Whats the best method to organise a music library?
I’m just wondering which is the best way to organise my music library.
I’ve seen a few methods around but I would like to get some opinions.
The one method was to have a directory for each year say 2012 then within that directory they would have singles, albums and mixes, organising them by release date.
The second method was to organise them by music genre under a year.
But I’m sure there must be better methods out there.
I’m using a mac and was wondering if there’s an app/utility that will automatically move downloaded tracks into a specific subfolder.
I use Live and Im pretty meticulous about my library. All my stuff is just named by key, BPM, Artist, Song, Genra/feeling, energy level from 1 to 10. So it looks like this:
Yea im pretty anal about my library. But for me, it makes mixing so much more enjoyable. I just keep a browser window open and move down the scale. I always mix harmonicly so I just go down the list and work on mixing in different tempos and genres.
I am on about the 8th or 9th “major” (by some definition) organization strategy for my music. As I add more music, learn more about the workflow I like, and settle on tools…that changes the way I organize the music.
There are are few common “themes” that have proven to be really helpful for me over the years.
Put as much information into tags as you can find at the time you are creating the song.
Care more about labels that help you to filter, remember, and search for songs than about “correct” labels for others.
Note when the song was purchased…this is the “new to you” date. I often find that I can recall when I found a song (by year) and that helps me to better search for it. This is not the same as the year the song was released.
Backup your music BEFORE and AFTER you make “major” changes to organization. This includes moving files, deleting files, etc.
Backup your music AFTER you do any major additions, or tag corrections. No sense repeating lessons.
Media Monkey has a really good set of tools for managing a large music collection. There are other tools, so pick one and learn to use it.
I view playlists as “disposable”…I don’t tend to keep them around for longer than a few weeks at a time. I do have several “smart playlists” setup in iTunes that make it easy to grab things and build Traktor playlists (and import that music into Traktor).
There’s no one single method that’s going to work for everyone here. It’s down to personal preference.
For folders, I use iTunes old method of album folders in artist folders, mostly because I used to use iTunes to rename files and automatically sort before I realized that wasn’t the most ideal option. iTunes used to (no idea if it still does) cut file names short and drop everything into the same folder if it had the same album name (which was an issue for remasters, reissues, etc. in some cases.)
Some people simply have their folders set up with the artist name, release, year of release, record label, bit rate/file format as the folder name and leave it at that. That’s not a bad way to do it, but it sure does mean a lot of extra work renaming folders.
I generally let the media player handle all the sorting. Folder structure isn’t big on my priorities. I use Foobar + DarkOne V4 theme + Discogs Auto-tagger to handle all the tagging. I can’t stand how Beatport labels everything as “Original Mix” and the Auto-tagger corrects that while it also grabs the label, catalog number, etc. With a few right clicks on the album I can also immediately go to the release page, artist page, etc. while browsing. Which is real nice if you decide you really like a track and want more information on the artist, record label, and so on.
Then I use MP3tag to make sure files are properly named. Again, Beatport does some funny stuff with their file names. I want tracks to appear as “01 - Artist - Song - Album.”
I copypasta the record label to the comments field. The comments field seems to be the one thing that is shared across all media players and Traktor, and I find it easiest to keep track of things by record label. I listen to a lot of underground label stuff, so this won’t really be quite as effective if your music is from major labels.
Finally, I have smart playlists in iTunes to collect releases by record label (from the comments field) and put them into playlists, so that when I go to Traktor, I can easily look up the record labels and import into Traktor from there.
I imagine that’s an incredible amount of geekery on my part, but that’s how I do it.
