Organizing Music in WIndows

[Kakashi]

I just had a quick question regarding music. I know that if you download music from iTunes it automatically organizes the files by artist and creates a folder. But for the other thousands of songs that you download elsewhere, how do you guys organize them?

 

[VirusType2]

I have a music hard drive

I rip a CD, I tell the ripping software the name of the album, the artist, and it automatically puts it in the correct folder

So I would click on the hard drive called "Music", and on that drive would be lots of folders labeled with artists names. So, for example, I would click on a folder named AC/DC, and inside would be folders labeled with AC/DC album names: (Highway to Hell/Bonfire/Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap). In each of those album folders is the mp3 files for each album.

"Music" folder>Artists>Albums

If you do it right each time, you won't be left with lots to do later. Sorry.


*In my opinion, it's best to start album names off with the year - for example: 1979 Highway to Hell, or (1979) Highway to Hell, so that Windows will sort them in the order they were released. This is especially helpful if you have a whole lot of albums by that artist.

*For several reasons, I don't think it's good to have the Artist name also listed in each album title, but it's up to you.

 

[Vegeta897]

"Music" folder>Artists>Albums

This.

Isn't this sort of obvious?

 

[PvtRyan]

Well, do you run Windows 7? If so, just dropping all of it in the Music library works just fine, as the Music library allows you to arrange by Album/Artist on the fly in one click. Even if you don't, I don't think it matters all that much as I never open my music through Explorer, I just let my music player manage all that and discover the songs that I drop into the folder. Of course, iTunes can't do that because it's a terrible piece of shit abomination of a program that forces you to manually add your new music to your library. Alas, if you use an iPod/iPhone you're pretty much forced to use it as Apple are cunts, so I structure it by Artist and then by Album.

 

[VirusType2]

I also like to scan or download the CD covers and put them in each album folder.

In Windows, if you name each album cover "folder.jpg", the folder will take on that image exclusively (large thumbnail). This can obviously be a huge task if you have a large collection of music, but it's pretty nice.

Some media players will display the "folder.jpg" image when you play a song from the album. There are other ways to set it up but this is the way I do it.

Instead, you can embed cover art into the meta-data of individual mp3s somehow, but I've never used that method. Some media players will look for an image named "cover" or it may display the first image (in that folder) it comes across.

 

[Kakashi]

Thanks for everyone's responses. I recently got Window's 7, and I'm currently rearranging all my files from my old computer onto this new one. I have some 10,000 MP3's to arrange.