# How do you organize your music on your computer?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-organize-your-music-on-your-computer/155257>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [February 15, 2003, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-organize-your-music-on-your-computer/155257 "2003-02-15T15:25:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![ElwoodCuse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/edb3f5/32.png) [@ElwoodCuse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElwoodCuse)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2003, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-organize-your-music-on-your-computer/155257/21 "2003-02-17T03:15:06Z")

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Anything that I have the entire CD of is in a folder with the album title. Everything else is just alpha by song title. But I listen to it all with a WinAmp playlist that has all the songs on it in alphabetical order by artist then song title.

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**Author:** ![Trigonal\_Planar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/0ea827/32.png) [@Trigonal\_Planar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trigonal_Planar)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2003, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-organize-your-music-on-your-computer/155257/22 "2003-02-17T03:43:02Z")

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One giant folder, with each mp3 meticulously renamed in the Artist - Song format. If I have enough songs by a particular artist, they get their own folder.

ALL files are the listed in the same playlist for quick easy access (of course, the ID files are also meticulously filled in).

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**Author:** ![indyz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/fbc32d/32.png) [@indyz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/indyz)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2003, 8:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-organize-your-music-on-your-computer/155257/23 "2003-02-17T08:17:47Z")

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/artist/album/01-track.mp3

So a folder for the genre, a subfolder for each artist, and another subfolder for each album. Track titles are formatted as “XX-title.mp3” where XX is the track number. It’s a convenient system because I can do a “Select all files” in any folder to play complete albums, or everything by a single artist.

I also use ‘symlinks’ (shortcuts for Windows and Mac people) to group artists by genre and other more artitrary groupings (study music, high energy tracks, etc.)

One of these days I’m going to put everything into a database and use it to generate playlists, track the music that I like, and so on.

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**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\
**Post date:** [February 18, 2003, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-organize-your-music-on-your-computer/155257/24 "2003-02-18T03:35:34Z")

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I do put mine on CDs. Each CD has a sort of “feel” to it, some more so than others. Among the more homogenous are Disk C (late 19780s hard rock), Disk F (folkie/bluesey stuff), Disk H (classical), Disk I (all Pink Floyd), Disk N (christmas music), and Disk Q (head-banging and goth).

Each CD has a twin on a spindle, an archived copy in case the one I actually play gets lost or scratched.

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