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Topic: Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album? (Read 7357 times) previous topic - next topic
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Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Hi :-)

So I'm in a process of converting my CD collection into MP3. The directory structure I picked is pretty simple - Artist->Album->Songs. For example:

D:\Music\Red Hot Chilli Peppers\Californication\
D:\Music\Metallica\S&M\

Sometimes I find myself adding post directory like D:\Music\Soundtracks\Aladdin so all my Soundtracks can be easily spotted.
I need some advice on how to organize song that are not part of an album. For example, let's say I bought a single song from the new Aerosmith album. Following the Artist->Album pattern for a single mp3 file doesn't feel right. If I'll have 100 "single" songs, I'll end with 100 directories with just one file in each.

Any common solution that everyone uses?
Thanks!

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #1 –
I give them a folder each, but i don't have very many single tracks.
How about a Various Artists folder?

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #2 –
i put them all in a single folder named "Tracks" away from my main artist/album folder structure. they are only tagged with artist/title. i remove any extraneous tags like album, track number etc.

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: marc2003 on
i put them all in a single folder named "Tracks" away from my main artist/album folder structure. they are only tagged with artist/title. i remove any extraneous tags like album, track number etc.

Same here. Folder "Random", Tags: Artist, Title, Genre and Album: Random (easier when you want to play only the random songs).

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #4 –
If I have a folder for the artist already, they get thrown in their artist folder (no subfolder), otherwise I do the same as the other posters. I have various artist tracks by decade though, for no particular reason.

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #5 –
As suggested so far but with my suggesting you to keep in mind that, in the eventual cases where some singles' or EP's tracks may overlap with exactly the same version available on (an)other album(s), you'd quite probably have to decide on which release to create subfolders for, to avoid redundancies.
Take for example AC/DC's '74 Jailbreak EP, as its songs are scattered around two of their Australian albums:
The older the 'lossier' - meaning: my hearing & my music collection.
After all, I listen to the music, not the media it's on.

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #6 –
For purchased single tracks from otherwise whole albums I create separate directories. Free/unreleased/demo single tracks I leave without folders, and keep in the root Artist directory no problem, as Foobar2k still displays an item for the album/release type (custom tag) they're from.

Quote from: includemeout on
In the eventual cases where some singles' or EP's tracks may overlap with exactly the same version available on (an)other album(s), you'd quite probably have to decide on which release to create subfolders for, to avoid redundancies.


Although I'd recommend creating directories per released album if the OP does decide to stay with the current method as long as the filenames include the album this shouldn't be such a problem. Eg:

Artist - Album [#04] - Example Track.flac

Artist - Earlier Album [#10] - Example Track.flac

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #7 –
For another useless opinion, I give mine the album name "Single". They are all stored as MusicRoot\Single\Artist - Title

There is no particular reason. This is just what I decided to do.
--
Eric

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #8 –
Quote from: tev777 on
For another useless opinion,[...]

???
The older the 'lossier' - meaning: my hearing & my music collection.
After all, I listen to the music, not the media it's on.

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: includemeout on
Quote from: tev777 on
For another useless opinion,[...]

???


Poor choice of words. I just meant that I don't place a lot of value on my opinion on this matter. Now I see that it could be interpreted that I thought the same of everyone else's. That is not the case and I apologize.
--
Eric

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #10 –
Okay then.
The older the 'lossier' - meaning: my hearing & my music collection.
After all, I listen to the music, not the media it's on.

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #11 –
IMO - The physical organization is not super critical because your player software can read the tags and you can view/sort your songs by genre, artist, title, album, year, etc.

I have one more layer - Genre -> Artist -> Album -> Song.

I don't have a lot of singles, but for singles I have a "Singles" folder in place of the album folder.  So, if I have more than one single but the same artist they will all be in the same folder.  If the song was originally released on an album, I'll tag the file with that album name and artwork, but organize it in a "singles" folder.

My "genre" folders are broad categories and probably 80% of my music is in a folder called "Rock & Popular".

I've got a separate top-level folders for "special genres" such as Soundtracks, Various Artist albums, Christmas, Halloween, Mexican, Comedy, and a few others.

For various artist albums and soundtracks with various artists, I'll include the artist in the file name (no separate sub-folder for each artist).

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #12 –
I don't bother with a permanent, rigid directory structure at all.

All my tunes are effectively filed as singles. They all go into a single directory.

It is then trivial to use a combination of tags and file operations to rearrange them at will.

I do notice everybody else recommends using directories in one way or another and you you should probably go with that but single, flat table with multiple indexes works well for me.

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #13 –
Mostly repeating what others already said.

Directory structure is ultimately not that important. Some organization is nice (and even required to avoid problems), but should be kept simple as the point is archival/storage of the tracks, not to surface every tiny bit of information about them. You have your music players and metadata for that reason (which means I never or extremely rarely browse them using explorer). I avoid including anything in the filepath that may change over time as well.

Genres are a good example: at first you might have a few songs from 'metal', but as your collection expands, you will have to break it down to 'melodic death metal', 'power metal' etc. You could create broad umbrella folders like 'metal/rock/classical' etc. but there are a couple of problems with that too. First, since the broad term isn't identical to what is written to your GENRE tag, you'd have to create additional rules to accommodate for that (setting up the same rule multiple times with a different topmost folder for each or using complicated titleformatting that would second guess it for you). Second, there are those artists that hit a pretty much 50-50% mix between genres with their music. Where do you put those now?

Creating one level for albums are necessary to avoid problems with tracks that have filenames (re-releases, special versions etc). It also means you can simply put a cover.* into each folder and safely assume it belongs to the specific album, useful for matching album arts when using lackluster players that may have access to your library. Release date formatted to YYYY are also included next to the album names somewhere. Artists are obviously a no brainer to be separated as well, which can be done in this level ('Artist - Album'), as well as higher ('Artist\Album'). Currently I am omitting anything but the first artist ('Artist1 & Artist2') as well in folder names to avoid long paths and reduce clutter when a single artist collaborated with various others by merging said folders. The usefulness of that is debatable.

Then there are those unconventional albums like singles, collections, covers or seemingly random songs. I generally strip date and unify the album name to something descriptive ('singles', 'covers', origin of content, purpose of content). Since these are the only albums without a date, that can be used for sorting purposes. I personally fill tracknumbers as well, which goes higher and higher with each new track added, but that is just my personal habit. These kind of folders are also one of the reason (not the only) why I don't use codec in paths either, as they would end up segregated.

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #14 –
Quote from: Tall-Guy on
Sometimes I find myself adding post directory like D:\Music\Soundtracks\Aladdin so all my Soundtracks can be easily spotted.


Like:

D:\Music\Various\compilationalbum#1
D:\Music\Various\compilationalbum#2
D:\Music\Various\varioustracks

I would want to keep things like that at the end of the alphabet.  A tip: If you have an internationalized keyboard with e.g. µ on AltGr-m, use that as first letter. Check if µVarious ends up after ZZ Top (it could be locale-dependent).
 

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #15 –
When I started collecting MP3s in the early 2000s, I usually got only single songs.
As such, I didn't store them by artist, but instead, I stored them by Genre.

When I started ripping complete CD's, I created another folder named Albums, where I put them.

Recently, I've been sorting and cleaning that, better tagging and relocating the files, but overall, I believe the Genre separation was worth it:

Albums
Dance
Disco
House
Mixes
Pop
Pop-Rock
Rave
Techno
Trance-Progressive
Vocal Trance

(The Genre tag in the files is a bit more precise, but the folders are good enough to separate them)

The "Mixes" folder includes radio streams and many Dj Sessions.
With that, and foobar2000 Album list, everything's good

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #16 –
I autogenerate my filenames and folder structure from the tags using mp3tag. Get the tags right, and everything else looks after itself. Creating the automapping you like is "fun", but it's much better than trying to keep tags and files/folders correct separately.

Like tev777, the album name of a single is always "Single" (actually it was "~Single" to alpha sort it after all the albums, but some things don't like the ~ character).

I have defined a "SINGLE" tag too. If SINGLE=1, it gets put into an entirely separate "singles" folder with a simple artist - title filename. If that tag is absent, it will be put into the normal folder structure with the albums (remember album name = single). Hence the music/artists area doesn't get filled with lots of artists with only one track, because I tag SINGLE=1 on those tracks.

I find my folder structure useful for different things from my tags. I like both to be available. I know some people only care about one or the other. Such people either don't search for things in a large collection (where tags are essential), or don't use a wide variety of devices to play their music (where a sensible folder structure is essential). IMO. YMMV

Also, the folder structure gives a fixed organisation which can mirror a physical organisation of items. Some people like that. They like to know "where" something is.

Cheers,
David.

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #17 –
The only two genres I use are 'Podcasts' and 'Radio Drama', the rest I leave blank. It's far too complex to define music by genre, especially when an artist doesn't fall into any neat category. It also would be too fragmented, and I prefer using tags that can be filtered to more than one result (otherwise I could just as easily search for it).

ReleaseType is one of the most useful custom tag ideas I've picked up from others. Each release or track is tagged appropriately - Album/Single/EP/Unreleased/Demo/Soundtrack/Compilation/Live Recording/Radio Recording/DJ Set Mix. Singles I like to define as being officially released, whether multiple tracks or one, otherwise it will be tagged differently.

Advice on How to Organize Songs That are not Part of an Album?

Reply #18 –
I use subdirectories in the format of Artist\Release\Track.ext. Singles and EPs get treated the same way as albums -- if the release has a name, it gets its own subdirectory. Tracks that do not have an associated release get thrown into an "Assorted" directory and named Artist - Track.ext. I generally let fb2k handle media library functions and searching.