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mp3 organization

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Crash893

Crash893

"The man in black fled across the desert,
​
Joined
Mar 13, 2001
Hi all

I was wondering if any of you had any tips / tricks for managing your mp3's


my main questions are

1) do you think its better to keep your mp3 in sub folders or just all lumped into one dir and organized by name.

I currently have sub dirs but im finding its hard to visually see everything at once witho ut having to do a bunch of searches


2) what do you think the best naming convention is

currently im doing artist-title.mp3

3) is there a way to save the rateing in the id3 tag? i find it odd that WMP!! uses 5 star rateing itunes uses 5 star rateing but it seems to be kept in the softwares datebase not in the mp3 itself.


thanks for any other wisdom you feel like shareing.
 
Ive also run into a bug with Windows home server(gasp)


apprently since its basicly server 2003 at its guts it puts some sort of security certificate to access some folders that have sub folders

my wifes mac just crapped the bed over this so i think im going to go back to a mp3 dump


I found a fairly neat peice of software called fixtunes that i can use for free to rename the files to match the artist-title of the id3 tag info and then either move it to a subfolder of artist (which is how they got there now) or to a root dir
 
I used to have my MP3s organized like TheGreek;
I do

artist - title.mp3

and it's all in one folder, well actually, I have a greek folder and an english folder :D
Click to expand...
however, as my collection surpassed 6,000 my comp was lagging when I opened the folder.
My solution?
Itunes - and initializing the automatic file organization
It copied all my files into the Itunes folder and organized them, and updated them. It also converted my wma files to mp3.
 
i would never even think about letting itunes manage my mp3s

i have a BUNCH of mp3s(60gb which is about 31days 8hours 30minutes 58seconds according to gnump3d), and store them all on my gentoo box, and i run gnump3d on that box
thats its only job to serve mp3s.
my structure goes:
Generic genres
artist folder
album folder

i am very anal about my mp3 collection, where every mp3 must be categorized
and i have found that gnump3d is great for 'taking your collection with you', but i dont rate any of my music. my main music player is media monkey, but i prefer to maintain everything the old fashioned way, open up my music folder and drag stuff to the appropriate folders.
 
The reason I don't do folders is because if you have a group like Metallica who have like 13 albums and you only have 1 favorite song from each - you'll have 13 folders with one song in each which is stupid. I have my collection split in 3 folders: GREEK, ROCK, RAP and I my songs as artist - title.mp3 (actually, right now I am moving to FLAC)
 
itunes=devil
Click to expand...
What is your opinion on Windows Media Player 10?

Honestly I prefer Winamp, but it has been crashing on me recently and a reinstall hasn't fixed it so I am unable to use it.
I've also become a podcast addict and Itunes has been easier for me to use than anything else (especially for putting music on an Ipod)
i am very anal about my mp3 collection, where every mp3 must be categorized
Click to expand...
I used to be a-retentive about my music but it took too much time to organize it; time I didn't
have; Thus I tried other payers to help me sort them and Itunes worked for me (it had the best accuracy on song and album titles when I copied my CDs)
 
I have mine in folders setup like this music/artist/CD.way back in 2001 I used to just have a music folder with MP3's running around loose but that got out of hand pretty quick.after it took me 2 days to organize them by hand i just got in the habit of ripping each Cd to it's own folder.of course most rippers now a days do that for you anyway as well as tagging them automagicly.
 
In my Opinion the best way to go is a Main Folder i.e. Media, I then have Subfolders by Artist, i.e. Jethro Tull. Below the Artist Folder I go by Album in this case Aqualung within that folder are all the individual MP3's named in the artist - title.mp3 format. I find that if you don't organize like this now you pay for it later when you want to do something and find you can't cause your files are too much of a mess. Just my opinion but organize them now and it's easier later when you have 10,000 :)
 
Snarl said:
In my Opinion the best way to go is a Main Folder i.e. Media, I then have Subfolders by Artist, i.e. Jethro Tull. Below the Artist Folder I go by Album in this case Aqualung within that folder are all the individual MP3's named in the artist - title.mp3 format. I find that if you don't organize like this now you pay for it later when you want to do something and find you can't cause your files are too much of a mess. Just my opinion but organize them now and it's easier later when you have 10,000 :)
Click to expand...

QFT. I got so ****ed a couple years ago trying to organize 1 folder of thousands into sub folders, just deleted the whole thing and started fresh.
 
wmp11 is "okay"


does anyone know if there is a way to store star rating in the id3?
 
Well Crash, since ID3 has not had a version revision in seven years, I think that it is safe to assume that you have the current version. That being said, there are a few frames in the standard that you can put arbitrary text into. That ability all depends on what software you are using.

Now most common player software has some ability to edit your tags but I cannot say without knowing what you are using if you can do it directly. However, there are a few standalone tag editors out there and one of them might help you. Since I am a huge fan of FOSS, here are a few links that might help you out:

Easy Tag (Linux/Windows GPLed)

Picard Tagger (Linux/Windows GPLed)

Pinky Tagger (Linux but GPLed)

Quod Libet (Unix bit GPLed)
 
I figured as much

right now im useing wmp11 to get into the ballpark

i was just wondering about the stars becase it seems like everything is X out of 5 stars

but i recently lost my wmp11 DB to corruption on the HDD and all my star rateings went away so obvously it wasnt being kept in the id3

I know i could manualy put that in but if no player can read it whats the point.

It just seems silly that if i moved my library over to itunes or somehting else i have to re rate all my songs again.
 
Malpine Walis said:
Well Crash, since ID3 has not had a version revision in seven years, I think that it is safe to assume that you have the current version. That being said, there are a few frames in the standard that you can put arbitrary text into. That ability all depends on what software you are using.

Now most common player software has some ability to edit your tags but I cannot say without knowing what you are using if you can do it directly. However, there are a few standalone tag editors out there and one of them might help you. Since I am a huge fan of FOSS, here are a few links that might help you out:

Easy Tag (Linux/Windows GPLed)

Picard Tagger (Linux/Windows GPLed)

Pinky Tagger (Linux but GPLed)

Quod Libet (Unix bit GPLed)
Click to expand...

know of any taggers that work on OSX (intel)?

I have my music stored by /Music/Artist/Album Name/track#-title.mp3
This way all the tracks stay in the original order and i know what goes where easily. I started doing this years ago when i only had a few hundred MP3s. Now i am over 6,000 and it has been working fine.
 
I'm getting ready to transfer the entire CD collection to HD.

Since there are so many albums per artist, I'll probably have a folder for Artist Name > folder for Album Name > then have the contents of that folder named like so: 01 Name of Song 1.wav.

Yup. Half a TB should be enough to house it all in wav format.

My one hit wonders are all together in one folder and are named Artist Name - Song Name.mp3
 
I haven't come up with a good way to do it yet. What I'd really like is a fully relational database that allows you to input a great deal more information about the music. I listen to mostly classical, so the idea of "artist" is ill defined... is it the composer, the conductor, the symphony, the soloiost?

Since I haven't found anything that really handles all the info I want, I haven't done anything yet. Maybe I'll write my own, since I think the current software sucks.

I don't care much about bells and whistles, but I want to rip my music and rip it once, and then have a working system basically forever... so maybe I should design my own. It would be sweet having a command line interface too so I didn't have to use some annoying gui.
 
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