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.

[Canar]

codec\artist - date - album (quality info)\tracknumber - title

[thinkum dinkum]

for artists with more than 1 album which is 80% of my collection

[Genre]/Artist/[Year] Album/T# Artist - Track.ext
or
[Genre]/Artist/[Year] Album/Artist T# Track.ext
..haven't decided yet which is more suitable for me, and I tend to move all "-" before and after T# because try to save space where I can (joliet)

for artists with 1 album

[Genre]/Artist [Year] Album/T# Artist - Track.ext

for various

VA/VA - Album or Artist or Label [year]/T# Artist - Track.ext

but, I also have other folders eg [Label] witch contains some obscure labels with 10 or maybe more releases, [Bootleg] folder etc etc ..and they have different structure, if one have a wide spectar of music it's impossible to have just one naming structure.
end yes, I always move "_" cause it looks ugly and all my txt, nfo, sfv, jpeg files are in the same folder and have 00 before file name.

I my case, I end up focusing more on directory structure than on that same music
..but it works fine now

[audio2u]

Wow.
Some interesting schemes among all these.
What does strike me as interesting is how many of you use 'genre' as a folder, which implies that all tracks from an album are going to be under a parent folder such as 'rock' (at some level).
As someone who has worked in commercial radio, I want every song to have it's own specific genre, not an entire album labelled as 'rock'. That way, if I want to listen to ballads, I could listen to ballads that come off otherwise 'rock' albums. For example, let's say, I dunno, Springsteen, for instance. Let's take 'Born in the USA'. A track like 'I'm on fire' or 'My hometown' would definitely be labelled a ballad, while 'No surrender' would most definitely be 'rock'.
Do these kinds of conflicts not bother those of you who use 'genre' as a folder?
I can definitely see the sense in contracting the filename so joliet limitations don't truncate said filenames when burnt to cd. Very smart.
Something else I'd personally never considered was putting the year in the album level folder, so that albums are sorted by year of release, rather than alphabetically. Nice.
Looks like I'm off to do some major re-sorting.
Oh, to the dude who said "if you use a single folder, you musn't have very large collections", mmmm, I dunno.
My collection is probably not as large as some who lurk around these parts, but I'm currently around the 5500-5600 mark ALL IN ONE FOLDER. Yeah, I know, I'm crazy.
What brought me to this thread is I'm wondering if parsing some of the tag data to the folder level (and therefore creating a couple of hundred 2nd and 3rd level folders) will help Windoze Explorer to browse the folders quicker?
Keen to hear peoples thoughts on that, too.
Cheers,
Bruce.

[EdBanky]

As someone who has worked in commercial radio, I want every song to have it's own specific genre, not an entire album labelled as 'rock'. That way, if I want to listen to ballads, I could listen to ballads that come off otherwise 'rock' albums. For example, let's say, I dunno, Springsteen, for instance. Let's take 'Born in the USA'. A track like 'I'm on fire' or 'My hometown' would definitely be labelled a ballad, while 'No surrender' would most definitely be 'rock'.
Do these kinds of conflicts not bother those of you who use 'genre' as a folder?

My way of thinking about the music seems significantly different from yours. For whatever reason, I kind of append a "working genre" to a band's name in my head, so if I decide to sort and/or listen by genre, it is to hear the bands that I know will show up that way.

I honestly had never even thought of each song having its own genre. I know what you mean, and can see how that makes sense, but I think of it kind of like this:

You've got the movie director (artist) and the film's genre (genre) and the film's name (album title) and scenes within the film (songs). While this obviously doesn't work across the board with many directors, it would play out like this for me.

Thriller/Alfred Hitchcock/(1935) The 39 Steps/The scene with the prayer with the guy and the farmer's wife

So the way I think of genre, it would be like classifying each scene in a movie as its own genre. I know it's a peculiar way to look at it, but it's in my brain that way.

[audio2u]

I honestly had never even thought of each song having its own genre.  I know what you mean, and can see how that makes sense, but I think of it kind of like this:

You've got the movie director (artist) and the film's genre (genre) and the film's name (album title) and scenes within the film (songs).  While this obviously doesn't work across the board with many directors, it would play out like this for me.

Thriller/Alfred Hitchcock/(1935) The 39 Steps/The scene with the prayer with the guy and the farmer's wife

So the way I think of genre, it would be like classifying each scene in a movie as its own genre.  I know it's a peculiar way to look at it, but it's in my brain that way.

Fair enough. Each to their own, eh? It's things like this that I love about these sorts of forums (or fora).... hearing everyone's different views on stuff.

[audio2u]

I know this isn't the thread to post this in, but seeing as how this is where I am right now....
...anyone know why the url tag doesn't seem to work in the sig file?