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How well organised is your digital music collection?


Steve

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For years, mine was a mess. I didn't bother with file tags, so I just had folders for different genres and I'd put music in there. I used to manually browse those folders to play music.

 

Now I'm a lot more organised. I still have main folders for music that are a bit fucked up.....

 

http://i.imgur.com/93GwVIj.jpg

 

.....then inside those most of those folders I have 2 folders, 1 for albums and 1 for EPs and singles. Then inside those, all of my music is properly named, tagged and has album art: -

 

http://i.imgur.com/Xl7Yi8C.jpg

 

I still have an "unsorted music" folder that packed full of random stuff that isn't sorted, and I also have loads of DVDs with albums and mixes on them that need sorting out, but I'm getting there.

 

Having everything properly tagged helps a lot as I can just drop it all into MusicBee and it's all sorted, searchable etc.: -

 

http://i.imgur.com/USaTshM.jpg

 

So, what's your story?

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I ended up ditching most my music as it was low quality and stuff and just kept my "DJ music"

 

I basically use Itunes to organise it all through smart playlists

 

I got smart playlists for:

 

Key

Mood

Genre

Energy

etc

 

It's a good system but sometimes it's hard to keep up-to-date with, I've still not managed to completely go through and tag everything properly to be honest.

 

i tried that MP3 tag thing for mac but it didn't seem that useful once I'd already bunged it in Itunes as it had all been taken out of the folders already, bums.

 

Or may be it was just not as good on the mac.

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Mine's crap.

 

A couple of years ago (with your help) I flattened my music folder structure completely and recategorised all my mp3s into "would use for DJing" and "other".

 

The DJ folder then got manually recategorised into basic genre playlists for my Traktor but since then I've added so much more on an ad-hoc basis and it's got dead messy again with folders called stuff like "Dom Wedding" and "Lorna Party" or "New Stuff June 2012".

 

So...shit but I only really use my digital music collection for DJing.

 

At least it's backed up though.

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in itunes i had it tagged up for: key, bpm, title, artist, album, date added. and separate playlists for 170ish stuff, 130ish stuff, and film scores. i've since got rid of my playlists and hidden the bpm & key info.

 

in my music folder all the folders are labelled like this:

Artist - Album (year)

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Mine's a miserable shitty mess of good ideas I started and never finished, spur if the moment decisions and missing files.

 

I've sort of given up on having a digital music collection, I'm not playing gigs with it or anything, all my good music is mostly still on record and I can't be arsed to spend hours doing digital music admin.

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Guest Symatic

date added or bpm is pretty much all i use for sorting.

 

the only weird thing i have to do is keep my flac's separate from itunes which is a bit annoying

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iTunes... pfffffft!

 

You could just convert all of your FLAC files to Apple Lossless. You wouldn't lose any quality and you could play them in iTunes then. There's probably a decent batch converter for OS X on the web somewhere.

 

EDIT - Beaten by d00b (of all people! :p).

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I'm rubbish with names etc, so I have many folders with stuff I don't recognise, but I have cherry picked the stuff I think would go well and placed them into folders by Decade and then subcatagorised into genre and sometimes again into things like "party" "cheese" etc to prompt me.

 

EG. 1990's/party/Barbie Girl

1990,s/Urban/Party Bangers/Jump Around

2000's/Urban/Rnb Classics/Wifey

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  • 5 months later...

Mine was horribly organize until I was sick off work and finally decided to take the bullet and do something about it. I like kid3. Opensource, easy to use etc. I have all my artists in separate folders, and then each corresponding album in its own folder. I generally go with the track titles like %TrackNumber - %AlbumName - %SongName and then all the MP3 tagging completed. Took forever. I've used the mp3 software by MAGIX also, but I'm an old school guy and generally just play using VLC or WinAmp direct from Explorer. Old tricks die hard! All my music is in MP3 320 which suits me fine. Don't have the hard drive space for FLAC!

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funny you mention this....im currently going through all my music collection and sorting it out....along with all sorts of other related bits.

 

the computer im using now was one i bought when i was running waxworks back home...so its probably at least 7 years old now....its lasted well, but cant even run serato properly - or at least reliably - so im looking at getting myself a new computer when i get my tax rebate within the next month (should be about $6k this year - should be able to get something beastly with that!!)

 

last thing i wanna do is to transfer any badly organsied shit straight over...so ive been going through all my music and seeing whats worth keeping, whats cacka quality, etc etc etc.

 

its all well sorted - but mostly really wanky bit rates...so its all gonna have to go...ive strated the arduous process of basically starting again from scratch pretty much.

 

.....fuckin mission!!!

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I gave up on organizing music. Sound strange but it was easier to organize vinyl records - at least I was familiar with how they looked.

 

I use Spotify for anything that I can find, and only download the copy when I need it. I think cloud storage will be the future - with the exception of rare gems that are not on Spotify.

 

When I make "to do" lists, I usually end up with many lists that I eventually compile into one list. Taking the same approach with organizing music is a disaster.

If I had nothing to do for 1 whole week, I would re-arrange all my shit and dedupe - but right now it's such a hassle.

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Guest petesasqwax

yeah that didnt work. it tagged 10000 songs with wrong tags. I tried Real McCoy and it came back as R Kelly Bump n Grind! lol

Ain't nothing wrong with a bit of that

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Guest petesasqwax

 

yeah that didnt work. it tagged 10000 songs with wrong tags. I tried Real McCoy and it came back as R Kelly Bump n Grind! lol

Ain't nothing wrong with a bit of that

 

see, what i did there was I used a reference to the track "Bump N Grind" which has the hook "I don't see nothing wrong with a little Bump N Grind" and I obscured it slightly... "for the heads" you know. But now that I explained it, shit is funny. Fucking hilarious, no doubt

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