large collection sticky?

[largo]

Would it be possible to create a "large collection" sticky? I'm having a hard time finding information on the best settings/best practices for large collections - I've got about 76K+ songs in my collection.

So far I've only found (paraphrasing), 'keep your directory structure simple; alphabetical by artist, then by album.'

Is there anything else? Particularly from a NooB perspective?

[ShinyJim]

I have around 46k tracks, and find Mediamonkey handles it easily. I don't know how it would cope with your 76k, but you could download the free version and give it a go;
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
It's great for manipulating tags too.

I religiously use the structure /<Artist>/<Album>/<Track #> - <Track Title>. I find Vista copes OK with this, but could be better at times. You could try dividing the artists into broad Genres;
<Genre>/<Artist>/<Album>/<Track #> - <Track Title>

[jjwa]

There is not one correct way of managing your collection.

But this topic should point you towards some tools to use.

Aside from those, I can recommend Total Commander. It has a lot of awesome features for managing any large collection of files (Multi-Rename Tool, Compare Directories, and a view where it shows all the files that are in a folder and it's subfolders as if they were all in the same folder (great for example to check your whole FLAC folder to see if any .mp3 files sneaked in there). And more .


Practices I would personally recommend:
1) BEFORE moving any newly aquired music into your collection, make sure the tags and filenames are correct. Otherwise you'll never know what stuff is or is not correct. You can keep all downloaded-but-not-ready stuff into a seperare folder. I have a \Music\Unsorted\ folder for this for example.

2) Pick one directory/file structure, and stick to it.
My structure looks like this:
\Music\Format*\Band\Releaseyear** ***Albumname\01. ***trackname.flac/mp3

*In my case, they are these folders:
FLAC Stereo (lossless)\
FLAC Surround (lossless 5.1)\
MP3\
Unsorted Music\ (downloaded but untagged and messy stuff. Not format-specific, because it's not sorted, or still has to be converted (I prefer to have everything in only FLAC or MP3, no other formats)).
** Having %YEAR% or (%YEAR%) in front of the names may look a bit ugly sometimes, but it has the serious advantage that now all your albums will be sorted chronologically . Great for artists/bands who have been around for a long time and/or have changed in style a lot over time.
*** You often see people use the "01. Bandname - trackname.mp3" format for files and "Artist - Albumname" for folders, but that means you are using the band name multiple times, because it's already used in the /Band/ folder. Especially with classical music, I ended up with files that had a file path that was too long, making some programs go crazy. Not naming the band/artist two or three times saved enough characters for me to fix most of my "filename too long" issues.

3) Limit the amounts of file formats. For example, use only .mp3 and .flac. Convert everything else to one of those (all lossless to flac, all lossy to .mp3). This way things like compatibility are a lot less complex. For example when you change to a different music program, need to convert things, or want to put music on a media device. No worries about 10 formats.

4) Limit the amount of files, where possible. Music collections are often scanned by one or multiple services. More files means longer scanning and sometimes a more cumbersome index/database. Remove junk you won't need, .nzb .par .sfv for example. Maybe remove .pls .m3u .cue etcetera, if you don't believe you will ever need or use them.

5) Replay Gain. This helps against crazy volume differences between songs from different source. For example, going from a classical track to a metal song can leave you with an ear-blasting volume increase. Especially if you sometimes listen to your music on shuffly/random, having your collection scanned and tagged with replay gain, can really help a lot.

6) Use a good music player. They can be very different in the way they browse the music. I love Foobar2000. Example of my setup. Foobar2000 website.
With the library viewer set up a 'by folder structure', and the feature of tabbed playlists, I find it really nice for using a huge collection (1.12TB, 80,7K songs).

[3R3]

Thanks for posting the "Large Collection 101"

I found I did all of the stuff on your list (3 weeks of tagging, ugh) and yes, foobar2k is even great for tagging.

Collection like this doesnt really qualify for _really_ large but I get "large" problems sometimes.
With the above tips you wont have any trouble though, promised.

8.259 Artists
2.770 Albums
26.744 Songs
194,16 GB (~ 3.016 hours)

3R3

[Negativecreep0]

hey, i have over 300 gigs of music all full cds with full art

I use TagandRename to get the proper tag info/art/songs
from amazon then I use media monkey to auto rename files into folders taht are in the format \artist\album\

[EasilyOdd]

Hey, just got Subsonic and still trying to figure how it works, works with iPhone/iPad and best practices.

What is the best practice for a large collection of compilation type discs for use in Subsonic?

I'm a large collection guy too. ~68K MP3 files that I've been tagging and renaming for years with MuscBrainz Picard.

I follow the folder format of ~/Artist/Album/Artist - Album - song number - Song Title.mp3 for single artist discs. I store all of that info in the tags also. I use a different format for compilation, soundtrack and other mix discs. That format is ~/Various Artists/Album/Album - song number - Artist - Song Title.mp3. I store all of that info in the tags as well, but I don't store the words "Various Artists" in the tags at all. I've done that for several changing reasons over the years, from NAS performance issues to the wife wanting easier folder browsing. Nothing is set in stone if I can find one solution that fit most of the needs.

Seeing how Subsonic scans the directory structure, I get a single "Various Artists" link. If I click on that I wait for a long time and get a giant list of the discs. I haven't tried it yet on the iPhone.

Just wondering what problems may come with this type of structure. Is it best for Subsonic to just get rid of the "Various Artists" folder and move the subfolders up a level?

Thanks in advance.

--EO

[tnt533]

I've got a 280 gig collection and for the most part do most of whats above. I would suggest another little known application that, if you spend the time to learn it's advanced functionality, is invaluable!

EasyTag

It can generate tags from file names and visa-versa. It does CDDB look up and can handle art if you need it to. The great thing about it is the fact that when dealing with large numbers of songs, you can load up a folder or recursive folder structure and selectively tag every file, with an artist name or genre for example, with one click.

Download and install it for windows in the normal fashion and it's usually included in your Linux distibution's software channels. For debian a "sudo apt-get install easytag" without the quotes will do it.

For the Linux users out there I would also suggest you take a hard look at Quod Libet.

It's might' powerful stuff, ya hear?

[ockymofo]

I have a "large" collection myself. Right about 4TB, I've found the best way to keep things organized is to have a consolidated "unsorted" folder. and then a "organized" folder. Inside the organized folder > Single Letters of the alphabet I.E. Folder named A, B, C, D, etc.. From there the artist name folder > album name folder - then mp3 file.

best way to keep music tagged in my opinion is using Music Organizer for os x.

[glenfiddich.xxl]

Hi,
i am running subsonic (4.6) on a virtual machine with windows 7 64bit (2 Cores with HT, 4GB Ram) on a dual quadcore xeon server with vmware esxi 5.
CPU and ramusage never goes beyond 25%.
i happen to have a collection of about 100k songs, 15k audioplays and 6k movies and my folder structure is first by media (audioplay, mp3, movies) then artist/album or filmtitle or author.
I've set the java memory usage to 512MB (wich never semms to used completly).
The media library is on an unraid NAS (about 85 MB/s throughput).

i know this is quite a big collection but even though i understand that subsonic cahes the directory and the files in the library to its database it takes more than 15 minutes to list ether on of the directories (audioplay / movies / mp3) ehen i'm using the webinterface.

any idea how i can speed things up a little?

thanks in advance ...

[BKKKPewsey]

i know this is quite a big collection but even though i understand that subsonic cahes the directory and the files in the library to its database it takes more than 15 minutes to list ether on of the directories (audioplay / movies / mp3) ehen i'm using the webinterface.

any idea how i can speed things up a little?

Try moving a sub-directory from the nas to the server and see how fast that is?
Looking at some of the posts here there does appear to a big performance hit using samba shares which may be your problem.
I would expect SS to take no more than 15 secs to populate the left frame.
I have over 72k songs and running SS on a WHS with a little atom cpu (2 cores ) and can access any song in my library
via web-interface in under 10 secs. (Its just cr*p at transcoding though )
One thing you need to be careful of though is with your video files.
Due to the way ffmpeg scans your files you do not want too many videos in a folder.
If you have your films in separate folders or in genre or actor etc sub folders that should not cause a problem.

[IbaIbaUrinCus]

I have a "large" collection myself. Right about 4TB, I've found the best way to keep things organized is to have a consolidated "unsorted" folder. and then a "organized" folder. Inside the organized folder > Single Letters of the alphabet I.E. Folder named A, B, C, D, etc.. From there the artist name folder > album name folder - then mp3 file.

best way to keep music tagged in my opinion is using Music Organizer for os x.

I have similar large collection and I use... root /, then letters A.B.C / and then just folders name put in right directory. No matter of artist or album because it isnt important as I use library inside players instead of manual searching in directory structure.

[zeroth]

My music Collection is right over 740 gigs and is 2300 artists, 8100 albums and over 100,000 songs. Subsonic handles this without issue. I'm very impressed.
My collections is sorted on one drive in the folders /Artist/Albums/Songs

But to like other people said. Tag your tracks properly. Take the time to make sure they are tagged and you'll be much happier with the end result.