. Each album has two copies, one in flac ripped with EAC and scanned with replaygain, and one in lame mp3 vbr -v0 with embedded album covers (for use with portable players). I use mp3tag religiously to keep tags and file names in order.

When I first started organizing my music collection, it took me forever (nearly two years of slow work) getting everything the way I liked it. Nowadays I find that adding new cd's immediately makes the organizing not so painful.

And tagging classical music is the biggest pain in the ass, especially with all of the accented characters, etc (I've got several alt+#### shortcuts memorized for inputting all sorts of accents). At least mp3tag's regular expressions makes file naming and cutting off long names easy once the tags are in place.

So, are you guys as anal about keeping a pretty music collection as I am?

 

[AtomikPi]

I keep music organized by folders.
Artist - Album - Year
I tag in mp3tag and include folder.jpg's
I'm not as obsessive as you are by a long shot though. I don't always embed, and some of my folders are just artist-album without a year. Good enough for me (it's functional) although having everything perfect would be even better.

 

[buddhashenglong]

Not enough.

 

[The Actual]

not as much time as I spend looking for CDs I haven't played in a while...

 

[Uncle Erik]

I rarely, if ever, organize.

The CD rack was loosely alphabetical. Now, with very little free time, I just stick albums back on. I've never organized the records, either.

You know, it doesn't really matter.

Even if I'm hunting for a particular album, I can stumble across something unexpected and decide I want to listen to that instead.

 

[priest]

About 1-2 hours a week, if I'm lucky. It's not enough (I have over 4000 CDs and LPs), but if I don't give it at least that, I'd be drowning.

 

[edulus]

so those people who have lps, how do you sort your records?

 

[roadtonowhere08]

More time than a lot of people, I suppose.

My CD rack is sorted alphabetically by artist and then chronologically for each artist.

On my computer, I have ALL files tagged with the following data:
- Artist
- Album
- Track Name
- Date
- Track number
- Genre

Each play of a track is recorded and dated, because I am interested in my listening habits.

I have all my songs sorted by studio tracks or live recordings. I have album art for each studio album, and I use a foobar configuration called Kameleon (a work of art, in my opinion), so everything has to be tagged correctly. A typical path to a studio track would be something like this:

F:\Music\Studio Recordings\Callisto\2006 - Noir\Callisto - 2006 - Noir - 01 - Wormwood.flac

OCD, I know, but it works very well for me.

 

[Aslan123]

Quote:

Originally Posted by buddhashenglong /img/forum/go_quote.gif Not enough.

I do make an attempt to tag properly, but otherwise I'm lazy.

 

[Halluci]

Quote:

Originally Posted by roadtonowhere08 /img/forum/go_quote.gif More time than a lot of people, I suppose. My CD rack is sorted alphabetically by artist and then chronologically for each artist. On my computer, I have ALL files tagged with the following data: - Artist - Album - Track Name - Date - Track number - Genre Each play of a track is recorded and dated, because I am interested in my listening habits. I have all my songs sorted by studio tracks or live recordings. I have album art for each studio album, and I use a foobar configuration called Kameleon (a work of art, in my opinion), so everything has to be tagged correctly. A typical path to a studio track would be something like this: F:\Music\Studio Recordings\Callisto\2006 - Noir\Callisto - 2006 - Noir - 01 - Wormwood.flac OCD, I know, but it works very well for me.

For me, the hardest tag is genre. I've kind of settled into using allmusic.com's genres for each artist, and although they aren't perfect, it splits my music collection into wide enough collections which simplify searching/exploring music somewhat. I've tried kameleon, but I'm not that into the uber-complicated foobar themes. I always default back to one of LasseKongo's themes (check out his library on deviantart), FooLars (modified a bit by myself) is a favorite.

How do you arrange albums that span multiple cd's? Do you store all tracks in one folder or two? Do you mention CD number in the album name tag or just in the disk tag?

As for my cd collection, I've got two large bookshelves filled, that I arrange by genre, then alphabetically by artist and date of CD release.

 

[roadtonowhere08]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Halluci /img/forum/go_quote.gif For me, the hardest tag is genre. I've kind of settled into using allmusic.com's genres for each artist, and although they aren't perfect, it splits my music collection into wide enough collections which simplify searching/exploring music somewhat. I've tried kameleon, but I'm not that into the uber-complicated foobar themes. I always default back to one of LasseKongo's themes (check out his library on deviantart), FooLars (modified a bit by myself) is a favorite. How do you arrange albums that span multiple cd's? Do you store all tracks in one folder or two? Do you mention CD number in the album name tag or just in the disk tag? As for my cd collection, I've got two large bookshelves filled, that I arrange by genre, then alphabetically by artist and date of CD release.

I just hit up wikipedia for the genre. I am not hardcore with them, and I keep one genre for each artist (even the ones who drastically change, like Anathema or Dark Suns).

As far as multi-CD sets, I tag the CD number in the disc tag, and the file name will have the disc number as well. All songs must be in one folder as per "exvar (extended variables" limitations on foobar. Chronflow has no problem with different folders, but exvar did, and if I wanted Kameleon to work completely, I had to make the change. I am glad I did though, as with the CD number tags, the different discs are broken up in the playlist view anyway.

 

[anetode]

Obsessively, at least an hour a day while listening. 31103 v0 MP3s w/ ID3V2 tags with high-rez album art, all basic fields & composer/label when available. Files sorted in folders by musician/album, leaving an unfortunate number of duplicates.

Of course all this OCD behavior is in good fun, that's why I don't fear the "Genre" tag. Bands are either unique enough to warrant their own genre (i.e. Aphex Twin = drill 'n' bass) or bland enough to be labeled "Rock". So I get creative. Bjork is listed as "Batsh&t Iceland Pixie Techno", Flogging Molly is "Guinness Punk", etc. Music journalists make this crap up all the time, there's no science to it.

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

Hardly any, these days, thank god (and foobar!).

Although back when I first started my computer music collection, it was tons of time. Time spent tagging, and gathering, and fixing files, getting better bitrates.

Fortunately, after a while, I decided to make my collection all lossless, and pretty much settled on a file naming system. These days, all I do is simply insert the new files, following the chosen system, all automated in foobar. There can be a little bit of tag fixing from time to time, but again, thanks to automated freedb tagging, that is minimized.

I also agree that tagging/organizing classical music is the biggest PITA of all. I prefer to have the "artist" listed be the composer, because that is how I categorize classical music in my brain, and hence choose what I'd like to listen to. This creates the issue of trying to cram performers, conductors, et al. into the album title field. Then you have albums without a clearly defined album title. And then there are the repetitive sections of track names. And on and on. It is simply too much to ever have a nice, clean, unified system, so I just don't stress out about it too much.

 

[chinesekiwi]

um...never...really...

if I rip or convert something it's [artist name] - [album name] [codec] e.g. 'Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon [EAC-FLAC] or 'Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon [Vorbis -q8]/[LAME 3.98.2 -v0]'

Put into [Musicz] folder = done.
Foobar does the rest and detects it.

 

[Ham Sandwich]

I do spend too much time dealing with digital music files. Fiddling with tags, getting or scanning artwork, general organizing, and such. J. River Media Center handles all the organizing, but the data has to get input somehow and that still takes time. Fortunately now that my music listening is computer files I don't have to spend time organizing and cataloging physical CDs. My physical CDs are in boxes in the closet. I pull them out if I want to scan cover art or check which version of a CD I have.

My file and tagging organizing goes in bunches. I'll an itch to organize then once that is done I'll leave them be for a while.

About a third of my library is classical CDs and it's the classical stuff that creates the most issues for tagging and organizing. You can't just rip a classical CD and get by with accepting the info from Freedb or AMG or any other online source. I'm convinced that everyone but me are idiots and name their classical CDs all wrong and then they go and upload all that wrong info to freedb.