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Staying up far too late, watching MusicMatch churn through my mp3 collection and find album titles and album covers to go with my hideously unhelpful filenames. This is actually pretty cool, it's finding stuff I never thought they'd have. Over the years my CD ripping has been very inconsistent. For the longest time I didn't include the album title in the filename and didn't break up my music into anything but the most rudimentary folders, but my collection has gotten large enough that endlessly scrolling is getting annoying.
So how do you guys do it? One big folder? Meticulously organized into genres, artists, albums, release dates, album colors, when you bought them (the High Fidelity method), what?
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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It's a mixture of mp3 in order according to the artist and the album and one massive chaotic folder. Make that 2 or 3 chaotic folders.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I've got a massive folder called "mp3". Inside that, I've got two folders, one for my instrumental music (jazz, classical, soundtracks, etc), and one for my pop music (rock, rap, techno, etc). Inside those are a bunch of folders, each containing between 650 and 700 MB of music of similar genre, each representing an mp3-CD. Inside each of those is a folder for each artist. Inside the artist's folder is a folder for each album, most of which are numbered in order of release date. Inside the album folders are the track files, named with the track number and title.
My collection has reached the size that it's no longer practical to dig through mountains of CDs every time I want to hear something, so I rip my CDs as soon as I buy them, then listen to all my music off my computer at home (which I've connected to stereos in every room of my tiny apartment), my PDA when running, or my mp3-CDs in the car or at work. And I've got a little bit of the OCD. That being the case, it pays to be anal.
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I let Windows Media Player name everything for me, and it conveniently sticks all the files in album folders by artist.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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My husband has thousands of live recordings. he saves them as SHN files, on the spindles that cds come in. They all have a number. The number is recorded in a massive MSWord file. All you have to do is "Find" the date or artist you are looking for, then retrieve the cd from the spindle. He then burns certain cds we want tolisten to more regularly. The spindles take up very little space.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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I used to just have them all in a big folder. Now iTunes has them all organized by album and artist and everything.
Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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The database programmer in me wants to point out that storage location and retrieval method should be decided on factors independent of one another.
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I don't have iTunes, so I'm a bit more hands-on (and anal) than others. If I have fewer than four songs by an artist, they just go into the big folder. If I have more (like a ripped CD), they get a folder within a proper genre (i.e., Classical, Soundtracks, Jazz, etc.). Sure, it takes a bit more time, but ultimately, it's worth it when I can find everything quickly and easily.
Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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I don't let iTunes mess with my music. (I prefer to use Winamp for a media player, although I'm thinking I might try out FooBar sometime).
I have my music that I don't have in full albums in a couple semi-organized folders. Those songs are tagged as completely as possible, considering I got them from so many sources.
On the other side of things, I have all my full albums organized in a folder
albums\Artist\Album\Artist - Album - Track # - Song.mp3
I used a program called Tag&Rename (shareware) to sort them all there, and it was quite useful. If you're missing, say the "album" information for all the songs on one album, you can go add that in relatively quickly and painlessly.
I also use a plugin to Winamp that allows me to listen to the albums by the album very easily (The AlbumList plugin)
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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I create subfolders under MyMusic for each artist once I get more than about 3 tracks. If I have signifcant parts of albums, I'll create further subfolders under the artist. File names are strictly song title.mp3.
So for example, : c:\mymusic\sting\dream of the blue turtles\fortress around your heart.mp3
I use MusicMatch as my PC jukebox (which was a large part in my decision to get a Dell DJ-20 instead of a Zen or iPod) and it sorts by track tags. If I burn directly from a physical CD, MMJB pulls those track tags from somewhere on the web (I know cause if I'm offline for some reason, they all come up as "Track 1", "Track 2", etc. instead of the real information) Stuff that I download often needs to be edited.
Posts: 4515 | Registered: Jul 2004
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