Tips on organising digital music on PC?

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Participant

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Caporegime
Joined
13 May 2003
Posts
34,587
Location
Warwickshire
Hello guys

In short, my music collection is a mess and I want to sort it out.

I have MP3s of varying bitrate, FLAC, WMV, WAV...all sorts.
I have duplicated files.
I have files all over the place, some in the approriate folder, some not.
Some are tagged, some are not.
Some are tagged incorrectly.

With that in mind, I have some questions:

- Are there any fantastic software programs that will help with the pain of this process with auto tagging, folder / album arranging, duplicate removal, etc...
- How have you guys arranged your music...by file type, then genre, then artist, then album, what?
- What do you use to normalise the volume on your music files? Anything that's still consistent between file types?
- Any other tips or comments for arranging digital music collections?

Many thanks :).
 
Organizing by file type sounds silly to me. Why would you split your collection like that? :/

Personally, I like to manually manage my music. So unfortunately can't recommend any kind of silver bullet to fix your tagging and sorting problems. All my music is organized by Artist then Album.

One idea I did try once was to arrange each Artist into letter groups - so A-C D-F and so on. It got irritating to find music after a while with that organization.
 
SiriusB said:
Organizing by file type sounds silly to me. Why would you split your collection like that? :/
Click to expand...

So that I can make sure I'm only uploading a certain file type to my media player.

For example, my car plays MP3s but not FLACs, so I wouldn't want to see an album name then have to check whether it's MP3, FLAC, or whatever or discover before going on a journey that I'd loaded a load of unplayable files onto my USB stick.

On the other hand I have a Sansa Clip+ that plays FLAC, and this is all I ever use on it. So I'd want to select from my FLAC files if I was running, going to the gym, on the train etc.
 
I tend to use MP3TagScanner to make sure my music is tagged correctly. It's a neat little app.

I spent a couple of weeks organising my music last year, it was painful but it's so nice to use now.

I don't split by file type, I just remember what's FLAC and what isn't.

So I have:

Music\Artist\Year - Album name\Trackno - Track name.ext

Or for multi-cd albums:

Music\Artist\Year - Album name\CDno\Trackno - track name.ext

So for example:
Music\Blind Guardian\1990 - Tales From the Twilight World\06 - Lost In The Twilight Hall.mp3
or
Music\Epica\2009 - The Classical Conspiracy\CD1\09 - Stabat Mater Dolorosa.flac

You could split it by extension easily enough, Music\FLAC\Epic\2009 - The Classical Conspiracy\CD1\09 - Stabat Mater Dolorosa.flac for instance.

MP3TagScanner will be able to name your music like that as long as it's tagged correctly. You'll have to go through and make sure the tagging is right first. It's a PITA, but worth it and the program makes tagging as painless as it can be. Once you've done it once it's easy to keep on top of.
 
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