How do you organize your media

[threni]

Just for your reference (and interest), please find my policy and practice shared here (and here, here).

Spoiler

My music ( and video) library consists of mainly classical music and also with some jazz and popular.

My policy and actual operation of organization are as follows;

1. Digitize all, of course, save in silent SSD;

LPs: into 192 kHz 24 bit AIFF (non-compressed, easy to add unlimited tag info) "devided track files" using Audacity; if needed remove scratch and/or pop noises using Audacity, edit file name, add Tag info and cover art by JRiver (see below)

CDs: rip bit-perfectly into 44.1 kHz 16 bit AIFF track files with JRiver's safe mode dBpoweramp's CD Ripper safe mode

SACDs: rip the "DSD layer" into DSF (DSD64 2.8 MHz 1 bit) files (I will not discuss the method here...)

DVD Movies: rip into ISO (.iso) file by CloneCD, store in "DVD Movies" folder to be mounted on "virtual CD-DVD drive" which can be played by JRiver, add to JRiver's video playlist

Downloads: non-compressed format in as high sampling rate as possible, and save "as it is" in SSD of PC

YouTube etc. clips: beloved clips: download into .xml or .mp4 or .mkv files by "4K Video Downloader", store in "my_webmedia" folder, add to JRiver's video playlist

2. Music Library Organization Policy in SSD
Track file naming policy:
Track #+content: for single CD album
Disc#+Track#+content: for multiple-CD album
Folder structure: Root - Music_Arcives - Artist - Album, like these images;

3. Tag info and cover art
Have the tag info at least;
Artist, Album Artist (same as Artist in my library), Genre, Date (recording year), Disk#, Track#, SamplingRate, FileType, Duration, FileSize, BitDepth, Channels, Composer (in my rule), Comment (with Company+Label+Catalog #, download link, etc.), Year (recording year)

Some of these would be automatically assigned by JRiver; I usually carefully edit the tag contents before and/or after ripping.

if needed:
Conductor, Orchestra, Soloists, Instruments, etc.

Cover art: must be embedded "in each track file" by JRiver or other software

4. Downloaded Booklet, purchasing info, etc. in PDF format
These PDF files should be saved in the same album folder for future reference

5. JRiver (or Roon) to Organize and Play all the files
Add all the above files (tracks) to JRiver to organize, search, and play...
(I recently abandoned using Roon because of many reasons; to be discussed separately if needed...)

For play with multichannel multi-driver multi-amplifier system with digital crossover software EKIO and Okto DAC8PRO, audio tracks are up or down converted into 192 kHz 96 kHz or 88.2 kHz 24 bit by JRiver "on the fly". (I also maintain the system configuration which can play DSF files in bit perfect native DSD format using OPPO sonica DAC or OKTO DAC8PRO.) (ref. here)

6. Extract audio track from video clips, DVD movies etc., if needed
If needed, we can easily extract audio tracks by using JRiver's "Convert Format - Convert video to audio", and we may organize the extracted audio files as shown above.

7. Size of the SSD...
We are living in wonderful era of computer technology and digital format.
In my audio (audio-visual) completely silent PCs, I use 2TB SSD for music+video library which easily keeps non-compressed tracks of about 2,000 CDs, 500 LPs, DVD movies, many of recently downloaded large DSD and FLAC files, YouTube clips, etc: really amazing.

Of course I have several backups of my whole library in 6TB HDDs in other PCs and also in QNAP NAS.

And I can easily carry whole of the library in my very tiny USB 3.0 portable 2TB SSD...

8. mp3 compressed library
BTW, I also always build and keep the mp3 library of my whole tracks/files (mp3 Variable Bit Rate VBR Encoding by JRiver) which can be easily loaded into 128 GB Apple iPod to be USB connected to my car audio system.

9. Physical LP, CD, DVD library
I also keep all the physical LPs, CDs, DVDs in shelves with glass window, in LP, CD, DVD sections; the order in each section is mainly;
Genre - Category - Composer (alphabetical) - Artist (alphabetical)

Categories in classical music is historic order like this;
old ancient, early+Renaissance (before baroque), baroque, classical School (Wiener Klassik, Viennese School), romantic, impressionist-period, modern contemporary, etc.

Some of the unique Labels/Companies are separated as a group in specific shelf space, like "Dorian Recordings", "Gimell for The Tallis Scholars" (I have all Gimell's), etc.

Jazz and popular physical disks are of course separated, and in usually artist's alphabetical order.

If needed, I can rather easily access to the specific physical disk of interest...

As for my "backup policy and practice" of my digital library, please refer here.

Regarding your backups: if the fact you have one and six month backup periods for local/remote destinations respectively is because it takes you a long time to perform the backup (copying all the files) maybe consider using rsync. It mirrors source and dest (add/change/removing differences) efficiently. You could literally run it every night. It's built into linux; you can trust that it'll checksum everything so there's no need for the time (and wear and tear on devices) cost of dealing with all the files from scratch.

 

[Robin L]

You mean: "Do I Try to Organize My Media"?

I guess one of the reasons why I listen to so much via Tidal is that Tidal's already organized. Sort of. One would assume that looking up the name of a composition (I'm one of those classical people) one would find the composition. But one will not find the Annie Fischer performance of Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto under "Beethoven Piano Concertos. It's on a massive DGG Beethoven box or it's on a smaller disc filed under the name of the conductor - Ferenc Fricsay. And it's my favorite performance of the work.

But it's far easier than rearranging the little boxes containing 25 CDs each, recently acquired and shuffled like a shoe in Vegas. One might call being drawn to streaming as proof of laziness, but lately I've been playing my guitar a lot, which I find the easiest way to find music. Whatever rolls off the fingers, that's what I'll be listening to.

 

[MattHooper]

My Blu-ray movie library is organized alphabetically.

My vinyl records are organized via genre (and sometimes via decade, for instance, I have an “ 80s” section).

I also have an area for new arrivals and Albums that I haven’t listened to yet. Afterwards they get organized into genres.

I also also have a fairly large collection of library music, and it’s subdivided via the different library, music companies, such as KPM, Bruton etc.

Here’s my Bruton music library music. Bruton sort of organized their music, depending on the colour of the jacket:

 

[JeremyFife]

Alphabetically (band name or artist) physical and digital ... doesn't work well for classical so all physical media gets logged in discogs and I can search or browse there. Kind of works.
Aimlessly flipping through the small collection (500 ish) and going "ooh, I forgot about them" works better
Then I usually stream it anyway... my playlists are hopeless chaos.
I sometimes flip through JRiver's album view, I quite like that. Usually something pops into mind, or I read a review and I'll play that

 

[GD Fan]

Seems like we had a thread on this topic a few years ago. I remember detailing my admittedly insane method for organizing my CDs. It's highly unlikely to be an approach adopted by anyone else at all.

Edit: found it https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...apes-physical-medias.21849/page-3#post-728465

 

[Groove01]

I listen to a lot of genres, from classical to breakcore and from abba to zappa and back. I got music from all over the world, from very mainstream (yes, i got michael jackson on vinyl, and i'm proud of that) to extreme obscure music that probally nobody here heared yet.

Vinyl is in a for me logical way that is impossible to explain to you. It's by genre and then by tunes that fits each other or by artists, depending on the case.

Digital media is by gerne (following my own definition) and then by artist, with a seperate folder for compilations.

I can (if my libary is welll maintained) find any music back in less than a minute, but i tried to explain it to several, and nobody understand my way, so they need to keep out of my vinyl, and got only read rights to my digital music database... I do have a folder for new that they can write to, so i can sort it later but i won't let them mess with my digital database on my nas freely, so they can mess it up.

This sounds like my office and desk organizational system. What looks like a mess to others is absolute organization for me - lol.

I had a boss early in my career make me clean up and organize my desk. 3 weeks later it was a mess again and he was mad “No one can possibly work effectively like this”. I told him to leave me alone as “I can’t find anything his way”.

I challenged him to ask me to find anything on my desk in 30 seconds or less. He did, for about 15 minutes straight then walked away speechless- lol.

Years later when we became peers, he admitted that I could find stuff faster in my piles of paper than he could in his organized files.

 

[anotherhobby]

I'm almost only in Tidal these days. I don't really use my digital or physical libraries almost ever. I like to mostly organize in Tidal by artist. I just follow artists on Tidal that I like, and then work mostly from that list as my base. I love that I can sort the artist list by date added. That's one of the more powerful tools for how I listen, frequently giving recency bias a lot of weight in my music selection process.

 

[dualazmak]

Regarding your backups: if the fact you have one and six month backup periods for local/remote destinations respectively is because it takes you a long time to perform the backup (copying all the files) maybe consider using rsync. It mirrors source and dest (add/change/removing differences) efficiently. You could literally run it every night. It's built into linux; you can trust that it'll checksum everything so there's no need to the time (and wear and tear on devices) cost of dealing with all the files from scratch.

Yes, I do exactly the same as you indicated.
My backup is not full copy each time, but it is so-called "differential" backup i.e. the actual copy procedures are done for only new and revised files using outdated still highly reliable "RealSync" software.

 

[hashhar]

Here's a description of my MusicBrainz Picard setup to tag stuff and Beets to do additional metadata on top.

GitHub - hashhar/picard-beets-config: MusicBrainz Picard tagger scripts, config and beets config

MusicBrainz Picard tagger scripts, config and beets config - hashhar/picard-beets-config

github.com

I'm not into classical (yet) so the traditional Album Artist/<type>/<year> - Album/NN - <track title> serves me well.
The <type> thing is useful for me because it helps me separate out the EPs, Studio Albums, Live Albums, Compilations, Soundtracks etc. because that is usually not standardized via tags.

 

[AnalogSteph]

Speaking of tags not standardized, I wish there was a widely accepted way of keeping track of origin country. I have a terrible memory for names, and it has happened a number of times that all I remembered about the album I wanted to listen to was the time frame and country.

 

[Petrushka]

Media Monkey has an insanely extensive tag editor, and, while I haven’t tried it, Monkey Mote claims to control everything from your phone or tablet.

 

[EJ3]

What is this organize thing you speak of here?

It's when you get the walls good & tacky, throw things at the walls, then, whatever sticks to the walls, you know where they are at.
Then you need to find some place else to pile the rest of it.

 

[Mart68]

This sounds like my office and desk organizational system. What looks like a mess to others is absolute organization for me - lol.

I had a boss early in my career make me clean up and organize my desk. 3 weeks later it was a mess again and he was mad “No one can possibly work effectively like this”. I told him to leave me alone as “I can’t find anything his way”.

I challenged him to ask me to find anything on my desk in 30 seconds or less. He did, for about 15 minutes straight then walked away speechless- lol.

Years later when we became peers, he admitted that I could find stuff faster in my piles of paper than he could in his organized files.

My desk at work was always a bomb site but like you I could find anything I needed easily.

I noticed that the tidy desk people mostly did very little work.

My CD collection is arranged alphabetically - separate sections for jazz and rap/hip-hop since I don't listen to them as much.

There's also a separate area (on top of the player) for new stuff and stuff that's currently in my regular rotation.

I can find any album in 5-15 seconds.

 

[Snoopy]

everything digital ends up on my roon server. I just stack the discs into ikea Kallax containers.

Vinyl .. alphabetically.

 

[obsessive9119]

I rip CDs and store digital purchases in an Album Artist/Album hierarchy. I used to do it manually, but a few months back I spent a couple of hours working out how to configure beets. It’s pretty awesome - I run “beet import foldername” and it renames the files how I like them, puts them in the right folder hierarchy and fixes the metadata.

It’s that last step that’s really important now, though, because for the most part I stream via DLNA using minimserver. I’ve configured it to group and sort albums a few different ways - by artist, by year of release, recently added, recently played etc.

The underlying file structure matters less than it used to, but it’s still nice to have everything in order.

 

[5-pot-fan]

My Blu-ray movie library is organized alphabetically.

My vinyl records are organized via genre (and sometimes via decade, for instance, I have an “ 80s” section).

I also have an area for new arrivals and Albums that I haven’t listened to yet. Afterwards they get organized into genres.

I also also have a fairly large collection of library music, and it’s subdivided via the different library, music companies, such as KPM, Bruton etc.

Here’s my Bruton music library music. Bruton sort of organized their music, depending on the colour of the jacket:

View attachment 435124

This is how my good wife suggested I order all the physical items - by jacket colour.
Same as she does for National Trust visitors when she is on car park duty - by car colour!

 

[respice finem]

I’m reorganizing my physical media and kind of wish I hadn’t started . Although It’s always interesting finding stuff I completely forgot I had - lol.

I think this question would apply to both physical and “digital” (music servers and such) media. How do you organize your music libraries? By genre, alphabetically..? Genre then alphabetically?

I need a better system.

I've always been an "albumwise" listener, so I don't need much "complication". A playlist, sometimes, but not daily.
All my music is ripped to FLAC and organized simply as folders - artist/album+year/files.
Right-klick in file explorer, Foobar2000 FTW. If a search is needed, "Everything" will do it in a second.
Same for video content, only with MPC-BE as a player.
The 50 or so LPs I still have, are "unorganized".

 

[Deleted member 89782]

I often wondered what on earth Roon would be good for,
Reading this thread I got the answer. Most people haven‘t arrived in the digital world yet, not in the least.
If one doesn‘t understand what tags are for and how to utilize them via a capable server like Lyrion (LMS) one might just as well leave it all up to the cloud …

But maybe it‘s even worse and has nothing to do with digitalization. It starts with personal organisation. If you cannot express what you want you cannot formalise it into catagories, i.e. tags, and then extract it via appropriate queries. It‘s sad.

 

[TunaBug]

I used to be That Guy that friends/coworkers made fun of for being too picky about organizing CDs. Always in order by album artist, using "Last, First" if the album artist was a single person. Within that, in order by release date. That latter bit is not visually obvious to a visitor, so I need to re-shelve things myself. But I also make sure every disc is rotated zero-degrees for trivial reading of the label; it always frustrated me having to spin somebody's disc. It's my OCD and I'm sticking to it. Or so I thought.

Two things happened which caused me to stop organizing physical media: I stopped playing physical media, only RIPs of my physical media, so being able to quickly find something on the shelf had zero value other than assuaging my OCD. Then the collection stopped fitting on bookshelves. So I moved all the discs into CD storage bags (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C7WMDDR7) and then into the back corner of an out-of-the-way closet. Once they're like that it is just insane to try to insertion-sort new acquisitions. So now I wait until I get another 80-ish albums, fill a couple of more bags, and move them to the closet.

But the RIPs on the media server? They're meticulously by album-artist, and within that by release date. In the case of re-issues I used the original release date. If I have more than one issue of an album then {original,reissue}. Or if an album was released significantly after the recording date then I'll use {recording,reissue}. It's a hard requirement for me that media server software allow me to control that order. I started that eons ago when iTunes let me separately set album sort order, but today I use a combination of LMS and FooBar2000, both of which work nicely with that.

I also keep dumps of all metadata into a parallel directory tree, which is in a GIT repository. Then if I spend time tweaking tags I can re-dump them and "git diff" to ensure that I changed only what I thought i changed.

I don't listen to much classical. Even when I was anal about organizing physical media, "classical" was over by itself in no particular order. Few enough discs that that was not a problem. One thing that always bugged me on classical releases is that there is frequently a primary and secondary work. For example, Mozart 40 and Beethoven 1 on a single disc. Clearly that goes under "Mozart" but "Beethoven" was misfiled and bothered me. And making it "Mozart, Beethoven" was even more clearly wrong. Working with RIPs actually simplifies this a bit, as I can split the tracks out by composer. That bugs me as well, but less so. Some of that was driven by the ideas at https://bbritten.com/articles, but I do not rigorously follow his rules.

 

[Deleted member 89782]

I used to be That Guy that friends/coworkers made fun of for being too picky about organizing CDs. Always in order by album artist, using "Last, First" if the album artist was a single person. Within that, in order by release date. That latter bit is not visually obvious to a visitor, so I need to re-shelve things myself. But I also make sure every disc is rotated zero-degrees for trivial reading of the label; it always frustrated me having to spin somebody's disc. It's my OCD and I'm sticking to it. Or so I thought.

Two things happened which caused me to stop organizing physical media: I stopped playing physical media, only RIPs of my physical media, so being able to quickly find something on the shelf had zero value other than assuaging my OCD. Then the collection stopped fitting on bookshelves. So I moved all the discs into CD storage bags (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C7WMDDR7) and then into the back corner of an out-of-the-way closet. Once they're like that it is just insane to try to insertion-sort new acquisitions. So now I wait until I get another 80-ish albums, fill a couple of more bags, and move them to the closet.

But the RIPs on the media server? They're meticulously by album-artist, and within that by release date. In the case of re-issues I used the original release date. If I have more than one issue of an album then {original,reissue}. Or if an album was released significantly after the recording date then I'll use {recording,reissue}. It's a hard requirement for me that media server software allow me to control that order. I started that eons ago when iTunes let me separately set album sort order, but today I use a combination of LMS and FooBar2000, both of which work nicely with that.

I also keep dumps of all metadata into a parallel directory tree, which is in a GIT repository. Then if I spend time tweaking tags I can re-dump them and "git diff" to ensure that I changed only what I thought i changed.

I don't listen to much classical. Even when I was anal about organizing physical media, "classical" was over by itself in to particular order. Few enough discs that that was not a problem. One thing that always bugged me on classical releases is that there is frequently a primary and secondary work. For example, Mozart 40 and Beethoven 1 on a single disc. Clearly that goes under "Mozart" but "Beethoven" was misfiled and bothered me. And making it "Mozart, Beethoven" was even more clearly wrong. Working with RIPs actually simplifies this a bit, as I can split the tracks out by composer. That bugs me as well, but less so. Some of that was driven by the ideas at https://bbritten.com/articles, but I do not rigorously follow his rules.

I‘m pretty much following the same rules as you.
But keeping a separate library for classical music has never been my approach.
Just like you I use Foobar2000 and Lyrion (for more than a decade) and I have spent quite a bit of time tagging and retagging my classical albums. But that‘s easy on Foobar.

My ‚physical‘ storage, i.e. folder structure, is simple and consistent across my complete library, be it classical or not. Album Artist —> Album.
But my tagging for classical is somewhat more sophisticated and yet simple. An example:

Album Artist: Berliner Philharmoniker
Artist (per track): Mozart; Grieg; Prokofiev
Composer (per track): Mozart, Wolgang Amadeus; Grieg, Peer; Prokofiev, Sergei
Genre: Classical - Strings
Album: Mozart - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Grieg, Prokofiev (Karajan, 1982)
Track Title (per track) (example): KV 525 - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - I. Allegro
Track no.
Year (per track): <Year of release> or <Year of debut performance>
Publisher: <Record Lable>
Source: eg. „Lossless 44.1/16 - CD rip“ or „MP3 320/16 - Shareware“

The broad album description is intended to support the search function (if ever I need it) and also to give me a good overview in the album lists ( see below).

Then comes my setup of Lyrion.
Besides the common catagories of Album Artists and Albums I have configured ‚Albums by Composer‘ and ‚Albums by Genre‘. I have subdivided classical into more specific catagories like Classical - Opera, Classical - Baroque etc.
This pretty much does it for me and nothing gets lost in the nirvana of bits and bytes.