How do you organize your music on your computer?

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

I have ripped a lot CD’s to my computer and I also subscribe to Emusic. All of a sudden like, I seem to have about 15 gigs of music in My Music Folder. I know I should just burn them to CD but I like having a lot of music so readily available. My puter is in a central location and it is just easier than flipping through the acutal CDs.

I currently have it organized roughly in alpha order with each folder subdivided-- A folder for each letter> a folder for each artist with 2 or more songs>a folder for each album. I have a few general catagories like Comedy or my son’s stuff but still it just doesn’t seem very user friendly.

Is it worth it to further organize it into categories by genre ie: rock, country, show tunes, etc. Or should I leave them in strict alpha order and create playlists in Winamp instead?

Any thoughts?

#2

i just keep mine in alphabetical order by artist. cuz im lazy.

#3

It depends on you. Do you have days when you only want to listen to a single band or genre or tempo or whatever ? If so, it might be worthwhile. Try MoodLogic.

#4

One folder, alphabetic by artist, with The’s in the artist name off. It’s manageable, since I only keep around 1 gig of music on the computer.

#5

I sort my personal music in a folder with my name, subdivided into folders by genre, or what it seems best to me. ie Techno, Love Songs and then songs are sorted automatically by alphabet according to the first letter of whatever they were labeled when dled. I sometimes change the labels though because I don’t like how they are set up.

In our general music files, they are just stuck in and alphabetical. Our music player sorts them all again though, and we sort according to artist. Unless we deem it necessary that they be sorted by other things. Like all our Christmas songs are in one folder, and kids songs in another. (I like my Sesame Street music for soothing me after a stressed out day) While Sarah McLachlan has her own folder as does Jewel and Blind Guardian.

I don’t like sorting solely by genre or CD names because I might skip over them if I am not thinking about it because I don’t like the stuff that is just one genre and forget CD names.

Of course we have a pile of CD’s burned just to hold our MP3’s… not for playing as we don’t have a cd player compatible with MP3’s. The pile sits at about 7/8 CD’s right now. I plan to at some point go through and list them all out in word… so I know what we have and don’t DL/rip it again.

#6

My first folder is labelled mp3s. This has 2 folders for genres I don’t listen to very much (soundtracks and Christmas music) as well as one for “almost everything.”

Within the “almost everything” folder, I have my music broken down by genre. Within each genre–if I have more than 3 songs by an artist, they get their own subfolder. Or else it’s just Artist Name-Song Name.

Like Obsidian Flutterby, I like sorting by genre, because when I load songs into my player, I can pick and choose what I want to hear–thus I won’t have to listen to “The Cherry Tree Carol” if I put my layer on shuffle.

#7

I have one folder, alphabetical: Artist’s Name, The - Song Title, The

I have them sorted by tags in Media Player into genre and further divided into separate playlists, since that allows me to put one song in several categories - which I couldn’t do if I put that sort of thing into the general organizey of filenames and location. My playlists go by genre, style, and “mood.” (I.E. I have “country,” which is all the country music on my computer; that’s subdivided into “alt.country,” “traditionalist country,” and “radio country,” with some overlap between the alt. and traditionalist and the latter is a subgenre of the former as well as a place to put real old songs by Hank Williams and Johnny Cash; “alt. country,” for example, also has another subgenre which is “rock-ish alt.country;” and it’s divided up into “Happy,” “Sad,” “Slow,” etc. The “mood” divisions also have playlists that encompass the entire music collection across all genres, so I can listen to every slow song I have.

I get crazy with the playlists, but I always have one to fit my mood at any given moment.

#8

Alphabetical by first name of the artist.

#9

One ig folder called MP3’s, where all my MP3’s are, in no order, and with the orignal title (which usually means the wrong artist or bad spelling.) I don’t care, I just want to listen to it.

#10

I initially did mine by decades, early 80s, mid 80s, late 80s, etc. Later moved some of them into artist folders.

#11

Folders sorted alpha by artist name, then subfolders within each sorted alpha by album name. Singles are simply in the artist name folder.

#12

Mermaid, I have mine sorted exactly as you describe, and have multiple playlists by mood: “singalong”, “housework disco”, “putting baby to sleep”, “too tired to go to bed so playing solitaire”, etc.

#13

I have one big Music folder. Each album gets its own folder, named simply Artist - Title. Inside, the songs are listed as Artist - Album Title - Track Number - Track Name. (If you make the track number two digits, like 01, 02, etc., they line up right when you open the folder.)

Any stray files that don’t belong to an album are put in a folder by artist called Artist Misc.

When I get in danger of filling up my HD, I burn a lot of them as music CDs and save them all as mp3s. The mp3 archives are terribly disorganized; I’m thinking of adding a second HD entirely for media, and if I do I’m going to copy them all back to the HD and start over.

Dr. J

#14

I don’t. The music on my computer is in one long list based on the order it was downloa… I mean recorded from my own legally purchased CDs. I’m a very lazy man.

#15

Unfortunately I thought to myself “Nah, I’ll never need all that hard drive space.” D’oh!

I have mine in one folder band- song.mp3

I am very anal about titles and names. For instance while there’s “The Beatles” there’s also “Eagles” not “The Eagles”

I have them that way because I like a broad range of music when I listen to it. So I’ll jump from 16 year old Doris Day to Boyz 2 Men to The Monkees. And I like it that way.

#16

Late hours make me skip clauses I meant to include.

… So I have 1 big folder on my pc and have several mp3 discs that rotate through my 2 cd-roms.

#17

iTunes. I try to create album playlists when I think of it.
iTunes also lists most recently played, most frequently played, and sorts by genre. You can also rename the genre and tell iTunes to sort that. I started a list of double-entendre tunes, but it went nowhere.
I also maintain a database of all the CDs I own, most of which don’t get ripped to the iMac.
I mean to get an outboard hard drive so iTunes won’t overwhelm my computer. At that point I probably will rip everything I own.

#18

I have two folders called “FULL ALBUMS” and “MP3” on my hard drive. Full Albums is exactly what it sounds like, CDs that I own that I’ve personally ripped (I use the OGG format for these. I think it’s better quality than MP3)
They are separated into subfolders by artist’s name, under that by Album name. Files are named like this:

<Artist> - <Album> - <Track#> - <Track Title>

“MP3” are files I’ve downloaded from P2P sources. Minimum bitrate is 128 kbps. There is no folder heirarchy under this folder; All 3000 files are in the one folder. Files are named like this:

<Artist> - <Track Title>

I keep all my music cataloged with Media Jukebox 8.0 (all excellent program that beats the pants off Music Match Jukebox any day). I also use it for all my CD ripping. Music is separated in MJ8 by genre, artist, and album.

#19

master folder is dead0mans music
subfolders to it include:
wavs/mp3s/playlists
subfolders under mp3s include:
alternative/classic rock/FULL ALBUMS/funny stuff/hard rock/punk/rap
if I have more than a 3 or 4 songs by an artist but not any complete albums they get their own folder under their genre. If I have a few complete albums (or entire collections) then they of course go under “FULL ALBUMS”.

#20

Sorted by genre, then by artist. Singles go in the appropriate genre folder.

Alt
Bluegrass/Country
Blues
Classic rock
Classical
Comedy
Dance and Techno
Grunge
Industrial
Metal
R&B
Rap and Hip Hop
Reggae
Rock
Ska and Punk
Soul and Funk
Soundtracks
Surf
unsorted (random singles)
TRIAL BY FIRE (mp3s I haven’t listed to yet)

I’ve got about 18 GB of mp3s.