How do you organize your music on the harddrive?

[Saoudi]

as long as the meta data (tags) are correct and updated with comments and your media player supports both instant search and smart playlists (i have to admit itunes is the best at this) i see no need of sorting your audio in a complicated structure
add to that itunes can manage several libraries which can as far as i understand can seperate your gigs audio and your personal audio (personally for that purpose i just use a different player) hope it helps you

[Saoudi]

if you want to have your music-archive not only THIS ONE PC or manage it only on THIS ONE PC then it beginns to matter

if you have a studio-pc and a live-laptop and a backup HDD, or share your files with other people, or transport your files cross-border over different operating-systems, you will have to start thinking about where your files are stored on your hard drive and how

in itunes you always have the option to let it sort your audio files in folders and sub folders and then you can backup the whole library and/or share itits a standard structure not the best option but as i said if the tags are correct and updated the location doesnt matter anymore atleast in my case :P

[DJSigma]

I have folders for main genres, then inside each of those I have a folder for albums and one for singles/EPs. I only really use digital music for personal listening though as I mostly use vinyl for DJing.

I use MediaMonkey to organise my collection: -



And I use MonkeyTunes/Hyperfine's Remote For iTunes (which works with MediaMonkey) to control it remotely via my phone: -

[photojojo]

threeee is the magic number......

[lethal_pizzle]

I just bung everything in my iTunes folder. I don't let iTunes organise the folders. All the software I use builds a library database from ID3 tags, so the folder organisation is of zero importance to me.

[TommyQuiet]

this is one thing i have always not got my head around is sorting out my collection

[SpeshulEd]

I use iTunes and really don't understand why people don't like it.

This! Just make sure all your id3 tags are correct and everything is perfect.

People that say they're meticulous about their music collection and then don't use id3 tags confuse the hell out of me.

The tricky thing is when you download a mix that's broken into separate songs with artist - track info in it. That's when things can get a bit out of order, so you just have to make sure when you import it into itunes that you fill in the sort artist information so it's all filed under the artist that did the mix.

I never have an issue finding a song, especially since itunes integrates with Traktor.

[dope]

Every track in the same folder. Then seach via Traktor's browser.

I'm lazy, and I'm sure this method is faster than browsing 1000 different folders to find your track.

[SpeshulEd]

If you have tracks in folders, Traktor can still search the sub folders by just searching the root folder.

Same with itunes in Traktor...just search in the root folder and it'll come up.

As long as I know what I'm looking for, I can pull it up in Traktor as fast as I can type it in the search box.

I just like everything to be uniform so no folders/directories are named weird. I used to rename all my folders as Artist[Year]Album (this kept all my folders alphabetized and in order by year) and would use tag&rename to write all id3 tags, add album art, and rename the folder. But itunes has gotten better over the years and most everything is tagged these days, so its gotten a lot easier to keep things organized.

[bumtsch]

All the software I use builds a library database from ID3 tags, so the folder organisation is of zero importance to me.

This, pretty much.
*iTunes free for a few years, but when I used it, I even let it manage the folders. I felt a lot of pain when I stopped and consolidated things into very generic genre-based folders, ie rock/metal, electronica, funky/disco, misc...
*I don't import all of my music folders into traktor. Only the "electronica" and "vinyl rips" folders, pretty much + an extra "tools" folders from a different production related audio folder.

I used to have separate "house" and "techno" subfolders in "electronica", but then I figured some tunes were more one than the other and it became a problem not having tunes in the right place when I became more of a tagging nazi. Now, I just bung them all into "electronica" randomly, inside a subfolder for every month of acquisitions.
If it's an album, it gets it own folder. That pretty much only happens with non-djing music.

In Traktor, I'll have some playlists which span 3 months for the current year, then 1 per year. The last three months have their own playlist.
+dynamic playlists in trainspotter using keywords from the comment tag.

Since I still browse for tunes by genre a lot anyway, I came up with my own genre tags, which suit Traktor's sorting algorithm and helped a lot with scrolling on the X1 :

genres starting in "-" go at the top, "." go afterwards, then stuff I don't want that much but still keep around just in case is tagged normally. (non pictured : "house/handbag/top40" and its 30ish tunes I'm only moderately ashamed of)