I figure most here probably have curated a pretty healthy library of music, whether digital only, physical digital, or physical analog. What storage solutions or hacks have you come up with for your library? How do you organize? Genre? Artist A-Z? Era? Bit rate?
I personally have a record stand with 6 square cube spaces for storing vinyl, sorted by genre, then Artist A-Z. A folder holds all of my CDs, which haven’t been used for over a decade. For digital, I’ve just left it it the default folders created, which is by artist then album. Unfortunately, when an album contains multiple artists, it splits the album and makes it harder to just go and listen to a complete album. I know there are programs out there to help, so perhaps I can learn a thing or two here from you masters of organization and curation.
I’m all digital. Everything is on the Roon Core or my PC. The CD’s went in the recycle a year ago, and I’ve never had other media (since the 1980’s I mean, lol). But I mostly stream from Qobuz.
The “Roon Favorites” and digital FLaC on tbe Core are in the same library, and they are organized Alphabetically by Artist/Album Artist.
I’m fully digital these days. I do have a CD collection but it’s boxed up and put away as Ive ripped everything. Folder structure I do a bit differently then what I’ve seen other people do. First of all a little background, I predominantly listen to Japanese music and have for the last 15 years I do have some western music but not something I actively seek out. So with that said first off I sort into region folders (NA, Europe, Asia, etc.) then from there everything is sorted Into release year. I format each release into this template
[year.month.day] artist - album name [music format]
This way I can easily find a release from a specific date as well as easily identify the format.
For searching out everything a artist has done or a specific release I will just search with a index program like everything or use roon
I have a mixture of digital, CD and vinyl music. Digital is organized in folders by artist and album and so on. I used a program called MusicBrainz Picard to tidy, organize and correctly tag everything after my last and hopefully final digitising of my cd collection.
CD’s are currently in a set of boxes, partly to save space and partly because I don’t have a CD player at present. I would like one so someday… My vinal records are organised the same way I organise books and is a little esoteric. They are arranged in groups. In each group it is alphabetical but the groups themselves are according to how I remember the music - period of life, thematic, style all play a role. This way if I want to find one I can do so by remembering what else I was listening to when I got that album. It sounds a bit odd I know but it works for me
The old various artists / multiple artist conundrum. I really prefer things that let me search via the file structure I created with Artist > Album. This makes those outliers more of a rename and move the folder where you want it type task.
If it tries to read artists most of the rap and hip hop has like 10 artist entries as collaborations are so common. And gosh forbid you get a track from the old download days where the data is all just promo sites.
I have some vinyl but its a small collection so I don’t really have a system there, flipping the records is part of the charm. I recently rediscovered my cassettes but that’s just a big box filled with cassette tapes.
Main collection is digital, all my CD’s are ripped in a box. I used to do my filing based on genre, artist, album but that’s a pain with all the crossovers. Now I just file artist - album, the compilations go under album artist ‘various artists’, they still have their real names under track artist. I used to spend a lot of time aligning the meta-data, making sure it show nice in my player. These days I have Roon and I just put it in the artist-album format and Roon takes care of everything else.
edit: maybe worth adding I rip with EAC and have paid for GD3 metadata plugin, this way 99% of my albums immediately get clean metadata and album covers.
My physical collection is very small so there’s no need for comprehensive organization there.
I organize my digital collections by folders, starting from artist, to albums, then to CDs (if the album contains multiple CDs): [artist] > [album] > [CD1], [CD2], …
Collab and split albums usually go in their separate folders if I have any albums from multiple artists in my collection. Various Artists albums go in their own folder. I search through file directories and just go off by memory whenever I need to find something.
I’m trying to import an album in 5.1 DVD-Audio into itunes but just realized that it doesn’t support multichannel tracks natively. That’s so dumb. Apple pushes their dolby atmos yet doesn’t even support it in their native music app. 🤦 Anyway, just a little rant. I hope it gets updated eventually.
I have about 1,000 physical CDs and a digital collection approaching 3,500 albums.
CDs are sorted by artist and chronologically within each artist. All genres are kept together except for classical. Classical is organized by Conductor or Soloist. I’m constantly buying/selling/trading CDs so it’s not a static collection.
My digital collection is almost entirely my own rips. Over the last year I have also started doing complete scans of all the artwork. Roon has a nice feature where it can detect a PDF in the album directory and presents a download link within the Roon app. This means I can peruse all the artwork, liner notes, credits and lyrics of the original CD on my iPad while listening to an album.
A few things I picked up while re-ripping and resorting my local library and files.
Everyone has their own naming scheme. Use what works for you. For me folder order was Artist > Album > Music Files. Multi discs I treated as their own album so “Best of, Disc 1” “Best of, Disc 2”. Music files were “Track##. TrackTitle”
Do not be afraid to tweak what you need. I have a few tracks that are in different versions, live, acoustic, remix. ID databases have these all just by the song name so i had to go in and add (acoustic) to differentiate.
Take care of the tags, have something like mp3tag do the work. Doesnt matter if youre using a database reference or doing it all manually. Once you have the track, track #, artist, and albums tags in, then you can automate everything else. A lot of video game soundtracks have 80+ tracks. It was real easy to look that up and get the tags, then i used mp3tag to convert the filenames to the ##. TrackTitle format. 2 clicks eliminate the need to click each file and type in the names. I dont know how many hours this saved.
Album art had my ocd going. I didn’t care much for specific sizes but I wanted everything square. This led to a bunch of time with me in paint stretching s 600x598 image to a square 600x600. The built in album art finder was good for 75% of things, even if the best artwork was from the rare canadian 12" vinyl version. But iTunes Artwork Finder by Ben Dodson and good googling got me the rest of the way there.
Nothing is perfect. I so wanted everything to be in its own album folder but the ramshack over the years of one offs, shady datpiff downloads, protected wma files made for a bunch of “misc” folders under a few artists. Sorting these out and googling their albums took the most time. I had one album where everything was just named “0”.
Hidden files. Windows, amazon and some downloads put a bunch of hidden thumb, folder, and album art files in the music folders. These were not only hidden, but marked as system files. I saw that not all my art was displaying what i picked and on my lumin it had these extra innate files. Showing hidden files didnt show them but i had to change windows setting to show system files. This was an extra few hours of going folder by folder and deleting these. Huge pia.
Protected files. Way way back before knowing better, I used Windows Media Player. WMP always made it seem like you wanted to put protection (awful drm) on your ripped music. Well no. This fucks things up. Not only can they only be used on the original ripping machine, they can become an issue to delete. I couldnt convert them or delete them off my hard drive. Selecting them bogs down the pc and you cant look at properties or anything. You can sometimes delete them but its a gamble if itll work or not. Once i know all is well and backed up i am going to format the drive to get rid of that stain. More for library management but avoid any drm “protection” options for anything.
Double check yourself. As youre doing things give it a once over before moving on. Its real easy to screw up doing this type of mass tedium. I created 3 copies of my library. An original untouched, a copy of that untouched, and an edit version. This way i always have a sturdy backup and a dedicated work spot. I only needed to dive into the backups once after an accidental delete but it was good to have. And if anything didnt convert right you can go back and redo it. Eventually that edit will be copied and become the final definitive library.
Take breaks. My wrists and fingers got sore throughout my time working on this. Age creeping up and a reminder of repetitive stress.
Besides that wma lossy was converted to mp3, lossless wma is flac, mp4a i kept as is (i need to check if its lossless, maybe ill make those flac if so) wav > flac, dsd/dsf was made flac with original file kept under it’s own folder. Cutting down on fringe formats makes it so my devices can all read everything. My cowon amd lumin now show everything so nice! The microsoft Sync in my car is just lost. No matter what options i choose it tries to get its own info and fails. For J Dilla it just shows a generic “Urban” album art, some things that had art no longer show anything, its a mix of hard file names and tags displayed on screen, it wont even show artists despite tags. It just sucks. I even formatted that thumb drive to make sure all the old bs was wiped out. At this point im going to ignore it.
Going from flac 7 to flac 5 and adding all the artwork added an extra 10-12 GB. I figured flac 5 is the default so just go with it this time. exfat and ntfs trade blows with read speed depending on the day. Exfat also loved to say it would take 15 hours to transfer all my files but while ntsf would say 2. Both were about the same 2.5-3.5 hours in real life tests. Jury is still out on what the lumin and network reads faster but it seems it depends on the day.
Some of these are still very fresh for me as I ripped most of my shit during Covid lockdown. Your number 3 is a good suggestions and you’re right, would have saved a lot of time.
No idea why your number 7 is the way it is, maybe something specific with your settings? All my files ripped fine without any kind of protection.
7 was for cds i ripped in the far past and i did not have the cd to re-rip. A lot of those were borrowing a cd from a friend and ripping using windows media player before giving the cd back. WMP i think defaulted to giving the file protection which was basically bad DRM. It would break things down the line.
This was before i knew better but is a warning to just avoid those type of things going forward.
For people using any linux desktop you can also try MusicBrainz Picard which is an awesome gui for sorting, tagging, adding cover art and generally getting to grips with a music collection on disk.
Yes, I have submitted all my rips. I was thinking about you as i was doing this all. It gives me a real appreciation of how much further you go… My brain would break
Anything i do not have a cd for i just had to match google searches and other sources. A few albums i had different track orders for but i went with the majority in those cases.
