Classical and jazz, in particular, offer many challenges for digital audiophiles with their variable (and often long and complex for classical music) mix of names. Composers, symphonies, concertos, movements, sonatas, suites, conductors, soloists and more are some of the complexities for classical music identification. And for jazz, there are artists, bands, collaborations, jams - fluid interactions between musicians that make simple classification difficult.
I simply ignore the default auto-organizing options of Daphile and Kodi, my audio and video apps that are available to me via dual booting on an Intel NUC mini-PC. These default options simply do not allow me to play what I want when I want to hear it.
I use Daphile, an excellent free, standalone Linux-based headless digital music player which is based on the venerable Logitech Media Server (LMS), With both Daphile and Kodi, my video player - I simply ignore every choice (artist, genre, album, year, playlist, new, etc.) except "Folders" under which I can access internal, external and network drives. (I also use Daphile to listen to internet radio - mostly Tunein stations and direct URLs)
My music and videos are located on a Synology NAS with 4Tb of storage. A folder/subdirectory method gives one greater control, and a logical hierarchical organization works best, but can be difficult to set up, organize, and manage. In the past year, I searched for utilities to help manage my personal collection - and clean up a motley and totally disorganized collection of more than 400K digital music files for a friend who inherited the collection from her late husband.
I copy music folders I want to edit to my fairly fast Lenovo PC (Intel Core i7-6700 @ 3.40GHz + 1Tb Samsung Evo 860 SDD). Then I use a combination of three Windows 10 applications to do the editing and help manage my collection of 36,000 digital music files, which are mostly a combination of FLAC files plus MP3's of various bit rates. I open all three apps and switch between the three windows when I am editing.
I simply ignore the default auto-organizing options of Daphile and Kodi, my audio and video apps that are available to me via dual booting on an Intel NUC mini-PC. These default options simply do not allow me to play what I want when I want to hear it.
I use Daphile, an excellent free, standalone Linux-based headless digital music player which is based on the venerable Logitech Media Server (LMS), With both Daphile and Kodi, my video player - I simply ignore every choice (artist, genre, album, year, playlist, new, etc.) except "Folders" under which I can access internal, external and network drives. (I also use Daphile to listen to internet radio - mostly Tunein stations and direct URLs)
My music and videos are located on a Synology NAS with 4Tb of storage. A folder/subdirectory method gives one greater control, and a logical hierarchical organization works best, but can be difficult to set up, organize, and manage. In the past year, I searched for utilities to help manage my personal collection - and clean up a motley and totally disorganized collection of more than 400K digital music files for a friend who inherited the collection from her late husband.
I copy music folders I want to edit to my fairly fast Lenovo PC (Intel Core i7-6700 @ 3.40GHz + 1Tb Samsung Evo 860 SDD). Then I use a combination of three Windows 10 applications to do the editing and help manage my collection of 36,000 digital music files, which are mostly a combination of FLAC files plus MP3's of various bit rates. I open all three apps and switch between the three windows when I am editing.
1. MusicBrainz Picard is useful for automatic renaming of tracks and adding/replacing metadata. MBP utilizes a volunteer-run, web-based repository of "corrected" OEM information which it uses to automatically update the filenames and metadata of digital music files to the standards specified for legal internet streaming radio stations. It is based on the album format, uses an automatic "cluster" method to group files into known albums. MBP will often be able to identify which of many releases around the world you have. A truly remarkable application, although not every group of files I have edited so far is in their database. For those folders, a simple metadata-editor can be used for manual editing.
2. Ant Renamer is a free utility that I use for simple and fast renaming of groups of files in subdirectories - especially when a I want to delete track numbers for more logical alphabetizing in folders - or I don't like the "official" convention used by MusicBrainz Picard. Again, music meant to be played in a certain order works best with track numbers in place.
3. Directory Opus 12, Light Edition is an Australian dual-pane Windows file manager application that is a bit quirky, far superior to any other one I have tried - for my purposes. To me, it is well worth the $33USD I paid for it. It has a third pane that will play music files or videos and is great for finding and deleting duplicates, and detecting corrupted files. Moving and copying files between the two windows is fast and easy.
2. Ant Renamer is a free utility that I use for simple and fast renaming of groups of files in subdirectories - especially when a I want to delete track numbers for more logical alphabetizing in folders - or I don't like the "official" convention used by MusicBrainz Picard. Again, music meant to be played in a certain order works best with track numbers in place.
3. Directory Opus 12, Light Edition is an Australian dual-pane Windows file manager application that is a bit quirky, far superior to any other one I have tried - for my purposes. To me, it is well worth the $33USD I paid for it. It has a third pane that will play music files or videos and is great for finding and deleting duplicates, and detecting corrupted files. Moving and copying files between the two windows is fast and easy.
What editing and organizing tools do you use for your collection?