How do you organise your music files?

[admin_exported]

All,

i'm preparing for moving to some kind of streaming solution, eg. sonos, linn, or cyrus if it launches in time. I'm struggling with the best way to organise my music collection on the nas.

I have all my cds ripped to flac. I also have mp3 versions of these (converted by foobar2000) that i've added to iTunes (so i can sync to the ipod and other portables). I also have a bunch of mp3s i've downloaded from various places. Essentially i have

x:musiciTunes

x:musicflac

So i don't have a single place where i can get all my music in whatever format is 'best'. iTunes has it all, but not always at it's highest quality, and 'flac' has only a subset. Of course i could create a third, 'master' directory which has it mixed up - flac when available, mp3 when not, but that seems like an administrative nightmare i could live without. I could just go for ditching flac in favour of apple lossless, and then itunes becomes that single repository, but i'm not a big fan of finding myself locked into a proprietary format.

Any suggestions from those that are already dealing with this?

Thanks

 

[Lee H]

I use MediaMonkey. It's designed to manage large collections as well as handling different formats. You can have a converged library, split them off in to formats or any other way you like. It won't handle Apple Lossless but will work with most other formats.

 

[Gerrardasnails]

mightyredchris:
All,

i'm preparing for moving to some kind of streaming solution, eg. sonos, linn, or cyrus if it launches in time. I'm struggling with the best way to organise my music collection on the nas.

I have all my cds ripped to flac. I also have mp3 versions of these (converted by foobar2000) that i've added to iTunes (so i can sync to the ipod and other portables). I also have a bunch of mp3s i've downloaded from various places. Essentially i have

x:musiciTunes

x:musicflac

So i don't have a single place where i can get all my music in whatever format is 'best'. iTunes has it all, but not always at it's highest quality, and 'flac' has only a subset. Of course i could create a third, 'master' directory which has it mixed up - flac when available, mp3 when not, but that seems like an administrative nightmare i could live without. I could just go for ditching flac in favour of apple lossless, and then itunes becomes that single repository, but i'm not a big fan of finding myself locked into a proprietary format.

Any suggestions from those that are already dealing with this?

Thanks

J River media centre. You pick which folders the library 'sees'.

 

[SteveR750]

Another J River user - its library is made up of files from wherever (mulitple locations) you have the files stored, which you control (unlike WMP for example that scans all drives and imports everything automatically).

For convenience I have one copy in a music folder on my hard drive, and one copy on an external HDD drive as a back up (all FLAC). The

 

[PJPro]

Take a look in my useful threads (see signature for link). There's a thread called "Audio File Hierarchies, Naming Conventions and Management Strategies" that might give you some pointers.

 

[The_Lhc]

It's worth pointing out that Sonos, should you go that way, will only see the top level directory. That is you could specify servernameMusic and it will play whatever it finds in all the subfolders but you CAN'T specify servernameMusicflac or iTunes individually, so in your case you'd end up with Sonos seeing two versions of whichever tracks are in both directories.

You could of course, share the two directories individually for Sonos, so on the PC or NAS (if it gives you the option, mine doesn't, stupid thing), share the Flac directory itself rather than the music directory and mount that on Sonos as servernameFlac. You wouldn't see the iTunes folder at in that case however.

 

[Anonymous]

I assume your computer is fast enough to convert on the fly. You can then have only one collection on the NAS at the best available quality, in whatever format - flac, mp3, - but NO duplicates, managed by, for instance, MediaMonkey. Whenever you want to sync something to an iThing it can convert it on the fly for you, following the rules you specify for that device, e.g "if flac then convert to 256 bit mp3", or whatever. You can specify rules for a memory sticks, cd writers, music players, whatever.

If you also want to stream, the main collection must be in a streamable/playable format of course.

 

[Anonymous]

MUSIC

+A

+ Aadvark

+ Album 1

+ Album2

+ Albatross

+B

+.

+Z

+Various

This allows network devices to browse either by folder or using their media management software.

Its 90% FLAC and 10% mp3 variable.

Should I need to transcode I have tversity mapped to the toplevel MUSIC directory (though this requires having the pc on).

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all the info so far. I downloaded MediaMonkey and will have a play around with it. Initial impression is very favourable.

 

[Anonymous]

edsib1:
MUSIC

+A

+ Aadvark

+ Album 1

+ Album2

+ Albatross

+B

+.

+Z

+Various

This allows network devices to browse either by folder or using their media management software.

Its 90% FLAC and 10% mp3 variable.

Good system. Problem is what to do with classical music, I guess many people would prefer composer > work > artist, Plus that in the databases for adding tags composer is used in the (album) artist field. Nice of MediaMonkey Gold is that you can set up filters (classical, modern) each with a different layout.

 

[kevinJ]

I use Mediamonkey with an ASIO plugin on an old windows XP laptop.

I put all my music in a folder called "music" (not so hard to see why it's called like that

)
Then I made a folder for FLAC and one for MP3.
Every cd I have is storred like this: MusicFLACArtistCd title
For Tracknames I use: tracknumber - artist - tracktitle

In Mediamonkey it's very easy to make all the filenames the same. ("Auto-organize files" and set them how you want them to look like)

 

[Anonymous]

Spent a bit of time mucking around with this last night. @KevinJ - your layout sounds similar to mine, and this works fine with MediaMonkey (thanks to everyone who suggested that) - i can find everything in one place.

However, my goal for my main listening is to not have a pc switched on - simply streaming the files directly from the nas. @the_lhc - that information is most useful.

I'm also trying to make this easy to use for two smallish kids - i don't want them having to know what is in mp3, what's in flac etc. I had hoped to be able to have some kind of 'mixed' structure, organised by artist/album with some mp3, some flac etc. Just struggling to get my head around how best to do it.

 

[Anonymous]

You probably do not have the Gold version of MediaMonkey yet (it is cheap, but note that version4 is coming out soon it seems - perhaps with dlna and streaming), but the filters are very useful in that version. You can make filters based on tags, file location etc, so to select only mp3 or flac (but not of course 'if there is a flac version do not show the mp3 version'), als also make a 'kid music' filter (if you tag the files with some text to select on, like in the genre field).

Still see no compelling reason to store duplicates and have 2 versions in the database/main storage folder.

 

[The_Lhc]

mightyredchris:However, my goal for my main listening is to not have a pc switched on - simply streaming the files directly from the nas. @the_lhc - that information is most useful.

NP, to be honest it's the main reason why I don't bother organising my music I just have the whole lot in one flat directory, Sonos will index it all from the tags, so there's really no benefit sorting them into subdirectories from that point of view.

It may help if you're manually try to find stuff from a PC though, as I've discovered recently...

 

[BillDay66]

mightyredchris:
I could just go for ditching flac in favour of apple lossless, and then itunes becomes that single repository, but i'm not a big fan of finding myself locked into a proprietary format.

Go with Itunes. You wouldnt be 'locked' into ALAC as still lossless and can easily be converted back to any format you like - or back up your flacs into an archive as well if you really want to keep them. Seems easiest solution to me

 

[DavieCee]

BillDay66:mightyredchris:
I could just go for ditching flac in favour of apple lossless, and then itunes becomes that single repository, but i'm not a big fan of finding myself locked into a proprietary format.

Go with Itunes. You wouldnt be 'locked' into ALAC as still lossless and can easily be converted back to any format you like - or back up your flacs into an archive as well if you really want to keep them. Seems easiest solution to me

Works for me but then I am on Mac with the original FLACs retained for future use if the hardware/software catches up (although I can't hear any difference above 312 kbps anyway). Others may feel differently.

 

[Anonymous]

One of the reasons for splitting artists into sub-directories A,B,C...etc is for speed, to allow a connecting device to browse by folder.

Without this my Phillips Streamium can get a bit slow over wifi once u start getting big numbers - currently have around 30,000 songs ripped on NAS.

 

[Anonymous]

After a lot of tinkering around, i've got a plan. I realise this is going to open me up for ridicule and accusations of apple-fanboy status but what i'm going to do is convert all my flac to apple lossless (alac). I'll then import all these into iTunes and having deleted all the mp3 version of the same files, i'll have a single place (x:iTunes) with *all* my music on it. Some of it will be alac, and some mp3, but nobody else will have to care. The wife and kids all know iTunes, so that satisfies two of my requirements. In addition, i just noticed that there's the option to have the sync convert my alac files into aac on copy to ipod, so i don't have to worry about only being able to get a much smaller number of tracks onto the ipods... I'm confident that whatever streamer i go for, it'll support alac.

If in future i decide to ditch apple then i'll have to convert from alac to something else, but the reality is that i'm unlikely to ditch my ipod any time soon.

Now all i've got to do is convert... 24 hours gone, 17 remaining...

Thanks to everyone who responded. Didn't have these problems with vinyl

 

[DavieCee]

mightyredchris:
Didn't have these problems with vinyl

Your iPod plays vinyl?

 

[Anonymous]

an update on this thread. I converted all my flac to alac, and imported them into itunes. Sounds easy, but iTunes was not very happy with the volume i imported, so i had to have several goes at it. And then i had to go remove all the duplicates because the mp3 versions of the same songs were already in there. That was fun. Then i had to go fix up playlists - removing foo.mp3 and replacing it with foo.alac. [Big Sigh]. Finally i've got to dump it onto the various ipods around here, and that effectively means wiping and re-copying everything.

Moral of the tale: think carefully about how you will access your ripped music *before* you rip it all

 

[manicm]

BillDay66:mightyredchris:

I could just go for ditching flac in favour of apple lossless, and then itunes becomes that single repository, but i'm not a big fan of finding myself locked into a proprietary format.

Go with Itunes. You wouldnt be 'locked' into ALAC as still lossless and can easily be converted back to any format you like - or back up your flacs into an archive as well if you really want to keep them. Seems easiest solution to me

dbPoweramp or others might unpack back to WAV but not iTunes in my experience. Converting WAV -> ALAC -> WAV in iTunes does sound like the original WAV. iTunes just re-converts every time.

If one needs to unpack back to WAV then seriously consider FLAC.

 

[manicm]

mightyredchris:

an update on this thread. I converted all my flac to alac, and imported them into itunes. Sounds easy, but iTunes was not very happy with the volume i imported, so i had to have several goes at it. And then i had to go remove all the duplicates because the mp3 versions of the same songs were already in there. That was fun. Then i had to go fix up playlists - removing foo.mp3 and replacing it with foo.alac. [Big Sigh]. Finally i've got to dump it onto the various ipods around here, and that effectively means wiping and re-copying everything.

Moral of the tale: think carefully about how you will access your ripped music *before* you rip it all

I think dbPoweramp does bit-perfect conversions. But I would not bet a cat for back-conversion on iTunes (or WMP for that matter), even for lossless formats.

 

[Anonymous]

Always keep a separate FLAC master folder just in case you get problems with ALAC/itunes. Don't delete the FLACS just yet...

There is a great folder/file compare program called BeyondCompare that compares and synchronises folders and is perfect for large music folder systems. Perfect for such scenarios, and given the cheap nature of sata drives these days, an essential archive.

 

[Anonymous]

I personally do not like the way many media player organise music until I found XBMC, I keep all my music in folders, I can recall the software I use for rippiing now but it allow me set up each folder as it rips in this style Artist - Album Title, I prefer each album to have its own stand alone folder.

This music is then stored on an external USB 2TB HD (Buffalo Drive)

If you want to sub devide in the drive such as Artist A, B, C and so on that is helpful I have done that.

With XBMC you can search and it is very fast to respond pressing control + then type artists name EG MET will jump to Metallica or first group of artists starting MET.

XBMC also allow you to have many source drives and folders with no speed issues.

For me this works as I like to play albums in one hit, you can do so much more with it but I have never bothered.

For playlists I used Spotify or Grooveshark online as I have unlimited BB.

http://xbmc.org/

 

[hearcandy]

I been a fan of MP3 Deluxe for many years. Mainly beacuse of the Mufin Technology for making connections between tracks using analysis.