Even after years I’m not comfortable with the way I organize my music-files (about 5000) on the harddrive.
While most people don’t care where iTunes or other library-tools store their music I’m a control-freak (plus my music-libraries often don’t last very long)
Please help me improve my current system!
This is how I do it now:
Music-folder
|- Tracks
| |- Year (e.g. 2011)
| |- Month (e.g. 04)
| |- [tracks I found this month]
|
|- Official Soundtracks
| |- [Soundtracks]
|
|- Albums
| |- Year
| |- [Album]
|
|- Charts
| |- [charts] (e.g. Single Charts 2011-07-06)
|
|- Sampler
|
|- Mixes
|
|- Hedgehog
| |- [mix-cds, edits, remixes, original tracks]
Then there’s another folder with unsorted music. Charts, oldies etc. → all music I don’t want to spin but have to sometimes at friends weddings etc (music I don’t consider part of the collection).
i organize my music on my HDD, when i buy a CD i rip it to WAV and add them to my archive.
there i have 4 folders: “~ Favorites ~”, “~ SETs ~”, “Albums”, “!!! NEW !!!” and one extra folder for every dj from which i get tracks “gotten from XY”
(so that i can seperate “their music” from “my music” and i don’t play accentially their hottest tracks in my set ;D which is one of the reasons they share it with me because they can trust i don’t play their bombs until they feel good about it and tell me)
when i make a folder for an album i want to store i name it like:
“Artistname (or VA) - Albumname - Label Country Year Dataformat” for example “VA - Psychedelic Blabla Vol 23 - Blablarecords UK 2011 wav”
When i like an Album really i make an SHORTCUT to an folder i called “~ Favorites ~” and describe in the link what i like on it
When i pick a Track into a DJ-Set i COPY them into a New Folder in my “~ Set ~” folder and name it like the gig i organize for and name them “Artist - Tracktitle - KEY BPM” for example “Secret Society - Explosive Diorama - 11 152”
for the sets im working on i make a shortcut to it lying around on my desktop so i keep focused on
when i burn a set-cd i put the KEY and the BPM (which i scan with an virtual dj demoversion since my traktor pro 2 can’t scan for keys lol) in front of the artistnames on the cd-text so i can see the tracktitles “fast” and find the track i search, and then i switch to the “artist info tab” and look which key & bpm the track has.
(would have to wait for scrolling if i want to know the artist, but the most of the time i know the artist when i see the tracktitle)
all albums and tracks i didn’t heard often enough to judge are in the “!!! NEW !!!” folder and this is the folder i select my winamp playlist out of it the most of the time. when i heard a album/track often enough i decide to delete it or move it in my “albums” folder. there it will stay forever
this “system” i developed a few years long and changed the way i named the folders or tracks a few times until i had it as described. now i can navigate my music relatively fast. (i make excessive use of the file-search-function of my operating system)
That’s what I don’t understand. Itunes doesn’t store stuff in weird folders. I let iTunes organize my library and it’s all in Music>iTunes>iTunes Music>Artist>Album. As long as I know the artist I can find it on my hard drive without doing a finder search for it. Am I missing something? I’m not trying to be difficult, just trying to understand.
what is with your order when itunes scans the artistname or albumname wrong?
what is with your order if you want to have your files sorted differently than the itunes standard-pattern?
for people which want CONTROL over this things it seems to be better not to use itunes =)
I’m religious about making sure stuff is properly tagged, I would be the same no matter how I stored it on my hard drive.
I guess this is why I’ll never understand it. I NEVER have to search for something on the harddrive so it doesn’t really matter to me how it’s stored on the hard drive. I just type a few keywords into itunes or Traktor and it automatically begins to narrow down my list.
That brings up another question. How do you search by keywords? I pit keywords like jazzy, or latin, or indie vocal in iTunes comments. that way if i’m looking for a deep house song with a jazzy sound I can open my deep house smart playlist and search jazzy and find all of the songs that I’ve tagged that way.
[quote=“photojojo, post:10, topic:33444, username:photojojo”]
I’m religious about making sure stuff is properly tagged
[/quote] hehe and i don’t use the tags, i burn tracks on cd and play them there. in this case i have to set the cd-text only for the set-cd’s.
[quote=“photojojo, post:10, topic:33444, username:photojojo”]
so it doesn’t really matter to me how it’s stored on the hard drive.
[/quote]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
well, i should’ve explained it more.. i dont want a separate folder for each artist and each album.. at least not for the music i DJ with.. cause this are never whole albums…
as seen in the picture this is my “new dubstep” folder. i dl about 15-25 tracks each week and place them into the next _dub folder in line. that would be for example #27. so i don´t have every track in one folder sorted by name but i have a folder for each “session”. and also i always make a mixtape of each folder to get to know my tracks better.
this way i´m able to remember wich track was where and so on.
it seems a bit complicated but it helps me to really get to know my tracks and where i put them.
Then you apparently have a problem with the ID3-Tags in the files your favorite download-store supplied. Just change it in iTunes and the rest happens automatically.
You have a bunch of options how iTunes shall name the files and structure the folders. But all the sorting you could want can be done in iTunes and it’s way more flexible than folder structures. You can easily reference files in different locations (granted, you could probably do that as well using the file system, but I don’t see why you’d want to) and therefore construct different “crates” for your music which do not have to be mutually exclusive (and I won’t even get into the brilliant concept of smart playlists here). And then you can access your iTunes playlists from within Traktor (this has still some limitations, but it’s not much of a problem to work around) - clear win in my opinion.
Well, that depends - how much control do you want, why do you need it, is it really the better solution?
In my music folder, I have a folder called Sorted music which is my DJ music. Outside of that folder I have all my listening music, loops, recordings, etc.
Inside the Sorted Music folder, I keep all EP’s in one folder, any compliations in a separate folder, then the main sorting method for one of tracks is Month/Year.
I’ve been meaning to clean up my collection. It’s a trainwreck right now and I need to delete and archive all my non-DJ stuff from my laptop and trim things way down then run trainspotter on everything but it’s such a slow process. Then once I retag everything there’s a chance of being able to store it properly since right now it’s massive folders of unsorted dance music.
I do have multiple computers and they all have iTunes on them. I use the iTunes share feature on all of them so I have access to the music on any computer on the network in a seamless manner. I even have one computer set up as the main music computer that automatically transfers songs to its external drive. So when I download a new song on the DJ laptop it’s automatically sent to the family computer. This way the DJ laptop only has my DJ music on it, but the main family computer has everything on it. If I need something from the family computer I just click on that computer in itunes and drag it over.
I guess what it all boils down to though is doing it a way that you can find what you want quick. How you do it doesn’t really matter. I’ve used iTunes since day one so I guess I’m just used to it.
yep, but i have to say that i didn’t knowed so much about itunes, didn’t tried if i can do some things you described now to me because it already worked for me the way i had it (thought if i want something i can’t do without software one day, its early enough to switch)
(and since i use also linux pc’s in my network i cant [and don’t want ;D to] use apple software, so i tend to rely on my filesystem and filenames without any software or database behind it ;o)
