Ask Lemmy

I just put all my files into folders by language. Everything else is done with the music player with any playlists exported to m3u.

I didn't think OP meant physical.

How I keep my physical music files.

I don't. Every album goes in the ~/Music folder. I don't use playlists unless you count albums as playlists.

Um, do you mean discs and albums? Because that's physical media.

Anything else is bits.

Alphabetic by artist/band name and then chronological.

I assume you mean digital files. I keep them all lumped together in a folder. I only have around 1,300 songs, since I only download the specific songs I'm looking for and not entire albums.

I organize my playlist by mood or use. "Working" is high bpm and general upbeat motivating things, "Singing" is things my middle aged ass sings along with when drunk or otherwise chemically enhanced, "Sadness" is the most soul crushingly painful songs that have lyrics I directly relate to, "Sexy time" is for when your mom or anyone else here's mom visits... the usual.

I have a quite large music library.

General music folder is organized by artist name, alphabetically.

Within each artist folder I organize albuns by year.

Each track is numbered in the file name itself.

Extra data goes into the file tag, readable by my music player.

No playlists. And for the files I use the default settings of beets: Artist/Album/01 Name of the song. Picard is good too.

Very old school, directories for albums. Filenames begin with 01-, 02-, etc so they play in the right order. "Playlists" lol. A few shell scripts to play specific albums maybe with a volume adjustment.

Picard musicbrainz + jellyfin + feinshin + lidarr

Works a treat

Files are in a Artist/Album structure, but it's handled by a media library, so I can sort/filter/group them however I want.

When I had albums the only one I cared about organizing was the one on the end that people could see. I always made sure it was something that showed how cool I was.

I’ve used MediaMonkey for years and let it do most of the work. Mostly I focus on my playlists, like “Current Mindlist,” “Calm the Fuck Down,” and “You’re Gonna Get a Speeding Ticket.” I also do smart lists by artist, genre, or grouping tags. It’s worked really well for my 50k+ files on the computer side. Just need to find a good player for my iPhone so I can pass ratings back and forth along with changes to playlists made on the phone. I used Spotify for a decade or so and have enjoyed digging back into my old stuff.

Like a physical file for keeping sheet music in?

this is a real problem. one of the next projects is to build a scaner that will leverage the Shazam API to identify and sort all my loose music (about 300% of my collection). afterwards I'll be using said project to identify ripped physical media from my massive 33/45/78 collections, some of which are local presses from almost 100 years ago that nobody has heard in decades.

My files are either in folders by album or, for singles, by alphabetical folders using the artist's name.

No playlists needed.

FYI, on Lemmy, we don’t have “subs”— we have communities or “comms”

My system used to always be a music folder full of album subfolders named like artistName - year - albumName. I did so much manual work to make that happen and then Spotify came along. I mostly neglected my collection for a decade, only adding to it occasionally. When Spotify aligned themselves with Nazis I cancelled my subscription and started about hosting my own collection with Plex for streaming. I had let my organization system go to shit and now I've got a mess.

I'm currently working on a script that will identify naming convention issues and eventually spit out a list of commands for renaming/moving folders. I also want the script to identify metadata issues, dupes, and missing tracks. I know there are a lot of tools that do a lot of this already, but I don't like any of them I've found so far. I especially don't like the idea of an opinionated tool redoing my library by making destructive writes, thousands of files/folders at a time, without me approving changes first. A lot of them work that way.

I use beets: https://beets.io/

The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.

Software organizes the library into artist/album folders automatically. Then I organize every track into playlists based on mood/genre. I'll generally pick a certain playlist to listen to and put it on shuffle.

Don't really do playlists but i have Genres, They are then split into bands, Which are the split into albums.

by preference of which albums and playlists go together, then within that... by alphabetical order.

probably a good question for !selfhosted@lemmy.world as well

I like my folders and separations. I separate the artists by the first letter of the name. I have 27 folders in my music folder. # and a-z. Then artist and album. So my music directories look like Music/R/Rob Zombie/Hellbilly Deluxe/Rob Zombie - Dragula.mp3. I know people who just drop everything into their music folder unorganized and let their player organize it. I can't do it, personally. Holding the file requires proper placement for me.

For normal albums: Artist/Year - Album [release ID if necessary for ambiguity for various versions of an album]/Disc-track - title.extension . Compilations (soundtracks, promo mixes from shows, etc.) get "Various Artist" as the album artist and sorted under "Various Artists" of the top level of my albums directory. Stuff from other sources would sometimes get their own special directory at the top level outside "albums".

Tags are everything, that's where the in-depth data is. album folders hold extra art, inserts, metadata, etc.

I don't really make manual playlists using relatively pathed m3u anymore because support is inconsistent across the apps I've used to listen to my library. These days Plex, jellyfin, ncmpcpp (tui front-end for mpd) all handle their own playlists. Those are mostly just spontaneous groupings or automated shuffles I don't really keep track of.

Back in the day I made mixtapes on actual cassettes, recorded from the radio, my CDs, and later tracks I found on Napster and soulseek. Later I moved on to making tons of playlists in foobar2000. Some of those playlists probably still litter my hard drive (now dead text because the files having long since been reorganized and moved). For the really good tight playlists I made of that era, I'd make physical mix CDs that I would master with sound forge. Had a few people that would trade these around. Make a mix, master, make many copies, distribute. Those CDs often died in cars and turned into coasters, so I'd keep the bin and cue files of the masters to make replacements. Those tracks would ultimately get turned back into mp3 or flac depending on quality and tagged with my own title, cover art, etc. and get filed away in the Various Artist folder. Then I got an mp3 player and it's been either full album listening or dynamic playlists for me ever since.

I still make yearly playlists in Spotify as I discover new stuff or rediscover old stuff, like a musical diary. Those playlists inspire library additions via the artist directly, Bandcamp flac files, or other means.

Folder called "songs" have sub folders of artists, inside which there are folders for albums and singles, inside which reside the flac files.

If there are albums which have multiple artists, there will be a different folder for that. For example there is an artist A and there is an artist B. They will have individual folders. If both of them have released an album or a single, there will a folder called "A, B".

I use Jellyfin to stream my music. Here are their detailed guidelines.

Music \ %artistname% \ [year] %albumname% \ ##.%trackname%

I tried varying it a bit, but it seems like any additional tag in folder's name creates confusion. If I want to listen to Crowbar's "I have Failed", I navigate to letter C, to them, to the album, and to the track. I save the same structure if I move it onto players or phones, so I can consistently find things in the same places in any UI or even terminal.

Additionaly, I have folders OST for soundtracks and VA for mixes with more than two artists. In OST folder every entry folder is named after the product, e.g. Unreal OST. This can be split between games and movies, but I don't care.

Feats and splits between artists are usually put into one artist's folder and then remembered. There's no sane way to resolve this on folder structure level without creating a folder for each artist+artist combination.

Player like AIMP can, after scanning your whole music collection, make a searchable database of all your tracks, so here is that. But I'm too used to navigating folders rather than tags, so I don't use that functionality at all.

When it matters, author's albums can be put into subdirectories e.g. Studio/Live/Remastered.

Playlists are usually placed in Music \ Playlists \ ..., but I rarely if ever use them.

playlists as pls files in one dir. albums in (mostly) random categories, mostly in genre/artist but sometimes the movie/show it's from etc. inside each dir i just keep the original filenames as i've acquired them.

i tried to use musicbrainz picard and beets for a short period but it just doesn't work for me because musics i have aren't popular worldwide and many have borked metadata

for listening on the go i encode them to opus and copy to my phone, play using foobar2000 or aimp

I just have a Music directory with a subdirectory for each album named - , with the files inside being named <disc number (if needed)> - .

I don't even use the library functionality of any audio player. I just have my file manager set up so that it uses the cover art as the thumbnail, set the thumbnails to a big size, and use the built-in search functionality for finding something. That limits what can be found, but I can't say I ever needed to find an album by the year it came out.

On my mp3 player, I organize folder by artist and the files inside are named [Song Title] - [Album Name]. Playlists are named after genre or occasion (metal, pop, 80s, workout music, soul-crushing lyrics, etc.). My mp3 player has a shuffle option so having files labeled in alphabetical or numerical order isn’t important.

I like to rifle through my music, so I just keep all my new albums on one shelf and move them to another shelf as I listen to them. Then I can choose if I want to listen to something I haven't heard yet, or something I have, and if I have, it's sorted naturally by last listen time, since I always put albums on the shelf in the same spot.

The only exception is that if I really don't like an album, I'll put it on one of the edges of the shelf so it can withstand the most pressure. I try to keep the records packed tightly enough not to tip too much, but also loosely enough not to be squished, but if I do make a mistake and end up messing up a record, I'd rather it be one I don't plan to listen to again.

Dunno how I did it long ago before I sold my soul to corporate music streaming (and now stopped paying) but I decided to go with /Music/Artist/[Year Of] Album/## Song

Haven't figured out playlist yet. Then I make sure the tags are correct such as for genres and other stuff

Folders for different genres, then subfolders for year. Not every song fits neatly in a specific genre and the year can be hard to get right.

It's tedious. I should probably correct the id3 tags and throw them all in one folder.

Files are neatly named as artist - song name with proper capitalization etc.