How do you organize your audio files?

how i'm "using" audio greatly effects the way i organize my music, and with me liking so many different genres, my library can get messy once in a while.

so now to keep it clean i start with year, then month, and then genre, because of the massive amount of music i get monthly. before i got to this point it was something like (genre, sub-genre, and then year) which was horrible!

so i was wondering if anyone has any good organizing tips that have stuck with them over the years, without having to revamp your organizing habbits?

I let itunes organise my music tbh. My flow is a little like this:

Download from internet music provider.
Run through MIK4
Copy into itunes library
Rate and amend genre etc, add comments
Delete from download folder.

I then have smart playlists set up that sub catergorise into genre and also age;

Added less than 1 week
Added less than 2 weeks over 1 week
Added 2 - 4 weeks
Added over 4 weeks
Added 2 months

I find it's a good way to keep an eye on current stuff I have bought and might miss if it were all in 1 playlist.....

dont mean to sound rude, but this question pops up a bit... have a look here for some more tips and to see what people have to say before the mods jump in and lock/merge this thread.

because of my huge collection - over 190.000 titles - i've choosen a standard organization waht means <album-interpret>/<album>/<title>[version].
that's to hold the operating system fast. the more files in a folder (windows) the slower the search.
i manage my collection with "mp3tag", but only have .wma (looseless).

i tag my songs in a special way. i use the "album-interpret" to manage the file-system.
that means, that the normal "interpret" tag holds for example "Michael Jackson" than the "album-interpret" ist filled up with "Jackson, Michael"
if it is a "soundtrack" from a movie, the album-interpret tag holds "soundtrack\movie" for creating the file structure.

i allso wrote me a programm, that holds my file structure clean and moves files automatically on the tag basis. as a benefit, these programm allso sorts the .mxm files to the same location als the .wma

for having access to the different genres, i tagged my files with multible entrys in the gene tag field, separated by ";" so i can access all cobinations by a search or create playlists on that basic.

i tested around a long time, what's the best - and for a huge collection - for me thats the best way.

cheers

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ponyboy

Run through MIK4

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What's this MIK4? Did a quick Google, couldn't find anything relevant..

It tells you the key of the song.

To the OP, Josh's Google search above gives you a whole bunch of answers to your question. If you have more questions please ask in one of those threads.