Music Folder Organiser

[thenktor]

I have a few main genres and a massive 'unsorted' folder . I'm considering ditching the genre directories now though as I think a simple A-Z of artists will work better for Subsonic.

Yes, actually I have "[a-z]/artist/year - album/track"

[mimosa]

Now I understand why music files automatically get these great long cumbersome names. But surely the tags make an actual directory structure and tree redundant? So you just do

$play ~/music/{some pattern matching}.mp3

... or use a GUI app to take care of that for you ... ?

As far as I can tell the apps aren't written like that, but wouldn't it be simpler? Nor is my music collection, such as it is, organised like that, but I'm thinking of doing some systematic ripping and will have to decide what principles to adopt. The same goes for video, especially if you like old TV series. It seems intuitively easier to have, say, all of Star Trek TNG in one big directory with tags for series 1-7 in the filenames; going a step further, you might have just ~/video/movies and ~/video/TV

[gapan]

Now I understand why music files automatically get these great long cumbersome names. But surely the tags make an actual directory structure and tree redundant?

No, they definitely don't. If you have all your files properly tagged, it might be just as easy (or easier) to search for them in your music library app (exaile, clementine etc) when you want to play your music, but how do you isolate an album or an artist when you want to copy/move some files?

So you just do

$play ~/music/{some pattern matching}.mp3

... or use a GUI app to take care of that for you ... ?

As far as I can tell the apps aren't written like that, but wouldn't it be simpler? Nor is my music collection, such as it is, organised like that, but I'm thinking of doing some systematic ripping and will have to decide what principles to adopt.

Even though I have all my music perfectly tagged, I rarely actually use the tags to search and play music. I went for a "~/music/artist/(year) album/## - title.extension" naming scheme from the very start many many years ago and I mostly use a file manager/terminal to navigate and play what I want.

The same goes for video, especially if you like old TV series. It seems intuitively easier to have, say, all of Star Trek TNG in one big directory with tags for series 1-7 in the filenames; going a step further, you might have just ~/video/movies and ~/video/TV

For movies and TV shows it's a little bit different, because there's absolutely no way everything will fit in a single hard drive. Not for me at least. For movies I throw everything in a "movies" directory. But I have such directories in 5-6 hard drives. For TV shows, I have all files under "TV/name/Season X/", also spanned across several hard drives. In order to avoid insanity when searching for something in those hard drives I simply made lists of the contents of every hard drive, that I can grep to find what I want.

Code: Select all

ls -lRh /media/mydrive > mydrive-list.txt

[thenktor]

Now I understand why music files automatically get these great long cumbersome names. But surely the tags make an actual directory structure and tree redundant?

No, they definitely don't. If you have all your files properly tagged, it might be just as easy (or easier) to search for them in your music library app (exaile, clementine etc) when you want to play your music, but how do you isolate an album or an artist when you want to copy/move some files?

I agree. Not having sub-directories is a total mess

Even though I have all my music perfectly tagged, I rarely actually use the tags to search and play music. I went for a "~/music/artist/(year) album/## - title.extension" naming scheme from the very start many many years ago and I mostly use a file manager/terminal to navigate and play what I want.

I've done this many years (that was the time when XMMS was my preferred music player). But Nowadays I really prefer a database player like mpd or Amarok. It's actually still a lot of faster to type few words than browsing a directory structure. When I want to listen to "Pink Floyd - Wish you where here" I just have to type "pink wish" and I already can chose to play that album. Also creating mixed playlists is IMHO much easier with this kind of player.