Organising my music directory structure

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333 posts

Ultimate Geek

Topic # 95095 27-Dec-2011 14:51
Hi all - hope everyone had a good Christmas... It's the holidays, a good time to sort out all those things that have been hanging around for some time now. I want to throw a question out to the community and ask what you use (if anything) to organise your music folders. I have a lot of music now, and it makes it impossible to find anything. The first step I'm guessing is to get everything correctly tagged - Any suggestions? With the files being tagged, I'd then like to use something to put them into an orderly directory structure. I quite like the idea of: Artist \ Album Name \ files I found something called Mp3 Folder Structure Maker, however it only dealt with mp3 files and I also have a lot of flac to deal with also. Any suggestions would be great. My HTPC - Case Antec Fusion Remote, MOBO Intel DH67BLB3, CPU Intel Core i5-2400S 2.5 GHz, RAM 8GB DDR3 1333, HDD 120Gig Corsair Force Series 3 SSD system \| WD Caviar Black 2TB data, Tuners Black Gold BGT3595 dual DVB-S/S2, dual DVB-T, Video nVIDIA GeForce GT 520, 1024MB, Sound Intel® High Definition Audio (onboard), OS Windows 7 x64

412 posts

Ultimate Geek

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Reply # 561848 27-Dec-2011 15:05
I use Softpointer Tag&Rename to tag my files and import the Album Art. I organise them by Artist\Album\Track Num Title folders. I also only allow read access for all users with a deidicated user for editing tags and art, so nothing can screw with my tags or artwork.

333 posts

Ultimate Geek

Reply # 561854 27-Dec-2011 15:26
Right - thanks. Good idea about making the directory containing all the media "read only" too! I've just been playing with MediaMonkey and it looks like it might do the trick also. Only slightly cheaper at $24USD http://www.mediamonkey.com/ My HTPC - Case Antec Fusion Remote, MOBO Intel DH67BLB3, CPU Intel Core i5-2400S 2.5 GHz, RAM 8GB DDR3 1333, HDD 120Gig Corsair Force Series 3 SSD system \| WD Caviar Black 2TB data, Tuners Black Gold BGT3595 dual DVB-S/S2, dual DVB-T, Video nVIDIA GeForce GT 520, 1024MB, Sound Intel® High Definition Audio (onboard), OS Windows 7 x64

240 posts

Master Geek

Reply # 561923 27-Dec-2011 17:55
I use Mediamonkey and find it perfect. From memory the free trial enables the full version features for the first month so you can give it a good tryout anyway. The "autotag from web" feature is a bit hit and miss so I go to http://www.albumartexchange.com/ for quality album art and just google around for anything I can't find there. It is very good at reorginising your files once you have things tagged the way you want etc. Living in Dubai but still have a keen interest on what's going on back "home" Media Centre Intel DH55TC with Core i3 550, 4GB Ram, 8TB HDD space, Hauppauge HVR2200, Blackgold BGT3540, DVBLink TV Source and Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit Connected to Onkyo TX-NR3007, Samsung PS50C6500, Theophany M4's x2, C5 x1 and Klipsch Synergy B2's x2

647 posts

Ultimate Geek

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Reply # 562105 28-Dec-2011 10:54
Mattv: I use Mediamonkey and find it perfect. From memory the free trial enables the full version features for the first month so you can give it a good tryout anyway. The "autotag from web" feature is a bit hit and miss so I go to http://www.albumartexchange.com/ for quality album art and just google around for anything I can't find there. It is very good at reorginising your files once you have things tagged the way you want etc. +1 Also syncs well with MP3 players (iPod, etc). I use allcdcovers.com for artwork and descriptions, as well as discogs.com for the more obscure albums. Haven't tried the new ver 4 of mediamonkey as yet, as this new version also catalogs video media rather than just audio as the previous version have done.

263 posts

Ultimate Geek

Reply # 563696 2-Jan-2012 11:39
rhysb: I also only allow read access for all users with a deidicated user for editing tags and art, so nothing can screw with my tags or artwork. Hi, Could you please give more details about how you set that up. Is it as simple as setting the permisison under "Security" to only be "Read" for everyone but a dedicated user who has Full Control. Then log into your machine with that user when you want to do anything that requires the Write permission, like adding new Music, etc...? Thanks, Guillaume

8820 posts

Uber Geek

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Subscriber

Reply # 564145 3-Jan-2012 22:30
I used foobar2000 to sort and rename stuff ages back. I have it as V:\Music\Full\A\Artist\album\discnumber\xx. tracktitle with various artist albums in V:\Music\VA\A\Albumname\discnumber\xx. trackartist - tracktitle Where A is the first letter of the artist or album name, as several 1000 folders in one tends to freak out windows explorer over a lan. Now I just drop things in manually as you cant always count on the person encoding to correctly tag VA discs with an album artist (many have some itunes specific compilation field instead) or else they will have different track artists on a single artist album and other dumb things, and retagging them breaks my ability to keep seeding them. Richard rich.ms

416 posts

Ultimate Geek

Reply # 564693 5-Jan-2012 11:00
Meidamonkey is my choice as it organizes everything for you and also has a search box where you just type the name of the song or artist and is all there ready to be played. Andy