As I am bored, I started to reorganize my music collection. It consists of 18gigs of MP3s and 7,62gigs OGG Vorbis.

I already sorted all MP3s by music category.

As there is neither hardware support for OGG nor (yet!!) support for it in Nero I had them in their own directory.

Times are changing! Both (Nero and hardware support) will be available soon so (I thought) I can put all files in the same directorie.

Even if it is quite a stupid question: How do you manage your collections?

fragtal

I Use MediaJukebox 8 but it's better to try the MediaCenter 9 from JRiver, it manages all your music files ( Ape, Mp3, Ogg, Mpc, Wma...and much more ) and your video files also.


http://www.musicex.com/mediajukebox/

Also you have 30 days trial for MediaJukebox8 and MediaCenter9

I meant, should I put MP3s and OGGs in the same directory, so that I cannot easily distinguish between them.

Well i have all my music in a single hard drive only for music, i have all separated like this:

Ex

D:\Music\ARTIST\ALBUM\artist-name-track.mp3 or artist-name-track.mpc or artist-name-track.ape

don't put your files into a single folder, except if you use a library manager

I use one partition for music my naming convention is.

Decade\Artist\Album\Artist - [Album] - (Disc ) - Tracknumber - Title.ext

i mix Oggs Mp3s and Mpcs because I've set explorer to show extensions and they are easy to recognize.

Anyway why do you fear mixing MP3s and Oggs I mean, If a progran cannot handle Oggs it won't use them.

>I meant, should I put MP3s and OGGs in the same directory, so that I cannot easily distinguish between them.

Depends on the program you use - something like Winamp will call all audio files 'Winamp Audio File', dBpowerAMP will call each type differently - ie 'dBpowerAMP Ogg File'

You can't really do much harm copying them to one folder - if you want to revert that change later, you can just right-click on the folder in Explorer, search for "*.ogg", and move the files somewhere else. (Dunno how you can do that with subdirectories that easily, though...)

I mix MPC, Ogg Vorbis and MP3 in one folder - I find it a lot easier to handle than having separate folders for each format (which is what I used to have... uhm... long time ago).

thanks, Volcano!

If you do not find any cons for mixing the music collection I'll do the same. Have you deleted the MP3s of an album if you had the same as OGG or MPC?

fragtal

Does anyone use rar archives to get recovery informations?
If yes, what do you do when you archive them on cd? Do you use any program which can manage them?

fragtal:



Of course I do, MP3 IST DEATH

Did you at least burn them on CD, for the case that somewhere somehow you could need them as MP3s?

What about parity files. Smart Par

So they can be played without decompressing

yeah, that is annoying about Winamp...why won't they make it differentiate?

I have 3 three main directories, it seems to be enough for me.

Songs - for low- and mid- quality songs from my friends and internet.

mp3 - for rips made with lame3.92 - 320CBR, and finally -

OGG - rips made using OggEnc 1.0 and lately OggEncGT3b1 at -q8.

It looks like music\ogg\Riverdance - 2000 - Celtic Dance\01 - Reel Around The Sun.

I have all my albums in a single directory, c:/download/music/mp3/artist - album/. Directory is still "mp3" but most of the music is in Ogg Vorbis format. MPEG Audio Collection (authors site is still down) is a very useful software to create reports and other information about audio collection.

fragtal:



No. But I have started to burn FLAC copies of the CDs that I borrow from friends or the library onto CD-Rs, in case I should need the albums in a different lossy format sometime.

Whatever you do, please take this advice: Don't be an idiot like me and decide to switch formats one or more times once you have acquired a reasonably sized library - use one decent-quality format for everything right from the start, and stay with it. I'm in an absolute mess as a result of having switched formats... uhm... 4 times in the past 2 years, I could really kick me for having done that.

I've kept all my OGG's & MP3's separated, simply because they came from different sources. Ogg's are all rips of my own cd's - the mp3's are all garbage I leeched off Kazaa. My aim is to rid myself of all the mp3's and have them as ogg's which I own and ripped myself.. or for stuff I can't own I'll keep it in lossless - which is also kept away from the ogg's

c:\music\genre\artist\album\track.ogg

or c:\music\bollox\track.mp3

or c:\music\_STUFF\superb rinse\genre\artist\album\track.ape

Using Exlporer as my manager, I've found using folders like _STUFF is a useful way to organize certain things you want kept away from your general albums or whatever

I do not think it will happen to me, because I now have 7,7gigs of OGGs and I am quite proud of them! I was able to convince some of my friends to use ogg, too. Switching the format a second time would not be usefull, because I would not be able to convince them a second time. And the waiting for a ogg hardware player would have been "für den Arsch", since MPC doesn't have any hardware support and won't get any as soon as Vorbis does!

When I get a CD of a friend I rip them with 1.0 -q 6 of gt3b1 -q 5. That's decent to me and does not fill my harddisk uselessly .

btw. I know organized my collection inpependently of the format like mac does:

c:\music\genre\artist\album\track.ogg

fragtal

Hmm, forgot something - thanks for reminding me, Mac

Of course I keep all the low quality stuff (128kbps MP3 and the like) away from my self-ripped files (I'll consider renaming the folder from "Low Quality" to "Bollox", too ). Only my own rips or rips by people who are using decent software go into the High Quality folder.

(My naming scheme is listed here, BTW.)