Organize your music

[trickydick]

Alot of people have asked my how have such an organized collection of music. I figured I'd post about it for you all:
Its taken a while for me to organize my music and I've used a few tools to get me what I wanted. First and for most, I put all my music in a Music_unprovisioned folder. As I "provisioned " each album it was placed in a Music folder. This way I know what is competed and what has not.

Provisioning:
Originally I used Windows Media Player to just get the id3 tags (genre, artist etc). At the time this was the fastest method and it accessed everything from online. The only thing I didn;t like is it worte alot of artitists with their feat artist. WMP did not chang emy folder structure though just the id tags.

To this I first used a tool called id3sync to move all my music in the correct folder structure.
http://id3sync.meista.de/download.html
The site is still up, but not sure the downloads work. Here is a link to my server:
http://www.trickysuniverse.com/downloads/id3-sync-1.3.1.msi

This tool will read the file name and id3 tags and you can preset the determined name to use. I used this as the new scheme:

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%A\%L\%A - %L - %N - %T

This means the music will be places in the "<Artist folder>\<Album folder>\<Artist> - <Album> - <2 digit Track number> - <Song Title>"

NOTE: This tools does however require .net framework 1.1. If you use IIS rewrite to frontend subsonic, don't install it on the same machine

After a few months of using this tool, I came across another one that not only can rename files, but can sync with Amazon Databae to pull music details. Its called mp3tag v2.48
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html

Awesome tool Once you collect all you music in it, you can do a mass cleanup and just have the tool just rename all at once, or select individual collections of music and name them while moving them into a new folder structure. To do this highlight the music you want to change then go to Convert --> Tag to filename, paste this in the format settings

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%artist%\(%year%) %album%\%artist% - %album% - $num(%track%,2) - %title%

then hit OK. Its fast

Now this won't populate correctly if each artist in the album is different (for instance eminem feat dr. dre, will be in a different folder than the eninem artisit folder), you have to clean up the artist names and albums

Aditionally I created genre folders in the root of my music directory and placed the artist in those, that way i have a way of selected a genre in subsonic as you can see in the drop down

[eblade]

umm.. if you have a filename format

Artist - Album - Track - Title.mp3

doesn't that read just like that in Subsonic, with an excessively long title?

[trickydick]

True, but that doesn't mean your music is organized. U could have all ur music in one folder like itunes put them, and subsonic organizes it by id3 tags. It for a a little hard to browse ur music physically. I always prefer to match the id3 tags to the folder structure. Believe be its a lot easier to maintain

[eblade]

My problem, is that Subsonic -doesn't- use the ID3 tags, for anything, and expects that all the information will be in the path name, and then it displays the song name as the final bit of the path, which if you want to keep your basic tag information in the filename as well, then you end up with a ridiculously long song name showing for the songs. Unless Subsonic strips off everything after the last - when displaying a song name? (i've never really tried this)

[trickydick]

Ur right what was I thinking, subsonic does not organize by id3 tags....that is why I posted this. The tools above will change/rename ur files and folders by id3. So if ur already have the tags all filled out just run mp3tag and it will orginizr them all in the structure I stated before! Why are dicussing this? Ur looking for the same end result

[eblade]

Yeah, I was just wondering if by doing this, you'll see your music song titles in Subsonic as "Artist - Album - Track - Song Name", which is what I've assumed, but I've never tried it.

[BKKKPewsey]

My problem, is that Subsonic -doesn't- use the ID3 tags, for anything, and expects that all the information will be in the path name,

Artist - from Directory Name
Album - from Directory Name
Track No. - from ID TAG
Song Title - from ID TAG
Year - from ID TAG
Genre - from ID TAG

In the playlist view ALL the info is derived from the ID tags


Thank you for sharing Tricky, in fact you beat me to a similar post I was (am) about to make using the auto-organise file command within Mediamonkey.
I think it would be a good idea to collect all the posts together and then we could add the content to the wiki.
So if any users have any tricks/tips, favourite tagging programs and just importantly any pitfalls to avoid PLEASE POST

[BKKKPewsey]

As Tricky has set the ball rolling I thought I would post on how I automatically add my music into the correct format using Mediamonkey (MM)
I have my directory structure in the format music\alphabet letter\Artist\Year - Album\artist - track# title
eg

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\Music\B\Beatles\1963 - Please Please Me\Beatles - 01 I Saw Her Standing There.ext


This was before I discovered Subsonic so adding my media to SS was relatively painless.
If there is more than 1 disc for the album than the format is \Year - Album\CD #\tracks

To achieve this I use the following mask in the auto-organise files feature within MM

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\\my-server\Music\$if($left($RemovePrefix(<Album Artist>),1)>=0,#,$left($RemovePrefix(<Album Artist>),1))\$if(<Disc#>,<Album Artist>,)\$if(<Disc#>,$if(<Year>,<Year> - ,)<Album>,\<Album Artist>)\$if(<Disc#>,CD<Disc#>,$if(<Year>,<Year> - ,)<Album>)\<Artist> - <Track#>. <Title>

Note the above mask will put any artist that starts with a number eg 10cc into the # directory and if the year has not been tagged then it ignores it (no years 0000 )
It will also create multiple cd (disc) albums IF you tag the disc no.
(Warning I make sure that single disc albums have a blank disc no. )
No doubt there are more refined ways of using the masks and if you know than please share.
NOW THIS IS IMPORTANT
Make sure that ALL your tags are correct before trying to use this and note I use Album Artist - this gets over the problem where some tracks may have guest artists but the album artist is the main artist.
If you use the mask without ensuring your tags are correct your music could end up anywhere.
MM has a feature of being able to move or copy so I suggest using copy while testing.
You can obviously adapt the mask to suit your requirements and also use other fields such as genre (which I often use for compilations)

I use a number of different masks for my classical music and compilation albums (various artists) but the above mask works for me for 90% of my collection.

Hope it helps and remember to post YOUR organisation ideas


EDIT: MM has a similar feature to SS in that you can ignore prefix's eg: "The", so "The Beatles" get added under "B" and not "T"

[trickydick]

To be real specific, I do a lot to ensure my music is correct. Media monkey is a great tool and has a lot of features. I don't like the interface though. If u load all ur music in MM or Mp3tag, it will display what is missing I the tags. This how I find and fix them:

1. load all ur music in mp3tag
2. Set the columns up so u get the list of filename ¦ artist ¦ album ¦ track ¦ title ¦ path.
3. Click any of the columns to organize them alphabetically, doesn't matter what column becuz the will show u what is empty. If ur music is physically in one location with no sub folders, and are not named very well, I would organize by artist to see what albums come up. If u get blank artist tags, u will need to manually type them in, if u know them. If u don't use the amazon button to search amazon.com frtor the song title.
4. Keep organizing them by columns until they are no longer empty
5. If no or most of your music has tags but have a sort of good filename, you can use the convert tag to filename option. Remember u can select multiple files at once. Select as many of the same artists and make sure they are all spelt the same. U can tell becuse the more u select together, the left hand side will change to <keep>, that's where u can force a change across all.
6. Another way to do it is oraganize by artist and run a command to move them into a single folder. Then work each artist at a time.
7. What I've found useful is just run the tool to see how much it moves files, it may screw up ur whole collection in organization, but its a start.

Good luck

[eblade]

ok, i did a little messing around.

Discovery: Directories that start with "." in the name, per the Unix tradition, are ignored by the music indexer. I'd guess it likely goes for files, as well. This means that album names that start with ellipses, such as "...And Justice For All" need to be dealt with. I know that's probably not all that common.

Anyway, I do see it actually using the tag information for some stuff, which is contrary to what -all- the stuff i've read about Subsonic says. So, that's a good thing. It's still archaic, though, that it doesn't use it for artist and album .. nor does it use any of the other common tags.

[trickydick]

Subsonic does pull some id3 tag info like the year and even genre. I'm curious if the code is able to pull the other important info instead of the directory structure? Worth a try....

[Beowolf]

i am going to test this tonight, it may help with some problems i am having atm

[bushman4]

According to Sindre's to-do list, the changes he has made for version 4.7 so far include a meta-tag database... It will be interesting to see how and for what it is implemented...

Glenn

[Beowolf]

http://id3sync.meista.de/download.html doesnt download

[MadEvil]

Hi,

i used for Audio-Media Checkin this tool for years, it can restructure, tag and edit your music libary

http://www.mediamonkey.com/information/free



i used this for my Libary as best

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%artist%\[%year%] %album%\Disk$num(%number%,1)\$num(%track%,2) %artist% - %title%.%suffix%


best regards