What is the best method for organizing folders?

[s-one]

This probably has been beaten to death but I can't find it anywhere. Anyhow, I'm preparing my cd collection for the soon to come X5 and wasn't sure on the best method for creating the folder tree. Can you guys provide examples that you have been happy with? Also folder and file names. Thanks much.

[caliaa]

I use:

genre>letter>artist>year album/track - song
genre>letter>artist>fillers>song
genre>letter>artist>year show>track - song
genre>letter>artist>others>date>track

When you have thousands of songs you have to sort your songs by genre. I use media monkey to tag them. And then if I want all song by one artist, I create a playlist the song and sort them by name.

It's way easier for me to find my songs like this, than it'd be using tags

[s-one]

Thanks caliaa

[bradavon]

I use:

Artist\Album

Nice and simple. I don't like putting music in genres as A: It can be hard to define some music and B: I just decide then and there who I want to listen to.

If it comes to the time I need to spilt them up more I'll add an alphabet letter to the start.

[Darkroom]

It differs according to your music, preferences and listening habits.

I agree with Bravandon that too much cathegorising is not a good idea, especially since you don't have a search in x5. I do keep a couple of cathegories, though - like I keep Jazz and Techno separate from the huge cathegory of 'Diverse'.

You may want to think it in terms of playability rather than genres. I keep the 'Serious' music separate, so that I can at any time put the 'Diverse' on random play for background music.

Also, I keep new music in a separate folder, and after one listening decided if I want to keep it or erase it (Or re-DL it because it was bad quality - I'[m not sure if we're supposed to say anything about DL here)

I also have separated long DJ mixes, and some other stuff. This basic structure works very well for me, but I change things from time to time to suit my preferences at the time.

Edited to add: I also keep my FLACs all in one place. The files are so big that I cannot have all of them in the player all the time, and they are easier to rotate.

Also, the structure on you computer's HDD may be somewhat different from X5, as you will probably end up having much more music than will fit in you DAP. At least for me, the point of HDD-DAP is not to have all my music with me, but to have a sufficient selection and sufficient bitrate.

I also rely heavily on playlists to make it play just the way I like.

[oVerCaffeinated]

genre/artist/year-album/artist-album-01-track.mp3

[bradavon]

Also, the structure on you computer's HDD may be somewhat different from X5, as you will probably end up having much more music than will fit in you DAP. At least for me, the point of HDD-DAP is not to have all my music with me, but to have a sufficient selection and sufficient bitrate.
Exactly why you'd need to put your entire music collection on one time is beyond me.

[s-one]

I'm kinda wondering about what bradavon is saying. An example is Jazz artist Path Metheny will have an album with modern jazz tracks along with classic ones. I wouldn't want to split the ablum into two different genre folders ie: Jazz Modern > Pat Metheny > Album 1 > track2.mp3 and Jazz Classics > Pat Metheny > Album 1 > track1.mp3. So I get what bradavon is saying. Thus, I should just let my custom play lists define the genres?

[Darkroom]

I think that's the thing... There is no one best method to organize files, it's an individual thing. Like I would personally never sort artists under alphabet, as mostly I need to browse through my files before I can decide what I want to listen to - But I also know that for many people this kind of organization works.

You should not organize your files according to any post in threads like this, but rather pick pointers to create your own organization; and it may well be that whatever works for Brad, won't work for you - and the other way around.

[bradavon]

At the end of the day it's completely down to personal preference. I'm not keen on putting them by alphabet also for the same reason.

I may have to if the list gets to long though.

[Fido]

Ok, one thing is that filenames should be
Track# - Track Name.ext
Do not put artist before track number or you won't be able to see the entire track name. Luckily MP3Tag has an autonaming feature so it only took about a minute to rename my 2000+ song library. Although now I'm seeing the benifits of an ID3Tag database (displaying song names regardless of filename) it's only a small nuisance.

[bradavon]

It's only a nuisance if all your filenames are wrong (which personally I couldn't stand in the first place). If you get in the habit it shouldn't be an issue.

[lonechicken]

BTW, I've been doing some experiments with my old M3 and my new X5. Subfolder boundary is unpredictable if you have a folder outside of the \Music folder and start from that other folder.

For example, say I have \Music folder with all the normal genres, but off of the root, I also have an \Oldies folder that I don't want to mix with the other genres:
\Music
\Music\Rap
\Music\Rock
\Oldies
\Oldies\Motown

If I set it to a subfolder boundary, then turn on shuffle and start playing from within the \Oldies folder, it often "drops out" of that folder and goes into the \Music folder.

[Lone]

I wrote this up a while ago, it's got a number of different methods (many mentioned on this thread) to sorting with folders.

http://www.dapreview.net/content.php?article.127