Music Library Organisation

$MUSICPATH/$ARTIST/($YEAR) - $ALBUBM/$TRACKNUMBER - $TITLE

Most of it is properly tagged and sorted this way. I use MPD + ncmcpp and the day I find out, how I make MPD copy a playlist to my mp3 player, I won't use anything else again for a looooong time.

I am an album listener so I do it the boring way, artist, album, alphabetically. Do not use playlists. A reflection of my boring personality I guess.

$MP3DIR/$GENRE/$ARTIST_-_$ALBUM/$ARTIST_-_$ALBUM_-_$NR_$SONG.mp3

i hate id3-tags so i kill them all using my id3kill-script. i just make sure all my filenames are proper and work with those.

the genres work most of the time, but not always. sometimes i find myself wondering 'why did i put that in 'electronica'?'... gutterslob is right, these guys like to experiment. i keep the genres broad though, so it is pretty workable.

I've not heard all his stuff, but I can somewhat understand.

Still, at least you got variation. Pretty sure no sane human would be able to tell what was produced when for Yngwie Malmsteen's discography.

^True that!!
Though, to Vai's credit, he did at least make When I was a Little Boy (Fire Garden, iirc)

[/offtopic] ... sorry

Last edited by gutterslob (2012-01-16 14:02:29)

@koleoptero: Thanks for mentioning exfalso! Would be awesome if there was something that used rules to rename directories also.
I know that banshee is capable of this but it doesn't like massive libraries. That and I don't really don't want to install banshee.

^ or just build your own!

I do it by hand. Albums are as such:

Jedi_Mind_Tricks_Violent_By_Design_(FLAC)
NEMS_Prezidents_Day_(MP3)

Like that. The songs themselves I just tag like normal. Heavenly Divine.flac, What It Do.mp3, etc. If I get a single to some album, I'll usually do it like: NEMS_Presidents_Day_Bonus_Tracks_(MP3).

Really once you get used to it, it's easy. It also makes it easy if I'm looking for my FLAC collection or mp3 collection.

Since I began to use music on a computer I put it on an external drive and it was from the very beginning ordered in directories followed by countries/languages as I am a massive world music listener. So it was easy to order my music this way till now. I have 46 big regions as directories and then followed by subdirectories. Of course first comes the artist and then the album, there is no mess here. So if a music program is complaining about not finding the tags, I know where all the things are.

An example. For my Spanish music from Spain, I have a directory called "España", there is everything in following artist - album. As Arabic music is very similar I have a directory called "Árabe", the sub directories are the countries like Algeria, Egypt etc. following of course artist - album.

To manage my vast music library with search functions and tagging I use MPD + ncmpcpp, you can even rename the directories if needed from within ncmpcpp.

For automatic tagging of some albums I use Puddletag, it is the Linux counter part to MP3 Tag or whatever the name of this app is. Everything is properly tagged, if not like mentioned Puddletag and ncmpcpp itself will do the job, also mass tagging.

Ncmpcpp also allows me to see all my directories from the library.

Years are not important for me, genres I apply in ncmpcpp as tag. So I can listen to Flamenco if I want when I use the genre feature or I can listen to Spanish music in general if I use the directory feature.

@bdbr: I put all the music to be organized in a temp folder (usually isn't much more than a couple of cds so no problem there) and after I'm done fixing the tags I rename the files using exfalso but with an absolute path to another folder so it makes the dirs there properly (eg /home/koleoptero/tmp/). It moves the files there that way and you can freely delete the original dirs and move the music to your music collection (or have exfalso move it to your music collection directly if it's on the same partition, don't try it on a different partition it'll explode).