Optimal Folder Structure

[Jeffajam]

Hey,

I'm about to purchase a lifelong licence to get away from the evil that is Google Play Music but need to rearrange how my music is organised. Is "/artist/album/tracknumber. songname.flac" the best way to organise my albums? How would Subsonic display compilation albums using this method?

Any input from current users would be great as I don't really want to have to rearrange twice!

[acroyear]

How it displays a compilation/soundtrack depends on the 'artist' you put it under. if you put it under a generic artist like 'Various Artists' or 'Soundtracks', then that is what it will be found under in the folder.

Once a file is loaded the player will look at and show the ID3 information in the file, no matter where in the folder structure it is. So if you have the soundtrack for Better Off Dead and you have it in a "80s Soundtracks" folder, you would find Howard Jones's Like To Get To Know You Well in Indexes->#->80s Soundtracks->Better Off Dead. However, once you started playing it, it would look at the ID3 and in the "Now Playing" part of the page, show "Howard Jones".

The "Indexes" is your folder structure as-is. Best to put your files where you want or expect to find them later.

Some apps (like SubFire, end shameless plug ) will allow you to see the folder structure as-is AND view it by artist-album regardless of the folder structure. Others only can handle one or the other (folder structure as-is OR artist according to ID3). The standard android app only goes by folder structure or the album views that the web ui's home page supports (recently added, recently played, etc).

In some of my folders, I keep the artists sorted at the top level, like my "Rock AOR" has folders for Pink Floyd, Rush, Kansas, etc. The basic Artist/Album structure that you describe.

In other cases, it is more complex. My folk-celt collection (which is HUGE, admittedly) is divided up by national style, so I have under it "Irish", "Scottish", "Breton", "DC Local", and "New Age" (the latter for artists like Enya), and then more divisions under that based on families of performers. E.g., I have a 'Fraser' folder under Scottish for everything related to Scottish fiddler Alastair Fraser who has had many collaborations over the years. Complex, but that is how I think about my celtic collection, so that is where I expect to find the file, so that is where I put it.

So really, there is no set rule. Put it where you expect to find it later. You may find in a deeper structure like I describe for my Celtic collection, the transitional folders that the "Artist Info" is wrong, but over time you can learn to ignore it. When SubFire loads artist info, it only does it for the song currently playing so it always gets it right (well, almost always).

[toolman]

In the years I have been using Subsonic I found the folderstructure A B C D E etc. works best for me.
So it would turn out like B / Beatles / Album / song1 song2 song3 etc.
For Albums with multiple volumes my structure looks like B / Beatles / Album Disc1 / song1 song2 song3 , B / Beatles / Album Disc2 / song1 song2 song3.

If you got all your tags right you won't be having any problems finding your songs. Even if they are in folders with albums by various artists.
Only downside on Subsonic is that it can't handle genretags with multiple genres in it. Putting "New Age - Downtempo - Instrumental " in the genretag of one song will result in Subsonic creating a new genre in the database called New Age - Downtempo - Instrumental .
But I guess any structure is fine as long as you know where you put your songs and how you organized them.
The best advice however IIMHO is: Make sure you got your tags right for each and every song.

[acroyear]

A "bug" I found is that if you have your tags wrong, but the file is already scanned, and you fix the tags, you need to get Subsonic to read the whole folder again to get it to notice. So say I have a spelling mistake in Yes / The Yes Album / Yours is No Disgrace, where the ID3 title is Yours is Not Disgrace. I might fix it, but the ID3 in the Subsonic cache is still holding on to the wrong version. No matter how much i 'touch' the mp3 file, Subsonic won't notice the change.

To fix it, rename the folder itself to something else, do the rescan, then rename it back and rescan it again. Then hit the 'clean up' link. After all that, it will have read and cached the corrected version.

I don't bother with alphabetical single-letter root folders because the Index feature already handles that organization for me.

[toolman]

@Acroyear
I use the alphabetical single-letter root folders as a quick way to fix that bug.
In your example I just have to disable the Y-folder in Musicfolders, do a scan, clean up the database. enably the Y-folder again and rescan the folders.
FYI:
Your comments and "corrections" begin to become quite annoying.
I notice that on almost every posting here you are blatantly promoting your add-on to Subsonic and in general claiming that you know best.
Just saying.
Not that I care, I have a life.

[Jeffajam]

Thanks for the replies, lots of recommendations.

So basically as long as I have "artist/album/track" somewhere in the folder structure everything will work fine? Just asking, is there anyway for it to organise it by tag rather than folder structure?

[acroyear]

Subsonic doesn't do any automatic adjustment/organization; it doesn't move your files, it just reads them. In scanning the files, it caches the genre and you can use the home page to find albums with songs from a particular genre.

A tool like http://www.musiczen.org/ might be what you're looking for in cleaning up your file directory structure to a personal ideal.