Music library organization

Personally I have my top ~5 bands in my music directory along with a zstuff folder that I put the rest in (named zstuff to go to the bottom of the list). I try to keep everything organized by band and then by album. If I only like a very few songs Ill take them and delete the rest, otherwise I keep the entire album. If I only have 1 or 2 songs I like of an artist I keep it in the base zstuff folder.

i keep full albums on my hd but create playlists for favorites. my collection isnt that big in filesize so there is no need to get rid of any unheard songs. you never know.

if i only like single tracks from a certain band i throw them all in a "RANDOM - bandname" folder. easy to navigate

I always play music in Windows Media Player and use its fancy built-in browsing thing that uses the ID3 tags to split everything into artists/etc. I keep whole albums only (I am not an illegal pirating fuck) and if I don't like particular tracks I'll give them a star rating of 0 (you can filter them out).

That's definitely the way to go Thrik yay.

i have loads of different singles from different artists. i usually group artists into folders, then albums as subfolders. if i only have 2 or 3 track from an album i wont bother creating a subfolder for it. from a playlist approach i simply list everything and then have a random sort on. the good thing about this is when you have a keyboard with next/previous track, it's easy to manage. also i never discard any songs from any albums. instead, i just dont have artists not worth listening to.

on my portable player i use a different approach, mainly because i cant be bothered filtering out what i want to hear (or well, i dont have time to do it) at every given point of time. so i use playlists, usually with around 20 tracks each with maybe 2-3 tracks per artist from different genres. whenever i am tired of one playlist i can essentially switch onto the next and have an emulated setup of what i have on my desktop without too much of a bother.

I keep everything in /audio/artist/year - album/track and queue all it up in mpd (or whatever player), then use 'find' to get individual tracks, artists, or years or whatever. Winamp has a great find utility. Give it a shot.

allthough not an answer to your question, winamp is quite easy to use and it has the greatest skins

Quote from Thrik

I always play music in Windows Media Player and use its fancy built-in browsing thing that uses the ID3 tags to split everything into artists/etc. I keep whole albums only (I am not an illegal pirating fuck) and if I don't like particular tracks I'll give them a star rating of 0 (you can filter them out).

iTunes does that too... and lots more.

I have a folder on my pc which I have named "music". I put all my music files in there and when I feel like listening to a particular song or album I do a search.

If I dont have it, I search google for someplace to download it (legally or not).

I use a fairly similar approach to Thrik, dissonance and sentura. Unfortunately I didn't do that from the start, so I've got a ridiculous amount of stuff that is just all the tracks have from a band shoved in one folder.

So my current job that has been stretching on for months and months is reorganising everything. I've got a network attached HDD so everyone in my flat can access stuff, and on it I've got a nicely organised "music" folder which probably has about 25% of my music in it which is setup as my Winamp media library. The rest is just a wasteland, with hundreds of bands waiting for me to listen to them again so I get around to sorting their stuff in album folders with track numbers. For somebody like Less Than Jake, of whom I have pretty much everything they've ever done, that prospect isn't exactly appealing!

I wish I'd had the foresight to use a decent organisation system when I first started collecting music

I-tunes is a grower, hated it before, but now it's fuck winamp.

Quote from skdr

iTunes does that too... and lots more.

I hate the iTunes interface, though. Windows Media Player does the job quickly, automatically fetches my album info/cover/etc, and I can just forget about it. I don't really need anything more.

I've got this on Windows and that on Linux, sharing the same music directory.

I use iTunes because I have an iPod and can't be arsed to set my library up with two players. I know there's other software that people have made but I don't really want to mess about.

So the main library has a crapton of stuff in it, but I operate using playlists and filters. Luckily I seem to operate on a cycle of obsessing over a few bands until I hate listening to them anymore, so I don't have to make a load of lists.

Since this turned out a little into an application discussion: The next version of Amarok will be available for Windows as well!

Quote from aevirex

Since this turned out a little into an application discussion: The next version of Amarok will be available for Windows as well!

Yeh, heh. You will also be able to run the whole KDE 4 stuff under Windows (if I didn't missunderstand something )

Sindwiller, dude. MPD. Check it out. Seriously.

I use foobar 2000 as player, I just shuffle and skip songs mostly or I create a quick playlist and later delete it.