Your Music Directory Structure, What format is your music organized in? Options

[Supacon]

I'm interested in finding out what kinds of directory structures all the audio collectors around here use for archiving their collections. I'm interested in establishing some kind of a "standard" for myself, at least, based on what is most popular with the smart people into this stuff.

This poll ONLY pertains to your directory structure, and not your filename structure. Also, the name of your music root folders is irrelevant (Whether it happens to be "C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\" (the default place for music on a Windows system) or "/" (a unix root partition).

For myself, I generally have been using C:\Music\Artist\Album\ and then having the files themselves named so that they are numbered by track.

More recently, for artists whose albums I have more than one of, I've been naming the album directory with the Year, usually as "2005 - Album Title", but I've historically used "(2005) Album Title", and sometimes even "Album Title (2005)", but that doesn't have the advantage of the folders being sorted in order of year.

I'd like to work through my music collection and rename every directory and file consistently one of these days, because over the years I've done so many different things.

[Supacon]

@PFS:
I think that's the most original scheme I've seen yet. I guess I always figured most people liked having the track number in the filename because you get used to listening to a CD, and you want to keep the files in the same order, even when your audio player doesn't support metadata handling or playlists.

For my uses DJing with digital audio, it might seem pointless to have the tracknumber and album in the filename, but you wouldn't believe how often I get people who ask me for "track 13 on such and such CD". Another reason I'm a fan of the numbering in filenames is because originally, ID3 tags didn't contain the track numbers at all. I'm hoping that those days are long gone now, however.

The worst case scenario, I suppose, is that I'll come across files that have no tags, and just track names. I have to look up the album on the FreeDB or something, and then use foobar's freeDB function to ensure that I got it right.

You are right, though, PFS, that if you want to make compilations and such, the track numbers can look very messy. I guess normally I just listen to my music in the form of whole albums, but if I were going to make compilations a lot, I'd be interested in developing (or finding, perhaps) a program that you could use to take a bunch of tracks from their original source directory, and copying them over, renaming them in an appropriate fashion... this could be useful for putting them on a small, flash based DAP, for example.

[PFS]

@PFS:
I think that's the most original scheme I've seen yet...
...
if I were going to make compilations a lot, I'd be interested in developing (or finding, perhaps) a program that you could use to take a bunch of tracks from their original source directory, and copying them over, renaming them in an appropriate fashion...

Cheers man. I love the system...great for mixed albums too. When you drop a track from a mix in a compilation, the file indicates the artist rather than the mixer.

It works great with winamp's media library, which read all the metadata and arranges things in order. That brings me to this program you mention. In the summer, depending on how much time I have to teach myself the non-trival bits of C++, I intend on making just such a program. It would basically be the winamp media library divorced from the player, with a bit more in the way of customization. Playing stuff from the program would just send it to the default player, so you can use whatever player you like. The program would basically be a useful shell for file exploring, design for music files and wrapped around your particular directory setup, no matter which way you have it organized.

And, dragging and dropping files to another directory or a DAP would be possible- winamp doesn't allow that, which is too bad. The renaming you speak of could happen along the way.

I'll keep you posted...sounds like fun.