MP3 Organization

[Smellincoffee]

Ever since I started keeping music on my computer, I've sorted them into folders based on music genre. I recently learned from a friend that not only does she not organized her music, but none of her other friends sort their mp3s this way. I've asked a few of my other friends, and no one organizes their music.

I do so, and have always done so, because I listen to many types of music but tend to be in moods to listen to one genre or another. I create playlists in Winamp for my convenience, and find it simplifies matters to simply add an entire folder of related music to a playlist. Because some music is hard to classify, I use broad descriptions.

Do you order your music in this way, or in any way?

Here are some of my folder names:
1. Big Bang/Swing
2. 50s-70s Pop/Rock
3. Eighties Pop
4. Rock
5. 90s-00s Pop/Alt
6. Classical
7. Jazz-R&B-Soul
8. Folk
9. Political (Billy Bragg, mostly)
10. Tech (ambiance, house)
11. Country
12. Meditative/Spiritual/Religious/New Age (ranges from Enya to Benedictine chanting)
13. Hip-Hop (specific songs from GTA Vice City and San Andreas)
14. Effin Misc
15. John Williams is the Man, containing music from Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, and other movies with iconic themes.
16. Klepacki, which refers to music from the Red Alert games.
17. Medal of Honor themes, which is the music from the MOH games and the special sountrack disc.

 

[Traitorfish]

I just have it by artist and then by album; I tend to use iTunes (in which I have all the appropriately anal genre classification), so I usually just pull stuff out through that. I also have a Rock/Metal and Folk playlist for playing on shuffle (the latter is good when you're trying to concentrate on something, much more mellow).

And because I feel like this is a halfway decent excuse to list the aforesaid genre anal-ness, I have:

Spoiler :

Alternative Metal
Alternative Rock
Avante-garde Metal
Black Metal
Cello Metal
Classical
Comedy
Country
Dark Cabaret
Death Metal
Doom Metal
Electronic
Folk
Folk Metal
Folk Punk
Folk Rock
Glam Metal
Gothic Metal
Gothic Rock
Grindcore
Groove Metal
Grunge
Hard Rock
Hardcore Punk
Heavy Metal
Horror Punk
Indie
Industrial
Industrial Metal
Melodic Death Metal
Metalcore
Nu Metal
Post-punk
Power Metal
Punk
Sludge Metal
Soundtrack
Southern Rock
Stoner Metal
Symphonic Metal
Technical Death Metal
Thrash Metal

Detailed enough for now, at least.

 

[Dell19]

Just by the criteria that media players sort music (primarily by album title, artist and then genre with the last one being the most inaccurate)

 

[cardgame]

Alphabetically by artist.

I don't see why anyone would organize otherwise, too hard to find anything tbh

(edit - unless it's in playlists)

 

[ZeletDude]

Well I-Tunes organizes it alphabetically and then I have my playlist of my favorite songs at the moment..

 

[madviking]

I sort by artist...

 

[Camikaze]

iTunes, of course, orders it for you. A more relevant question to iTunes users is probably 'which order do you view music in'. Most probably go for artist, alphabetically. Me included.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

3 main folders

- Alternative Rock (anything rock derived from punk and that doesnt sound electronicky)
- Old Rock (anything rock not derived from punk, not necesarely old)
- Electro (new rave, indie electro, post-rock stuff like that)
In each of these folders, bands of which i have more than 10 songs have their own separate folder.

Other music folders of stuff i used to listen to, and of stuff i very rarely listen to nowadays:

- Oldies
- Classical
- Video Game Music
- Metal
- Other (mostly trance)

 

[Dachs]

I just make a couple of playlists with no particular guiding theme other than "stuff I want to listen to atm", burn them into my brain over several weeks (or however long) of listening, then edit the playlists to incorporate new "stuff I want to listen to atm".

 

[warpus]

Back when I still had my 70gb mp3 library, everything was sorted by genre, then artist and album. I even had a handy list of bookmarks for easy access to everything, organized by genre, label, and alphabetically. Then I had a HD crash. Lost everything. The mp3s can go organize themselves, everything's in one folder now.

 

[civplayah]

I don't organize my songs. They're just listed alphabetically.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I sort them by Artist/Album. I also have a Misc folder for other scattered ones.

For multi-disc albums I usually have a seperate folder for each disc

An example is "D:\Music\Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers\Playback\Disc 4 - The Other Sides\01 - Casa Dega.mp3"

 

[Integral]

Front-end
Foobar2000, minimal add-ons, and with playlists that are little more than 'stuff I want to listen to atm', usually chunks of 10-15 complete albums that I'll put into rotation for a few weeks at a time. The main/default playlist is sorted by the underlying folder structure.


Back-end
I am a little OCD about the back-end/folder structure of my music directory. I use five top-level folders in the root directory and within those folders the music is organized by into subfolders by: /artist/[year] album/## - track. I found it convenient to use the "[year] - album" naming convention because then the albums are sorted by release year for each artist, which I find aesthetically pleasing.

The top-level folders are 'albums', 'soundtracks', 'singles', and two special-purpose directories.

i.e.,
.../music/albums/Tool/[2001] Lateralus/06 - Parabol.mp3
.../music/albums/Soundgarden/[1994] Superunkown/04 - Mailman.mp3
.../music/singles/Kansas/Dust in the Wind.mp3
.../music/singles/Aerosmith/Dream On.mp3
.../music/soundtracks/The Dark Knight OST/01 - Why So Serious.mp3
.../music/soundtracks/Noir OST 1/04 - Canta per me.mp3

Everything with the appropriate metadata and tags, and all sync'd with a backup external hard drive.

 

[Love]

Spotify.

Just saying...

 

[kulade]

most of my music is organized by artist/album, but i have some compilation cds that i just throw in my music folder; i have a separate folder for audio lectures and crap.

oh, and foobar2000 #1.

 

[downtown]

I'm going to give this foobar a try. My music folder is a wreck

 

[nc-1701]

Itunes automatically sorts it by album, artist, alphabetically, and by playlist. When actually accessing my music I always do it by album, unless I'm shuffling in which case I usually shuffle my entire collection or sometimes just a single playlist.

 

[SuperJay]

By artist and then album. Genres are artificial things, and much of the stuff in my collection doesn't really fit into an established label anyway.

 

[Traitorfish]

By artist and then album. Genres are artificial things, and much of the stuff in my collection doesn't really fit into an established label anyway.

Genre is no more "artificial" than any other non-objective delineation, which is true of both "artist" and "album". Perhaps you mean to say is that genres are fluid and contextual, while artists and albums are constants, which is, of course, a valid observation in itself.

 

[SuperJay]

Genre is no more "artificial" than any other non-objective delineation, which is true of both "artist" and "album". Perhaps you mean to say is that genres are fluid and contextual, while artists and albums are constants, which is, of course, a valid observation in itself.

Correct. Categories in art tend to be subjective, whereas artist and album names are not. I don't find genre terribly useful in organizing my own music collection. My own listening habits don't tend to revolve around a genre first; I don't think "I'd like to listen to some jazz today," I tend to think "I think I'll play some Oscar Peterson" or "I haven't heard any Grant Green in a while," so I generally organize by artist first.