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How do you organize your digital music?


curlytoot

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I was once really anal about the album art display in Winamp's main window, and would size all of my images to fit its window precisely.

 

I then realised how pointless this was (I never have the main window open), so now I just get the best-looking image, embed it in each file and put a copy in the folder so it looks all nice in Explorer. I'd say a minimum of 500, preferably higher, and for newer releases (where we have access to super hi-res), I shrink them to around 800.

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My fixation on good artwork stems in large part from longstanding inconsistencies in the way it's presented. Sometimes, it's got ugly white edges where (presumably) the scanner caught some of the glass and no one re-oriented the scan or cropped in it ever so slightly. And for many new releases, lovely high-res art is available, which is great, but it also plays up how poorly its low-res peers from years ago look by comparison.

 

I've had a perfectionism streak in me for a long time, but it's only been a few years since I've learned how NOT useful it is in much of life. It makes you less productive and gives you chronic dissatisfaction (since you always think it could be better, and if only I'd spent more time on it (but I already spent way more time than I should have), etc..). I've finally been able to break away from that to a modest degree and it's really liberating. But on legacy projects (like my music library) where my perfectionism was running at full tilt, I feel I have to continue in the same vein so as not to repudiate the hard work of my younger self.

 

Good on all of you who can resist the temptation! Wish I knew earlier it's not the metadata that matters; it's the music.

18 hours ago, Woj said:

Scintillating, most of what you said is interchangeable with the way I manage my collection. Though I don't add life years to their names, and I've gradually dropped cover size to 400x400 because of space. 

 

I might like to learn of your naming conventions. Mine keep changing as I go. 

 

You're the first person to express some tentative interest in my naming ways! It's probably easier for me to upload some screen-grabbed examples and make some notes after...

 

Screen Shot 2017-09-15 at 4.33.50 PM.pngScreen Shot 2017-09-15 at 4.35.31 PM.pngScreen Shot 2017-09-15 at 4.38.50 PM.png

 

My track-naming rules include lowercasing conjunctions and similarly short words ("as", "and", "or", "a", etc.), although there are a bunch of exceptions. The easiest way to summarize this is that I try to follow the typesetting conventions of newspaper headlines, book titles, and magazine articles. I try to reserve square brackets for informing on a fundamental attribute of the track unrelated to its name (for instance, [Reprise], [Alternate Cue], [1979 Revised Version], etc.). For classical albums, I always strive for the following sequence: Composer: Name of work and key ("Nickname of work"): Mov't #. Name of mov't in sentence case. For jazz, R&B, pop, etc., I always put the featured artist in brackets WITH THE ARTIST. Seeing featured artists identified after the name of the song has always driven me nuts.

 

What approaches do you use?

 

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Well I try to keep album titles distinct within the first 11 characters or so, in order to identify them easily in my car stereo that's connected to my iPod. So this means all my "Battlestar Galactica" albums (by Bear and Stu) are now BSG instead. 

 

I typically put the soundtrack label at the end of the album name, though I keep the year composition instead of the re-release. I may need to revisit this technique. 

 

I typically move featured artists into the title instead of the artist, to keep a smaller number of unique artists. 

 

I'm very inconsistent with naming tracks from TV shows when it comes to identifying the episode. I'd like to avoid breaking sets like Batman TAS and The X-Files and BSG and the Star Trek compilations down into twenty minute albums by episode, or rearrange them to get there. That being said, a lot of long track names ensue. 

 

For tracks with the / symbol, it hugs the first letter, with a space after it. I'll make tracks as long as I think they need to be, but I keep my filenames generally shorter than 20 characters to prevent Windows from screaming when they're moved in deep folder structures. 

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  • 3 years later...

It took me five minutes to find the appropriate thread to post this.

 

If anybody has thousands of unorganized mp3 files on their computer, I found the solution:  SongKong.

http://www.jthink.net/songkong/

 

It can run on your computer, but it can also run on a network server and be controlled remotely.  It essentially compares all of your unorganized music files to MusicBrainz and other online music databases, fills in the metadata, adds cover art, and it can also rename the files and move them into folders.

 

I have folders upon folders of music that were downloaded from Napster or acquired from whoever shared disks or thumb drives with me.  I acquire and hoard, but sorting takes years.  YEARS.

 

Jaikoz is supposed to be the more powerful version of the software but there's less written about it.  I want a program that can most of the grunt work itself.  It's easier to sort fully indexed files.

 

Now it will still take hours and days, but I have a ~$50 program running on my QNAP NAS that can do it for me.  I am excited.

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On 6/4/2017 at 2:40 PM, curlytoot said:

• What media player do you use?

 

iTunes. I really want to get off it, but I'm in so deep. It's got like 15 years worth of music in it. It's well-organized, etc. Gonna take something drastic to get me to change it. So far it still works great. I'm on 12 as well and it takes a few more seconds to launch, but once launched, it works perfectly fine.

 

On 6/4/2017 at 2:40 PM, curlytoot said:

• Do you get your music in FLAC/ALAC, MP3, or the iTunes M4A (AAC)? Can you tell an audible difference?

 

I have many different formats. MP3, FLAC, WAV, Apple Lossless, M4A, etc. I only really notice the difference between MP3 and M4A, but not much between FLAC, WAV, Apple Lossless, etc.

 

Typically iTunes purchases are in their format, WAV's are from any of my own personal edits, Apple Lossless is imported discs, MP3 or FLAC from other digital sources that are not iTunes purchases.

 

On 6/4/2017 at 2:40 PM, curlytoot said:

• If you tend to buy things from digital music stores such as iTunes or Amazon, do you leave the album/artist/track fields as is, or do you change them at all for organizational purposes? (e.g. changing an album's track titles to match that of a digital/physical booklet, if available)

 

If it's an iTunes purchase, honestly, I usually leave it alone. My library tends to be mostly playlist or search based. So the things I listen to most are in various playlists along the side and anything else I just search in the search box and it directs me there. It's hardly a well-oiled machine and I will probably rethink this should I find a suitable replacement for iTunes that works for me.

 

Now, if it's from anywhere other than iTunes and I have to import it, then I will probably tweak things. I know I tweak CD imports all the time from whatever iTunes suggests, but generally it's just for personal preference and no organizational advantage.

 

On 6/4/2017 at 2:40 PM, curlytoot said:

Just wondering in general how other people prefer to manage their collections, and if there is any method to their madness.

 

Not gonna lie. My collection is organized just enough. I think it finally got to the point that I was having a hard time finding things in File Explorer so I went through and renamed and my folders at least (which unlinked a bunch of files from iTunes causing lots of fun shenanigans). 

 

I could do a lot better, but it's a HUGE task. I have a lot of music I've gotten over the years. So...it would be a lengthy project and working in TV does not give me much time to tackle that in addition to making my own edits of scores, etc. etc. I'm sure I'll find the time eventually, but I'd like a new software first.

 

Speaking of. Anyone have any good recommendations on iTunes replacements? If so, what's the comparison? I've seen several different things listed in here.

iTunes has worked for my because it's clean, simple to operate, and very little red tape to deal with.

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2 hours ago, TSMefford said:

I only really notice the difference between MP3 and M4A, but not much between FLAC, WAV, Apple Lossless, etc.

 

There is no difference to notice between FLAC, WAV, and Apple Lossless. Their content, when decoded for playback, is exactly the same.

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6 minutes ago, Marian Schedenig said:

 

There is no difference to notice between FLAC, WAV, and Apple Lossless. Their content, when decoded for playback, is exactly the same.

 

You're correct. I guess my point was that, like you said, there isn't a difference to notice, so I don't care about picking a particular one of them. I have some of each because it doesn't matter to me.

 

That's bad phrasing on my part

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On 9/15/2017 at 10:30 PM, Bayesian said:

My fixation on good artwork stems in large part from longstanding inconsistencies in the way it's presented. Sometimes, it's got ugly white edges where (presumably) the scanner caught some of the glass and no one re-oriented the scan or cropped in it ever so slightly. And for many new releases, lovely high-res art is available, which is great, but it also plays up how poorly its low-res peers from years ago look by comparison.

 

....

 

My track-naming rules include lowercasing conjunctions and similarly short words ("as", "and", "or", "a", etc.), although there are a bunch of exceptions. The easiest way to summarize this is that I try to follow the typesetting conventions of newspaper headlines, book titles, and magazine articles. I try to reserve square brackets for informing on a fundamental attribute of the track unrelated to its name (for instance, [Reprise], [Alternate Cue], [1979 Revised Version], etc.). For classical albums, I always strive for the following sequence: Composer: Name of work and key ("Nickname of work"): Mov't #. Name of mov't in sentence case. For jazz, R&B, pop, etc., I always put the featured artist in brackets WITH THE ARTIST. Seeing featured artists identified after the name of the song has always driven me nuts.

 

What approaches do you use?

 

 

In terms of artwork, I went through a period perhaps 5 years ago when I manually resized everything to be 443x443px, because that was the size of my Winamp 'cover art' window at the time, which was (and still is) horrendous at resizing covers itself.

 

Now I strive to find clean, sharp covers that are at least 600, and for newer ones where the art is readiy available in ridiculous resolution, I shrink it to 800 using Paint.net and use that. I so rarely have covers displaying on my PC that actually, this doesn't matter at all beyond each folder having a thumbnail. It's just the inner perfectionist in me, that each file should have a HQ copy of the art.

 

I actually bought a scanner a few years ago, mostly for some other reasons, but it meant that for rarer albums, or those for which no one's bothered to upload a HQ version, I just make my own.

 

I recently decided to make all my track names upper case, i.e. 'and' 'the', etc, simply so that I don't have to choose which to use.

 

Other attributes like 'year', 'genre' etc, I couldn't care less about. The only thing I have to set is the album name in 'album artist' because the newer incarnation of Poweramp separates albums with different 'album artist' entries.

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On 12/3/2020 at 12:25 PM, Darth Wojo said:

It took me five minutes to find the appropriate thread to post this.

 

If anybody has thousands of unorganized mp3 files on their computer, I found the solution:  SongKong.

http://www.jthink.net/songkong/

 

It can run on your computer, but it can also run on a network server and be controlled remotely.  It essentially compares all of your unorganized music files to MusicBrainz and other online music databases, fills in the metadata, adds cover art, and it can also rename the files and move them into folders.

 

I have folders upon folders of music that were downloaded from Napster or acquired from whoever shared disks or thumb drives with me.  I acquire and hoard, but sorting takes years.  YEARS.

 

Jaikoz is supposed to be the more powerful version of the software but there's less written about it.  I want a program that can most of the grunt work itself.  It's easier to sort fully indexed files.

 

Now it will still take hours and days, but I have a ~$50 program running on my QNAP NAS that can do it for me.  I am excited.

 

 

Don't start a new organizing session at 3 AM when you're too tired to think correctly.  You might accidentally tell it to automatically sort a large folder of music that's already been carefully sorted and curated the way you want it.  The undo function doesn't seem to work well.  My entire rock collection has been transformed like a Genesis planet (no pun intended) as this program sees fit.  I didn't lose anything, but I just have a lot of smaller partial albums that are scattered.  I'm as amused as I am pissed.

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  • 2 years later...

I think I just made a really great decision. I threw out every genre and composer folder. Everything is now sorted by album. One folder per album that looks like: Williams - American Journey, or Karajan, Mutter - Vivaldi - Four Seasons. I forgot what it's like to listen to albums instead of files. A few days of re-organising things ahead of me (MP3Tag can't do it all, though its magic is surreal to behold).

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On 04/06/2017 at 10:40 PM, curlytoot said:

• What media player do you use?

As a long time Apple user (I even have an original iPhone... it doesn't work alas) I use iTunes but, as others have referenced, I'm kinda in too deep to consider anything else. To be fair, iTunes (at least version 12.8 that I use on my 15 ish year old Mac) works pretty well.

 

On 04/06/2017 at 10:40 PM, curlytoot said:

• Do you get your music in FLAC/ALAC, MP3, or the iTunes M4A (AAC)? Can you tell an audible difference?

I mostly buy stuff digitally in FLAC and them convert to Apple Lossless and then use iTunes' feature to convert to 256k for my iPhone to maximise storage. I don't really think I can tell the difference between an mp3 and lossless, but as others have referenced, hard drive space these days is so cheap that it seems churlish to save a few quid and have a smaller hard drive (I have an 8Gb drive, just over half full - albeit a lot of storage taken up with movies and TV shows as well as music). Due to a weird bug when transferring some mp3 format files my iPhone*, anything I do have in mp3 I tend to convert to Apple's own AAC format. For conversion I use MediaHuman which is excellent - quick and easy to use. Plus I can easily switch the conversion parameters depending on whether I'm starting with FLAC or mp3.

 

*any track longer than 1 minute 13 seconds is reduced to 1 minute 13 seconds (or thereabouts) on my iPhone. This doesn't happen with every mp3 and some play just fine, but it happens more often than not so I decided it was easier just to convert mp3s into AAC where the issue doesn't occur.

 

On 04/06/2017 at 10:40 PM, curlytoot said:

• If you tend to buy things from digital music stores such as iTunes or Amazon, do you leave the album/artist/track fields as is, or do you change them at all for organizational purposes? (e.g. changing an album's track titles to match that of a digital/physical booklet, if available)

I am more fussy when it comes to classical than soundtracks, although I always remove "original motion picture" or "music from the Netflix movie/tv series" or whatever it is that is usually appended to the title in digital music stores. The title of the film/show is just the title of the soundtrack.

 

For expanded/complete editions, I usually just replace the OST with the expanded version. There are a few where I really like the OST programme and it's edited too much to recreate it faithfully as a playlist, or the sound quality is materially different, in which case I'll keep the OST in my library (Starship Troopers, Small Soldiers and the first three Harry Potter scores are prime examples where the OSTs have somewhat different sound and are edited in ways that can't be recreated just as a playlist, but I really like the OST programme) and put "original album" after the title in brackets. If original album edits are included with the expanded edition (so sound quality is consistent), I will more likely just keep the edited tracks as a separate "album edits" album and then combine them with the unedited tracks in a playlist from the full programme to recreate the OST (I did this for Jurassic Park and Star Trek II - although for the latter I included a few extra cues such as Kirk in Shuttle and Enterprise Attacks Reliant for example). There are a couple of times where I have used album edits in the expanded programme as part of a playlist, notably Star Trek V where a couple of the action cues - Without Help and Let's Get Out of Here - are much more musically satisfying edited.

 

Where it's a limited edition with bonus tracks or source music, I put this in brackets after the title. Similarly for recordings of a score that aren't the original tracks, I'll put the orchestra and conductor in brackets after, i.e. Psycho (RSNO McNeely). I don't do this so much for those 60s/70s scores where the album was recorded soon after (Jaws, Patton, etc.) and the OST is just the "original album", although if the OST has some kind of specific moniker, I use that - for example Alfred Newman's A Certain Smile OST is called "Columbia Original Soundtrack Album" or the numerous Ben-Hur recordings are "First/Second Kloss Album" or "Savina Album" etc.

 

For artwork, I tend to go for around 800x800 although I'm good with anything over 600x600. I have found that Spotify is a fairly reliable source of cover art and that comes in 640x640. Google's image searching seems to have ditched the really useful feature of finding similar images of different sizes (at least you can't do it as easily as you used to be able to) which is quite annoying.

 

I tend to stick to the original artwork but am not precious about using custom cover art instead if it's better than the official artwork. I do try and use different custom covers for bonus tracks or source music, more just as a way to enjoy different artwork as much as anything. ST:TMP is particularly great for this as there's the full length programme, the OST, the "additional music", the "unused early score" as well as the Joe Kraemer demos each of which has different artwork. For some with lots of available artwork, I'll use a different cover for each track of the bonus tracks, which is more just a bit of fun.

 

On the matter of artwork (should you have made it this far...), has anyone had any issues moving from iTunes to Apple Music (or whatever the new app is called) with artwork being changed/disappearing? My other half has had artwork disappear or be reverted to whatever Apple Music decides to use. This would be massively annoying for me as someone who has spent a lot of (enjoyable!) time curating decent artwork for my collection! I might be getting a new Mac soon and will doubtless have to move to the new programme. Jeff Bond posted some issue with it recently on Facebook and someone suggested using Retroactive which enable continuing with an older version of iTunes. Anyone tried this?

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A minor update is needed on my part. I just reviewed my previous post!

All my FLAC files from my CD collection are now stored in a cloud, enabling me to download each album I want to listen to individually on my phone. Fortunately, the era of the micro SD card has come to an end! :lol:

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My main difference from a while back is that I try to find the highest res possible album art and keep it that way. Most recent Varese DEs have at least 3000px images and for most others I can find at least 1000px. Failing that, Spotify's 640px is serviceable but reliable.

 

Plus for non-film artists, I like to find single covers for those songs in an album that were released as singles. I may not care about CDs much these days, but my nice album art desktop widget needs something pretty to display!

 

Still don't give a shit about metadata beyond the basics needed to actually find and identify a track, and for PowerAmp to not get confused.

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1 hour ago, Richard Penna said:

Still don't give a shit about metadata beyond the basics needed to actually find and identify a track, and for PowerAmp to not get confused.

 

I regret not diligently tagging all my classical FLACs so I could search e.g. for orchestras or soloists.

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The closest I have to classical is a Copland compilation, a load of Ludovico Einaudi albums and a Vaughan-Williams EP. Nowhere near enough for me to have any issues with tagging or organising.

 

I guess this all depends somewhat on how different people search for something they want to listen to. I'm very composer-agnostic so I group similarly-themed albums, e.g. horror, documentaries, Potter, Jurassic, DW, and so on. I don't rely on metadata for any of this.

 

And that's only for my mp3s - my ripped or download flacs are as they came, totally unorganised.

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  • 7 months later...
On 16/6/2023 at 7:09 PM, Tom Guernsey said:

I use iTunes but, as others have referenced, I'm kinda in too deep to consider anything else.

 

 

I'm in a similar boat. Although now that I'm on a newer Apple computer I'm using Apple Music, but it functions almost exactly as iTunes has for me in the past. 

 

I've also been using media human for conversion which works great. 

 

On 16/6/2023 at 7:09 PM, Tom Guernsey said:

If original album edits are included with the expanded edition (so sound quality is consistent), I will more likely just keep the edited tracks as a separate "album edits" album and then combine them with the unedited tracks in a playlist from the full programme to recreate the OST (I did this for Jurassic Park and Star Trek II 

 

Can you elaborate on your JP expanded playlist? I'm about to actually dive into the score for the first time (better late than never lol) but I'm not sure how the tracks on the OST and the expanded release compare. Like which tracks if any are alternate recordings or edited significantly from their complete forms. 

 

The last few years that I've gotten a lot more into film score music and classical music means I have almost at least as much of that as I do pop music in my iTunes now. I'm starting to wonder if I should have a separate library for score/classical music now. Do you do something like this?

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23 hours ago, tee_oh said:

I'm about to actually dive into the score for the first time (better late than never lol) but I'm not sure how the tracks on the OST and the expanded release compare. Like which tracks if any are alternate recordings or edited significantly from their complete forms.

 

The original 1993 Jurassic Park OST album had no alternate takes compared to the film except one single spot: about 40 seconds of Journey To The Island.  Also, Dennis Steals The Embryos had the orchestra mostly panned to one side instead of normal stereo.  So on the 2022 expansion, the "Film Version" tracks of those two tracks now match the film. 

 

None of the cues on the OST album had any pieces edited out, but he did sometimes combine cues from two different parts of the movie together with an overlap, and there are two entire cues that are on the OST album twice

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2 hours ago, tee_oh said:

 

I'm in a similar boat. Although now that I'm on a newer Apple computer I'm using Apple Music, but it functions almost exactly as iTunes has for me in the past. 

 

I've also been using media human for conversion which works great. 

 

 

Can you elaborate on your JP expanded playlist? I'm about to actually dive into the score for the first time (better late than never lol) but I'm not sure how the tracks on the OST and the expanded release compare. Like which tracks if any are alternate recordings or edited significantly from their complete forms. 

 

The last few years that I've gotten a lot more into film score music and classical music means I have almost at least as much of that as I do pop music in my iTunes now. I'm starting to wonder if I should have a separate library for score/classical music now. Do you do something like this?

Usually the releases indicates where there are different versions of cues between the expanded programme and the OST. As Jay says, there are only a couple of minor changes on JP although worth nothing that Incident at Isla Nubla on the OST combines two cues (the actual opening cue with the raptor arriving in a cage and the later scene where the Rex chases the jeep down the road). Otherwise it’s pretty similar. But say for Star Trek V there are some album edits where a few bars have been cut out for a more enjoyable listening experience on disc but it’s nice to have the choice. 

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On 16/06/2023 at 11:09 AM, Tom Guernsey said:

On the matter of artwork (should you have made it this far...), has anyone had any issues moving from iTunes to Apple Music (or whatever the new app is called) with artwork being changed/disappearing? My other half has had artwork disappear or be reverted to whatever Apple Music decides to use.

 

I couldn't put something as visible as artwork in the hands of a program, but I have very recently found Apple Music's results in a google image search to be a fairly reliable source of high res artwork for albums that aren't well known enough to be on Album Art Exchange. Spotify is still more likely to have the album but Apple usually has 1200px.

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