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.

Music\Artist\Album\Artist - Album- T# - Song Title .flac

Artist\[Date] [VLS/CDA] Album\Artist - Tracknumber - Title

I added another [VLS/CDA] tag after the release year because I have loads of vinyls collection and it would be nice to sort them out.

Main music directory:
AUDIO\Artist\Album (Year) [CODEC*]\nn Title.codec

Secondary one (just assorted tracks with no full releases):
AUDIO 2\Artist\Artist - Title.codec

* — only if lossless (then [LL]) or MPC (then [MPC]).

In my case it depends of several factors:

1. If there are several albums of the same artist:
(level 1) Artist or Group name
(level 2) [Year] Name of the Album -> files have this format: Track number - Track title

2. If it's just a single disc of a single artist:
(level 1) Artist - Name of the album -> files as before

3. If it's an album with tracks of several artists:
(level 1) Name of the album -> Track number - Artist - Track title

I think this is the tidest (unless for me). But really it's the way you prefer, things aren't black or white, them can be in a grey scale - And yes, I separate by codec too: those encoded in ogg are under the ogg folder. Same with flac...

Music\Artist\(year) Album\nn. Title.ape

My Music\Artist\(Year) - Album\(Tracknumber) - Title.flac

I'm not sure what a VLS/CDA tag is... could someone explain this?




Personally I also add an extra tag like this to "non standard" formats. i.e., if I have an album ripped into an ape, with a cuesheet, I'll add [cue.ape] to the Album folder.

If I have something like an ogg version, I might add [ogg_q0]. This is because I must be able to quickly identify which albums are non-standard, because I use several audio programs, and some of them don't support anything other than MP3.

And sometimes I keep alternate copies of the song (i.e. a cue.ape and an MP3 Lame_Standard) for this purpose.

Personally, I hate having anything but artist and song title in the filename. I find having the year or the album or the track no makes things ugly and awkward when you try to make mixes or transfer to a DAP. I like to think of albums as collections of songs that stand alone and are tied together through metadata. As such, I use:

Music/(Albums)/[Artist] Album/[Artist] Track.mp3

Each album folder has an m3u, and the files have the track no and date tags filled in correctly.

The (Albums) part is there because I also have directories for videogame music files, music videos, one-file mixes, tracked music, etc....

@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.

Mine are layed out similar to the third option above.
X:\musicdir\artist\album\artist - album - # title.ext
I like to keep the artist/album in the filename just in case the file somehow find their way in the wrong place. Also everything is tagged properly, so that doesn't really matter, but at this point there is too much for me to want to change it.

(Music)\Artist - (Year) - Album\
or (Music)\Various Artists - (Year) - Album\

This is pretty good for me except for the all of the bands that are "The xxxx", can't wait for an os that can handle sorting on metadata like a media jukebox can.

- Cal

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.

My collection goes like this:

X:\Artist\Year - Album\Track# - Title.(ogg,mp3,mp4,mpc,etc.).

I keep lossless stuff (APE) in CD-R only.

There is one foder also (X:\Various or something) for non complete albums/single tracks.

I think it´s nice to have "Year - Album" because you can follow artists evolution through time.

Everything tagged and replaygained too. For the albums I like the most I have also lyrics and images (album cover/lyrics inside tags plus all album artwork in JPG format in the same folder).

It´s weird, being a long-time HA member, I have quite a few of my favorite albums encoded in MP3 160kbps CBR even now (encoded when LAME current version was 3.88 beta or so). I still think the quality is decent for me (I can tell the difference from the original but it´s so subtle it doesn´t bother me). I can´t understand those maniacs (my respects) that re-encode all the time (like "wow, megamix is out, lets re-encode!!!" ...a week later megamix 2 is out, they re-encode 500 albums again) although it´s probably time for me to re-encode all that stuff to vorbis 1.1 -q6. I´ll probably do that whenever I get loads of time to waste, not soon for sure.

normal albums:
\ Genre \ Artist \ Year - Album \ nn - Title
multi-disc albums:
\ Genre \ Artist \ Year - Album \ 1nn - Title . . . 2nn - Title
various artists:
\ Genre \ VA \ Album (Year) \ nn - Title (Artist)
\ Soundtracks \ Album {Composer}(Year) \ nn - Title (Artist if VA)

~ my directory of classical music is still rather inconsistent. =(

Music\Artist\[YEAR] Album [etc.., ex : ep, live, single]\T#. Title.codec

I use:



where "L" is the first letter of the artist name, eg:



I have to do this because otherwise explorer takes forever to display all the folders...

I used to sort also by genre but I realized it was more a hassle than an advantage, so I started using foobar's database more extensively.

Studio releases: Artist\Album\[Disc #]\nn - Title.codec
Basically, anything retail goes here....
Artist can be Artist/Band name, 'Various Artist'/'VA' or 'Soundtrack' - depending on contents...

Live shows: Artist\Venue\Date\[Disc #/Set #]\nn - title.codec
This would be for any LIVE recordings (bootlegs)...
The 4th level defaults to 'Disc' unless all tracks fit one disc - in which case it splits by 'Set'

Here goes for me

Artist\Album\nn Title.codec

On my iRiver iHP-120 this is the same except with very very basic genres (such as Pop, Rock, etc) preceding the Artist directory to simply the filetree-based navigation

I use...

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

For single artists:
Artist - (Year) Album \ Artist - (Year) Album - NN - Title.codec

For compilations:
VA - Album (Year) \ VA - Album - NN - Artist - Title.codec

Sorts everything very nicely.

Apologies. double post.

I just thought of another branch that I use for my BIG collection of music...
I recently resorted everything so that Soundtracks, CDs by a single artist, miscellenious single tracks (probably mostly downloads, like stuff from MP3.com back in the day) and Various Artist compilations are all separated into different parent directories.

Within the various artist or soundtrack folders, there is usually only one other folder for each CD.

Although it appears that many of you guys have an "Artist" called Various Artists, or such, so that "various artists" is another folder amongst all your artist names.

This is much like how EAC does it, but the problem I have with that is that you get lots of little 100-300 MB directory trees, and then the Various artists tree is many gigabytes bigger.

BTW, nobody has yet answered what [VLS/CDA] tags are...

You should check out directory opus from GP Software. It can do this, at least with MP3, ogg, and WMA, to an extent. Plugin support is there, so one could conceivably add in their own support for other codecs. Surely you aren't expecting something like this from microsoft, right? (Although I do believe that Windows Explorer offers some degree of capability to do this with MP3)




Razer, what's the reasoning behind you putting the year in different places for single and various artists? You find it more intuitive to sort VA discs by name, rather than year, because it is less relevant than for several releases by a single artist, I suppose?

That's exactly the reason. Say I have something like "Superhits 2" and "Superhits 9" released a few years apart, and there are many other VA albums released inbetween them. That would make it difficult to browse by release year if I just wanted to find all my "Superhits" albums right away.

One folder, no subfolders -

D:\Music\artist-album-track-title.codec

Codec\Artist\Year - Album\Artist - Album - NN - Title.ext

Optional sub dirs; CD1/CD2/etc, Extra (if pictures & other info is present)

Unless it's a multi-disc album, in which case I use:

Albums
/media/music library/Artist - Year - Album [Label]/## - Title.ext

Compilations
/media/music library/Name (Year) [Label]/## - Artist -- Title.ext

...Note the different but 'compatible' notation, this is by design. This way i can easily parse it with a script without the need to add redunant VA/Various Artist tags. The double'-' between Artist and Title in the compilations format is there to prevent (potential) parsing issues aswell.
Also it is a compact layout of which I can easily burn backups to CDR in Joilet format without the need to rename files. I'm quite happy with it, after all i worked 4+ years on it

Very nice, though I see two things "wrong" with it.

1: Compilation names mixed with artist/band names? Isn't that a bit untidy?
2: If you take away the directory structure and throw all the files in the same directory, there would be complete chaos.

Other than that, this is pretty much flawless.

For albums :
/mnt/media/Musique/Albums/genre/artist/(year) album title/[CD disc/]## title

For compilations :
/mnt/media/Musique/Compilations/genre/album title/[CD disc/]## artist - title

For original soundtracks :
/mnt/media/Musique/OST/type (movie, anime, series, ...)/album title/[CD disc/]## artist - title

For operas :
/mnt/media/Musique/Operas/main composer/(year) album title/[CD disc/]## title

For the people who use a system like this, I'm guessing that you don't have very large collections of music. Doesn't this get rather hard to search through after you get past about twenty albums or so?




I used to do 1 all the time, and didn't mind, but eventually I got so many folders that explorer and such was very slow listing them all. My main reason for splitting comps and artists was to make each tree more manageable.

I used to worry about 2. But now I use a system like this, just ## - Title.codec. If you ever want to burn the songs onto a Joliet CD (limit 64 characters per filename) It's a pain in the @$$ if the names get cut down.

In reality, what would happen to remove the folders from the directory structure? And even if that happened, you could always just use a program like directory opus, or even some fancy media management software to sort by album title and reorganize it all or something.

Music\[Artist/VA] - (Date) Album (Genre)\T# - Artist - Title.codec

I like it very much.

I was thinking exactly the same, with foobar2000 masstagger it would not be a problem. The only issue would be tracks with the same number and the same title.

Music\Artist - (Year)\Album\NN - Title.codec

For compilations:
Music\Album (Year)\Track Artist - NN - Title.codec

Is that the itunes way? I've heard itunes has the best naming.

Well, what is "best" is kind of subjective. As long as the ripper, or media manager that you are using offers very flexible support for naming, you're just fine. (EAC, for example does a good job of this.)

Not really. I use the library or playlist in the players makes a very easy. I do not
like having many folders.

Re: short filenames ( # - Title.ext )

Right, I have no worry of such hypothetical chaos because all files can easily be resorted or renamed from the tag metadata.

Now that we all have a good idea of the various schemes people use to store their music, how hard would it be to write a program that can somewhat intellegently look at a series of directories and filenames, and determine what the song artists, titles, and dates and such are for the songs.

I wrote a program that scans files for duplicate songs, and if that is any indication, If I did this, such a program would be extremely thorough and extremely complex

I suppose a program like this could also guess at all the song data (by analyzing the filenames), then compare to any tags that exist. It would consider the fact that some people use underscores, lower case text, and avoid certain characters in filenames, and then consider any tags to be more "authoritative".

It would also have to account for the fact that id3v1 tags might be truncated, and then guess the remainder of the title, or whatever, based on the part of the filename that extends beyond the tag data.

If there is data in the filename that is not present in any of the tags, then perhaps there would be some additional field defined for "extra filename info". (This is often the case with single-file downloads off crap networks like kazaa and such). Someone will make a filename like:
Rush - Subdivisions (Remastered Version).mp3
But there would be no tag data for (Remastered Version), so then my theoretical program would consider that data an extra comment or something.


Would anyone have use for a program, or rather, an algorithm like this? I'm thinking that it would be really handy if you have a large collection of music, and wanted to homogenize the way that your collection is formatted.

So if you finish archiving your 500 CDs, and then think "Damn - I should have labelled the directory names with the years in them", you could use this program to do that as a simple one-step process.


(BTW, Rush released more than one album per year some years, those ambitious guys. I have to label THEIR directory names with the month, like 1975-10)

I've let iTunes organise my files. This is its structure if an album has more than 1 cd.
Artist\Album\cd#-track# Title.codec
otherwise
Artist\Album\track# Title.codec

Looking at all the posts makes my naming schemce seems too far simple

Music\Artist - Title.mp3

About 4000 files in a single folder. There are all tagged and I use fb2k's search feature to quickly locate a song or artist I want to listen to.

i've long given up organizing my music... i used to do it by genre, but i just do it by first letter....

music\0numbers
music\0numbers\16-bit lolitas
music\a\
music\a\ace of base
music\a\...
music\b\...
...
music\w\
music\xyz
music\y_mixes
music\y_osts
music\y_various_artists
music\z_unsorted

kinda sucks if i want to hear a lot in a specific genre, but .. *shrug*

For my ripped music:
Multimedia\Music\Ripped\Artist\Album\## Title.mp3

For music I have received from other sources other than CD:
Multimedia\Music\Downloaded\Artist\Album\## Title.mp3

Compilations are stored in a
Compilations\Artist\Album\## Title.mp3
structure in their respective directories above.

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

I have a bit over 1800 tracks so I guess not as big a collection as some. It's easy to find tracks with the foobar search function and i've never been one to listen to a whole album straight through either. A few playlist of favourites do me and I have one big playlist with all available tracks in it to browse throuh as a feel like it. I use tags now, but didn't for a long time - the filename was enough.

Artist:

EAC naiming scheme: '%D\%C\%N-%A - %T'

or

Various Artists:

EAC naming scheme: 'Various Artists\%C\%N-%A - %T'

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

I have a dedicated external drive for all my music and everything is off the root as below.

\Codec\Artist\Artist - Album.flac (single file image)

Music\Artist\Album\Artist - Title (CT - Format).codec

Adding track numbers would be cool if Windows didn't allow for sorting by track numbers. Since it does as long as it's in the tags, it's all good. And with my "signature" I know what's mine.

For my CD images I use:
\Music\Artist\YEAR - Album[cue.flac]\Artist - Album (YEAR).cue.flac

(although I probably use ape slightly more than flac, and am probably going to switch to WavePack soon, but that's beside the point)