Music library organization

[Duff-e]

I'm in a little bit of a dilemma. About half of my music library consists of stuff I would consider essential but that I rarely listen to. Lots of oldies, pop songs that didn't really stand the test of time and obscure atmosphere music that gets maybe 3 or 4 plays a year (usually while on drugs).

Would it be smarter to just create a bunch of playlists like I assume most people would or delete the files that rarely get use? How do you people out there with like 5GB+ of music control your massive collection? What kind of playlists do you have your collection broken up into?

Also, say 3 tracks on a 10 track album are actually good do you discard the rest or what? I realize a lot of this is subjective but I'm being really indecisive.

[Bic-B@ll]

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.

[Sa74n]

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

[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).

[Cybbe]

That's definitely the way to go Thrik yay.

[Sentura]

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.

[dissonance]

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

[skdr]

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.

[Duff-e]

thanks for all info guys...I've been busy this weekend but I'm going to go through wmp winamp and itunes and see what I like most

[Skjalg]

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).

[ReNo]

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

[Evert]

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

[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 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.

[Sindwiller]

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