Comments on: Digital Organization

By: Rob O.

Rob O. — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:25:19 +0000

I gotta toss in another vote for good tagging practices. Accurate tag data was sorta important when I got my first iPod years ago, but with each new iteration, the value becomes even more apparent. Having complete metadata makes grouping and doing playlists much easier. And with Dede's iPod Touch, having the album cover art embedded in the file makes CoverFlow look so much better! (I totally geek out on CoverFlow!) I swear by Mp3tag by Florian Heidenreich. It's a free, powerful, fast, & easy-to-use tool to edit your MP3 music file metadata tags and it'll even embed album art directly into the MP3 files, which I've done on well over 90% of our library. I undertook a big project to convert all of our music to digital format a few years ago and haven't looked back. I still have the physical media stored, but rarely use CDs anymore after I've got the disc ripped. I still do prefer to purchase music on CD since I can rip to a higher-than-average bitrate quality and I use only MP3 format for compatibility-sake. With very few exceptions, nearly all of my music is arranged in an Artist | Album | Song structure and the filenames are (almost) always just the song title itself, without track number, artists name or any other clutter. Like Jason said, once your media is digital, backups become all the more key. Although drives are typically far, far more reliable these days, the question (still) is rarely IF your hard drive will fail, but WHEN.

By: Herby

Herby — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:45:11 +0000

To answer your question “How on earth are you going to be able to find anything?” — easy. I find EVERYTHING, using At least, where file names are concerned. The trick, therefore, is to have a directory structure and file naming convention that makes sense to you and is somewhat future-proof. However, in the case of mp3, there’s nothing more important than proper ID3 tags. Period.
What you do with them is another story entirely, the details of which I’ll spare you for now. And yes, I prefer to set those manually. By hand. Typed in and researched for accuracy (again, another topic entirely). To re-iterate: proper ID3 tags are absolutely essential. The end.

By: juba

juba — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:23:25 +0000

properly tagged mp3s in itunes or any other media player of choice would solve every one of these problems. once you start using smart playlists there’s no going back.

By: Brent

Brent — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 06:30:20 +0000

My suggestion would be to check out XBMC for Windows. I think it will do everything you are wanting. You can search by Album, Year, Genre, etc. It also handles any kind of video files if you have those as well. It will do pictures also. I think that is all the items you need to do.

If you have setup questions, give me a call or mail and I can help you since I just did it myself trying to get it setup (can be a bit tricky to get the scanning setup at first, but not hard really). The only limitation would be that you’ll need to set it up on multiple computers if you want to use it from more than one. I think that another copy would read the .db files though, so that is probably easy too.

The only thing that might take a bit of work for you is you might possibly have to do some reorganizing of your folder structure or file name conventions because for some things it requires the structure to comply with a regular expression that it is looking for of course. I think your structure would be pretty compatible though already. I imported several music files into it and it got the info 100% correct on them. They were scene releases, but still think it would work nearly as well as crappy iTunes for the music.

Best of all it is free. Download it and give it a shot and let me know if it works or doesn’t work for you.

By: Greg Kennedy

Greg Kennedy — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:44:13 +0000

Recently I changed my 101 Goals to include getting my digital media organized. I have nowhere near that amount of music (my MP3 collection tops out at ~1350 songs) but I want to tackle organization before I move on to copying CDs etc.

You can organize your music in folders yourself if you like… but I have finally given in and realized that allowing other programs to do the work for me takes a lot of stress and micromanagement out of the mix. Sure Winamp with the big playlist was a workable solution, but that was when I only had 200 songs. I would now recommend these two tools to get your MP3 collection in line:

* A music player with a Media Library function. iTunes is the industry standard, of course, but everyone else has copied it and the features are pretty handy. I run Listen Media Player on my Linux machine – it’s very lightweight but lets me choose songs by year, genre, artist, track name, album (or combine the selections to narrow further). Of course this relies on proper ID3 tags – what good is the tool if you have 30 files named Unknown Artist – Track 01? – so that brings me to the second tool:

* An ID3 tagger with mass-tagging features. The one I use currently is called easytag. It is not the most user friendly tool, but it is really powerful because it brings together filenames and ID3 tagging (for example, if you have a folder of properly-named MP3s that lack ID3s, you can copy the filename info into an ID3 tag automatically by defining a string that matches your naming convention… e.g. “%a – %t” would be Artist – Title) What’s really great about this setup is that once you get everything properly tagged, easymp3 can rename your files and set up your directory structure for you using the ID3 info from each file. SUPER handy.

Anyway, that’s my solution. I was a diehard folder organizer up until my wife’s experience with iTunes convinced me otherwise – watching her import a completely unstructured MP3 library and then be able to find anything she wanted with a few keystrokes was a real eye-opener.