- deleted -

I use
Music/A/Artist/Artist - Album (Year)/Artist - Album [#Tracknr] - Song.codec

Example:
Music\I\Iron Maiden\Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark (1992)\Iron Maiden - Fear of the Dark [#5] - Childhood's End.mp3

Various Artist goes in
Music/V/Various Artists/Various Artists - Album (Year)/Album - [#Tracknr] - Artist - Song.codec

I must be weird:-)
Year\Album~Artist~T#~Title.codec

The year directory is just used to minimize files per directory.

All organization is done using metatags in fb2k. No need for great organization at the file level.

My Music\<Artist>\<Album>\T# - Title.codec

Various Artists/Compilations:
My Music\Various Artists\<Album>\T# - Title.codec

Soundtrack:
Music\Original Soundtrack\<Album>\T# - Title.codec

When I used Windows Media Player I had:
Music\Artist\Album\Title.wma ...and for any WMA files I haven't been too concerned about renaming.

What main genres do you use? I've wanted to do a mapping of the ID3v1 + Winamp extension genres to a few that really describe what the music is. For directory structures I'd like more generalized genres to keep things together (for example, make Electronic include Techno, Drum & Bass, House, Jungle, etc)

My set up is:

\Music\<Format>\<F>\<Artist> - (<Year>) - <Album>\<Track> - <Artist> - <Song>

<F> is the first letter of the Artist (excluding the, a, an) Numbers are converted to what letter the number starts with.

For CUE/M3U/MD5/JPG I prefix with 00. Multi CD's I keep in separate directories. If it's a CUE I don't create an M3U.

I save EAC LOG files for personal rips. For lossy formats I create MD5's, for lossless the EAC LOG file is enough since there's programs that can decode on the fly to verify (not much slower than MD5/SFV, and just cleaner).

Single tracks:
%artist%\%album\%tracknumber%. %title%
Various\%album%\%tracknumber%. %artist% - %title%

Images:
%artist%\%album%
Various\%album%

I don't have a strictly-enforced naming scheme but, in terms approximating foobar2000's formatting, it would be something like that. I also have a couple of "Disc n" folders.

Music\bitmap\[Artist]\[Album] - [TrackNumber] - [Title].[ogg|flac]

My folder bitmap\ contains all recorded sound. Another folder, vector\, is for my MIDI collection, and another, hybrid\, is for the modules (*.mod, *.s3m, *.xm, *.it).

For people that use media jukebox software, can I ask do you, or why do you care how they're stored on your filesystem? I just let iTunes do it's thing and manage my music through that - not the finder (or explorer.exe). I couldn't care less whether they were stored by artist, genre, album or even a random hash ala the ipod filesystem.

\Music\<F>\<Artist>\<Year> - <Album>\<Tracknumber> - <Title>.<codec ext>

<F> is the first letter of the Artist (excluding the, a, an) Numbers are converted to what letter the number starts with.

various artist :
\Music\_Compilation\<Genre>\<Year> - <Album>\<Tracknumber> - <Artist> - <Title>.<codec ext>


soundtracks & classical music are in specials directories

for classical music I use :
(Bith year - death year) <Artist>\<Year> - <Album>\<Tracknumber> - <Title>.<codec ext>

I'll try to answer that - what happens if you decide to use a new program? Locking yourself into doing whatever "Program X" or "Program Y " does could potentially limit your options if you were every to change how you use your music.

Personally, I use too many programs in my daily music needs to even consider doing it in an unstructured way - EAC for ripping, Winamp for listening and Catraxx as a database/frontend.
My setup is close to Level 3 in the poll, except I don't use "Music" at root, I use an "A" folder, a "B" folder, etc.
example - Z:\S\Sianspheric\RGB\01-Sianspheric-To Myself.flac

I used to have it as Z:\artist\album\file but it was getting to be too much scrolling when adding items to my database. (This is on a dedicated drive).

Z:\Music\

FileFormat\<first letter of artist>\Artist\AlbumTitle\Artist-AlbumTitle-TrackNumber-Trackname.extension



Aye I have long filenames. Arguably, I have no need to put Artist and AlbumTitle as part of the file name if the ID3 tags are properly maintained so this may change. This is a holdover from the time when I traded individual files around more often and didn't maintain the ID3 tags well. Files orphaned away from the file structure had none of this identifying metadata. This shouldn't be so much of a problem these days. I still rigidly maintain this folder structure to easily find and pull files for compilations or to sample for people. Also helps when writing scripts to do stuff for me or when using other people's scripts and small programs.

The FileFormat level of separation is to keep FLACs separate from MP3s which are separate from MPC which are separate from AACs. I used mareo I think to rip into both FLAC and MP3, but there are some leftover MPC from when I experimented with that (if my iPod played MPC I would rip to that format again, but alas) and all the AACs are purchased or free downloads from Apple ITMS.

I used to have some divisions based on Genre, but I discovered that to be too subjective.

If the first letter of an artist is actually a number, I have a folder called "123s" for bands like 2 Live Crew and 311.

Soundtracks and compilations I never seem to satisfy myself. I'll do it one way for awhile and then switch so right now i have about 2 or 3 competing "standards" in my file structure.

What do I do for Albums with multiple discs? As I sit here I don't remember, but I believe I put (disc n) in the Albumtitle level. For example, Infected Mushroom's Converting Vegetarians would be :

Z:\Music\MP3s\I\Infected Mushroom\Converting Vegetarians(disc 1)\

Again, keeping to a fairly rigid 2 level heirarchy above the actual tracks, helps when writing scripts as I always know how to treat the folder names of the parent folder and the parent of that folder.

Then again, now there are tools that can analyze the file itself and try to fill out tags for you unlike the days you had to make your own tools.

Note I don't own much classical style music so I haven't run into the organizing needs some of you have nor have I really hit the limitations of ID3v1.1 even as I move to ID3v2.3

I really like the way I have it now. It's like fileformat/artist/artist-album-year/tracknumber - trackname. I can find my music files fast this way.

I'm just curious about the level of importance many of you people have for the year.

While I don't consider my ID3 tags complete unless I have the year, especially so if I own the full discography for an artist, I never would have thought to add that to the file names or make it part of the folder structures.

In most cases, I never need to know the year.


Why is it so important to you all? (Note I am asking this not to knock your decisions and opinions, I'm actually curious if you have a good reason that I may not have considered)

Edit: I just considered one reason why to maybe go \AlbumTitle-Year\ because I think a couple of bands have released albums years apart with the same title (like the first few self-titled Peter Gabriel albums, which reminds me I need to rip them eventually)

I just add the year as that on the CD case, as I do with the COMMENT field (CD catalog number). It's not too important but I try to include everything.

It's genre that irks me. I may just start tagging my CD images with a genre from the freedb list rather than wondering what exactly to call them. It's so much simpler to call something rock instead of wondering if it counts as punk, metal or punk rock!

Anyone have any good hints for genre classification?

Well, I've often gone to allmusic.com and used their recommendation for genre, mostly to keep from having to make that determination myself.

Also, I have some CDs where the album as a whole is characterized one way, but there might be an song on there with a decidedly different feel. Do you think I get down to the track level when characterizing genre? Nope, I'm too lazy for that. I justify it by saying Genre is so subjective and characterize the whole album.

About the issue of genres, I've really found that the whole concept of a genre is a matter of opinion.

As I may have mentioned in another post, tagging files with "correct" genres is very important to me, as I use my music to DJ, and often need to search for music by style. Usually I use generic types, like Rock, Country, Dance, etc. But I'm finding that my music supplier is using weird ones like "Adult" and "Top 40 Pop" now, so I've been retagging them as "Pop/Urban/Rap Fast" and things like that.

This blows the usefulness of the id3v1 tags right out of the water, but basically what I'm saying is that I tag every single song with multiple genres (delimeted by slashes). Obviously this would be tedious for regular music albums, but for my Various Artist compilation albums with an assortment of current popular music, this seems necessary to me.

I'd almost like some kind of fancy relational database system with support for internet connectivity to a database of all songs and artists and the classifications of each to do this crap for me, but... my system works. It just takes some time whenever I rip a CD.

In Vorbis Comment (the tagging format used in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files) you can repeat the same tag. You can set GENRE=Pop and GENRE=Urban in the same file.

I just have all my random singles an a flat folder and all my albums in a folder named after them. I let the various media librarys of winamp, foobar, etc do all the organising / searching for me.

This of course only works because my tagging is spot on

Albums\Artist - Album Name - Year\Track No. - Title.codec

Dont like to overcomplicate things...

As above my tagging is very spot on.

Regards

I use genre as a top level because when I want to listen to music, I have a hard time deciding since I have so much stuff, so I'd rather think "I feel like listening to metal" instead of "I feel like listening to artists that start with the letter B".. if that makes any sense.

Defining your own genres is better than strictly using generic ones, but it does take a lot of time. For example, sometimes I have one genre, and sometimes I have subgenres, making sorting not as uniform. With APEv2 you can add multiple genre tags, which I'd like to figure out but haven't had the time yet.

If you want to switch to genre based sorting, first write down which genres you will need. I use 18 main genres, about half of which are ID3.1 compliant, the other half are not. I found the list of basic ID3.1 compliant genres and used what's relevant there, then supplemented the rest with my own definitions for APEv2 tagging. For example, I use "Blues" from ID3.1 with no subgenres, but within Rock I have several and I use "Rock-Garage" for garage rock (APEv2) because I have far more subgenres in rock than in blues. But a blues guy might only need "Rock" (ID3v1 compatible) but need "Blues-PreWar" for a blues subgenre. It depends on how your collection is weighted in terms of genre, that is for you to figure out.

Dates would be nice but I have a harder time with them than with genres, so I'm not using them in directories. So many albums have different dates that are useful. Ideally for me all the dates would be referring to the recording (the most important date for me). But then there are so many albums with several years between the recording and the release. Then there are reissues, compilations. The date listed on the CD (and in online databases) is rarely the recording date, but more often the release date. No biggie if it was released the same year it was recorded but....

That's some good advice on genre. I would indeed stick to a few but my problem comes at classifying certain bands from my strange music taste. For example, are Velvet Revolver rock or metal? Was blink-182's new album punk or alt. rock? And just WTF are CKY?

(No comments on my collection please. )

EAC asks for release dates but I usually just put the date on the rear of the CD case. Which is probably the final mastering date and thus may not be representative of the release date on all CDs! But oh well...

I know, there will always be problem cases. In the end, you can just pick one and not worry about it too much. And like I said, if you use APEv2, you can put as many genres as you want on a file (though of course you will only want it in one genre directory). Personally I would not put Blink 182 in punk, but it's different for everyone. Don't worry what anyone else would think, it should just make sense for you. I agonized over things like the Pretenders (Pop? Rock?) and the Pixies (Pop? Alternative?). And of course you can break them apart. Like I have early Husker Du in Punk, but their later albums in Alternative. But I have both Punk and Alternative as subfolders in Rock.

%artist% - %date% - %album%\%artist% - %album% - %tracknumber%. %title%
or
%album%\%album% - %tracknumber%. %artist% - %title%
if %album artist%

With a few exceptions, eg for artists I own the full discography or a lot of albums:
%artist%\%date% - %album%\%artist% - %album% - %tracknumber%. %title%
or
%artist%\%date% - %album% - %tracknumber%. %title%
(I think I'll be renaming those ones though)
or
%artist%\%date% - %album%\%tracknumber%. %title%
only if $or(%artist%,%album%) is really too long

PS. It can be %album%[cd %disc%] instead of %album%, and everything in lower case.

Wow, that must get confusing. Whatever will you do when one of your album or track titles has a dash (" - ") in it?

Anyway, singaiya, thanks for your insights about genre.

Artist\Artist - Year - Album\Artist - Track number - Track name.filetype
like...
Nightwish\Nightwish - 1998 - Oceanborn\Nightwish - 03 - Devil & The Deep Dark Ocean.flac

That way I get all the information even without tags, if needed

artist/album/track# - artist - title.ext

works good with various, too.
oh, i don't use tags either


later

always the same one here. no matter if classical or compilation etc.

a concrete example would look like this:

x:\A\A Perfect Circle\A Perfect Circle - 2000 - Mer De Noms

and then # - title

i like seeing the albums in chronological order

K:\My Music\Album Artist\Album\Track Artist_Album_Track Name_Bitrate.Format

You can see a listing (NOT actual files) of my entire music library here.

After many tries at creating my ultimate directory structure for lossy files (easy as hell with Foobar ), I arrived at these final options:

X:\Music\codec\artist - date - album\nn title
X:\Music\codec\artist\(date)* album\nn title
X:\Music\artist - date - album\nn title
X:\Music\artist\(date)* album\nn title

if the album is VA:
X:\Music\Various Artists - date - album (or compilation name)\nn artist - title
X:\Music\Various Artists\(date)* album\nn artist - title

*If I go with either of these options, I would have to decide between (date) and [date], unless there's something that might interfere with the use of []'s.

Something tells me to go with the "artist - date - album" style simply because that's exactly how I name my lossless images, but sorting first by codec seems like a neater way of organizing. I'm hesitant to use the "artist\(date) album" style, because that's what WMP and iTunes use, and I always fount it frustrating when all I have from ArtistX is a 3 song EP or something and I end up with a whole folder with "ArtistX\EP title\3 songs".

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the "artist - date - album" style can get produce folders with really long names, and looks like crap when using any kind of tree style view.

G:/Music/Artist/Album/Artist - # - Track.mp3

X:\Music\FLAC\Artist\Album\Title.flac
X:\Music\MP3\Artist\Album\Tracknumber. Title (Year).mp3

Artist is Album Artist for compilations. I use different track titles for unique naming when loaded on my mp3 player.

Single FLAC/CUE Images
For normal releases:
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).flac
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).cue
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).jpg
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).log
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album (Disc 1).html

Various Artists:
Year ~ Album\Year ~ Album (Disc 1).flac
(Same for .cue, .jpg, .log & .html)

Soundtracks:
Year ~ Movie/Album title\Year ~ Movie/Album title (Disc 1).flac
(Same for .cue, .jpg, .log & .html)

Individual files/tracks
Artist ~ Year ~ Album\Artist ~ Year ~ Album ~ ## ~ Name.codec

Why the tilde (~)? Because I've NEVER seen it used in an Artist/Album/Song name and it frees me up to use the dash (-) for things like "'89-'93".

i am an artist - title.codec guy. one folder is all you need if you tag well and have a frontend that's worth a crap.

actually, i use two folders, not one:

stuff i have backed up/artist - title.codec
stuff i have not backed up yet/artist - title.codec

i'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned this. i learned the hard way that this is probably the most important element of directory structure.

I almost only have albums.

I used to have the following X:\Music\artist - album\nn-title.codec but now i've found something that i think is a very good tweak of this. The basic is still the same, but in those case I have more than one album from any given artist I will put those albums like X:\Music\a r t i s t\artist - album\nn-title.codec. This makes my music folder more tidy, especially while i'm getting more and more albums.

Also note the effect of these artists being on top of every first letter when sorting this folder.

Music\Artist\Album\T# - Title

A big music folder, each with smaller folders that are "Artist - Album" and in those folders I have "Artist - Title".

F:\Audio\Artist\(Year) Album\#. Title.mp3

Music/Artist/Album/# - Artist - Album

Flac/Cue Images
Music\ripps\artist\album\artist - year - album (disc 1).flac, *. cue

Mp3
Music\mp3\artist\album\artist - album - tracknumber - title.mp3

Harald

d:\music\[genre]\artist\(year) album\#T. artist - title.ext

my brother demands I have [genre] there :-/

I find that, in many cases, Genre can almost be subjective, unless you're really vague or generic. Like... the difference between Metal and Classical is usually easy... but what about NuMetal and Rap? Or overlapping and crossover genres?

Often music can be categorized into more than one genre, so I think that it's best to leave genres in your meta tags... of course, music stores have to make that choice to make it easier to find types of music that you listen to, and I suppose that for the bigger ones, at least, they can just put a copy of the CD in each section that it applies to.

On that note, it'd be cool to have some kind of a filesystem, or perhaps just a music management or database system that allows you to have one album or track in two places at once (through some kind of link, most likely). I've seen software that does this, and perhaps foobar's Album List can do that if you have two genre tags or something.

I try to avoid genres, I only use generic stuff like Metal, Rock, Classical, Electronic... The only use I have for the genre tag is with Classical, because I have a separate sorting string in foobar for it, but otherwise I don't fuss over it. Some of my metalhead friends go as far as having different super-specific genres for each track on an album, like "Neo-classical/Progressive/Symphonic Metal" and the next track is "Ambient/Darkwave/Neo-classical". Ridiculous.

%drive%\--music--\artist\year - album\t# - artist - title.codec

[drive]\Music\Artist\Album - Tracknumber - Title.codec

\genere\[nationality] artist - album (year)\#t - title.codec

[0-9,a-z]/$artist/$year $album [catalog info]/$track# - $tracktitle.codec

Artist/(Year) Album/Artist - Track # - Song Title

for various artists: Various Artists - Album Name (Year)/Track # - Song Artist - Song Name

This was a question I spent alot of time pondering.
I started doing things one way and thought that was best...
I made a change mid-stream and added the "(date)" before "Album" for better chronology.
I also changed mid-stream and added "Artist" before track # to better identify the thousands of songs in my library-so I can easily see, in the track name itself, who the artist is.
I currently use only FLAC & keep everything in a FLAC Archive so I do not use ".flac" in the song title.
In the future, I plan to transcode to (probably) MP3 and in that case I will use ".mp3" as a file name/format descriptor. Since there would be a loss in quality from the original lossless source, I would mark this and make it as clear as possible that the files are MP3s.

Mine is:

Music\Album Artist\Album\T#. Artist - Title.codec

This works for both compilations and single albums. If it's a single album I just set Album Artist to what Artist is.

Mine is:

1. For Complete Albums:
e.g.: Jeff Beck's you had it coming:

E:\J\Jeff Beck- [2001]- You Had It Coming\##- Title.codec

2 For Singles
e.g.: Beulah's Gene Autry:
E:\`Singles\Beulah\Beulah- Gene Autry.codec

3 For Compilation Albums
e.g.: I Am sam soundtrack:
E:\`Compilations\OST- I am Sam [Date]\##- Artist- Title.codec

4 For Songs whose tags have to be fixed
E:\`Fixx\<File>

Works well for me

For the most part, I use REACT defaults as they are well thought out. Alphabetically organize by artist, then year of album, then title.

F:\Music\The Beatles\1965_Rubber Soul\The Beatles - (1965) Rubber Soul.flac
F:\Music\The Beatles\1965_Rubber Soul\The Beatles - (1965) Rubber Soul.cue

Level 1 gives me... well, my music folder
Level 2 is the Artist alphabetically
Level 3 is the year with Title
Level 4 is the file itself, with all that stuff in case I move it around

#3 is the most important because if an artist has 10 or so albums, I'd like to visually see them in chronological order. Metatags will come and go, and preferences will change over time. File structure has been with us for decades, so that will always be important.


I only archive full albums.

-Robert