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[Quixote]

There are many on this board who are more experience with tagging their collections and have great ideas for organizing their media in MC.  I'm about ready to fully tag my media, but I wanted to get some ideas from those who have infinite more experience with tagging/organizing skills so I could do it "right" the first time.  I noticed that AlexB had a couple of ideas that I wanted to borrow (i.e. the Version tag).  Maybe he and others could share some of their more intricate systems.  Some of the questions that would help are:

• What are some of the custom fields that you use?
• How do you physically organize your music on your drives?
• How do you organize your singles?
• What are some other special considerations that you have?
• Do you use separate libraries for certain collections?
• Rating systems?

For example, I have a lot of Audio Books and I all my custom fields have "my" at the beginning:
Book Custom Fields:
mySeries = Book Series Name
mySeries# = Book Series Number

Music Custom Fields:
myTrack# = my own track # with leading 0's (sometimes I have 100+ tracks in an "album" and MC doesn't quite handle that leftmost 0 correctly)
myFileName = cleaned up version of the Name field for Filename purpose (i.e. " replaced with ',":" replaced with "-", etc..)
myFileArtist = cleaned up version of Artist ("/" replaced with " & ";Pink/Eve = Pink & Eve)
myFileAlbum = cleaned up version of Album.  This is the an actual Folder Name

Music is organized by [Album Artist]\[myFileAlbum]\#[myTrack#] [myFileArtist] - [myFileName]
That way I shouldn't see a lot of underscores in my Filenames; underscores are pet peeve of mine.

Thanks for the input!

[Alex B]

What are some of the custom fields that you use?

- Album Rating (for my own album ratings, integer 1-10)

- CD Track # (for the original track numbers before renumbering the multi-disc sets)

- Comment 2 (sometimes one comment field is not enough)

- Conductor (for classical music, I use the Band tag for the orchestra)

- CUE track (I mark CUE based track entries with this)

- DJ Playlist (A marker for various "party music". It is easier to make playlists when I prefilter files with this field.)

- Encoder (the used ripping and encoding programs, format and quality settings)

- Lonely (The values I use are just Y or empty. I use this for single tracks that are not ripped from any disc. E.g. my very old "lonely" files before MJ/MC times and some newer web purchases and downloads.)

- Lossless Archived (Marks lossy files that have lossless rips archived outside MC. The most of my newly ripped albums fell into this category)

- Solo Performer (lead vocalist, pianist, etc)

How do you physically organize your music on your drives?

\[Album Artist (auto)\[Album]\CD[Disc Number]* - [Track #]** -  [Name]

* if exists   ** with the leading zeroes. I rename the files before possible renumbering.
- There are exceptions when different structures are needed, especially with classical music.

Currently I have almost 900 [Album Artist] root folders and an unsorted "X" folder that has 2800 mostly old "lonely" files. I am slowly organizing also these files. I delete the duplicates if I have ripped the complete CDs later and organize the rest into the folder structure. For them I use \[Artist]\Misc

How do you organize your singles?

Just like any other ripped albums if you mean whole CD or vinyl single discs. If you mean single tracks that are not a part of a complete disc (aka "album") I have already answered this: \[Artist]\Misc.

What are some other special considerations that you have?

--- 

Do you use separate libraries for certain collections?

Not actually. Only for testing purposes.

Rating systems?

I added the album rating field. I am slowly adding album ratings when listening to the albums. I use the field sometimes for finding arbitary good albums.

For example, I have a lot of Audio Books and I all my custom fields have "my" at the beginning:
Book Custom Fields:
mySeries = Book Series Name
mySeries# = Book Series Number

I don't have audio books.

Music Custom Fields:
myTrack# = my own track # with leading 0's (sometimes I have 100+ tracks in an "album" and MC doesn't quite handle that leftmost 0 correctly)

I have not reached over 100 tracks in one album yet. The maximum I have is about 80 for a 4-disc set.

myFileName = cleaned up version of the Name field for Filename purpose (i.e. " replaced with ',":" replaced with "-", etc..)
myFileArtist = cleaned up version of Artist ("/" replaced with " & ";Pink/Eve = Pink & Eve)
myFileAlbum = cleaned up version of Album.  This is the an actual Folder Name

An interesting idea.

Music is organized by [Album Artist]\[myFileAlbum]\#[myTrack#] [myFileArtist] - [myFileName]
That way I shouldn't see a lot of underscores in my Filenames; underscores are pet peeve of mine.

Sometimes I use underscores for better visual distinction if the other fields already contain standard hyphens or if the filenames are likely to become too long. An underscore can replace three characters (space, hyphen, space).

[Mastiff]

I use Album genre\Artist - Album\Track number - Name, and Compilation albums\Album\Track number - Artist - Name for sorting. I dont use rating at all. And I have my own genres, like "audio books and verbal humor", "heavy metal and hard rock", "rock", "pop-disco-dance", "Alternative rock & pop" and a few more for tracks. For full albums I have even broader genres, with Pop being "Pop-Disco-dance-rap-reggae" and so on. First of all it's dang difficult to put albums in the correct genre any other way, since many albums have different genres on them. And my wife knows that anything under hard and heavy will annoy her, while what I have classified as rock is OK by her (Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi, for instance). Don't go too many genres, it's just chaothic. And by no means use different libraries, that's what views are for (well, except for if you have "adult" stuff that you want to keep away from kids prowling in the library, of course...).

I have a few sub-genre fields, like power ballad in the rock and heavy cathegories. And then I have my AlbumID wich is a number with digits from 1 to 3 (3500 albums or so now, so I don't think I'll need four digits any time soon). They are used in my Girder playlist selecter system, where I can read in a printout what ID an album has (sorted in genres in the printout and also in the squence) and just punch the digits on an IR remote or an USB numerical keypad.

[cascius]

As far as organizing my music on the drive, here's what I did:
- Organized everything by: Artist/Album/Artist - Name
- Then I went into explorer and moved the artists folder's in their respective alphabetical order. What I mean by that is that 50cents went into a folder called #, Eminem in a folder called E... This makes browsing your library in explorer much, much faster. It used to be so slow when I had 1500+ folders inside a single folder, that I find this solution quite good. Also, it makes finding track on your HDD much faster.

As far as tagging is concerned, I mainly care about the following things:
Main Genres  -- This is limited to a couple ones (~7 or so) These are semicolon delimited.
Sub Genres -- This is where it gets crazy! (~110 sub genres or so). These are semicolon delimited.
Ratings -- The standard ratings (1=crap, 2=ok song, 3=good song, 4=great song, 5=exceptional)

This balance of Main Genres/Sub Genres has worked best for me. The reason behind this thinking is that quite often, i find a song that fits in more than 1 cathegory. i.e. Black Eyed Peas: Hip-Hop? Rap? even Alternative for some songs... Using Semicolons makes that a breeze. I just love it.

A great source to learn about genres and sub genres is here: http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Musical_genre This is definitely the ultimate resource for all that stuff.

hope this helps,

- Cas

[hit_ny]

Some of the questions that would help are:

• What are some of the custom fields that you use?
• How do you physically organize your music on your drives?
• How do you organize your singles?
• What are some other special considerations that you have?
• Do you use separate libraries for certain collections?
• Rating systems?

Examples of custom fields
- Country (where artist/Band comes from)
- Recording Label
- Series ( name of the series, if its part of a compilation series)
- Cue Track (if its an album with cue file)
- Album Score (Average of the individual ratings, rounded up to 1 decimal place, might become redundant with MC 12)
- Encoder ( which encoder settings were used to rip the album)
- Vocals ( track has vocals or not)

Calculated Field
- Album Score - Album

Useful in viewschemes to show the best albums by an artist or best of in a series.



Rating System
Its a 2 stage process. I rate tracks on the following
5 - excellent
4 - good
3 - ok, not bad
2 - dont like
there is no 1

Calculate an avg score based on individual track ratings rounded up to 1 decimal place.

Then set up bands using smartlists.
Score >= 3.5 is 10 star album
 "       = 3.4 is 9.5  "
 "       = 3.3 is 9    star album
...etc

or it could be scaled down to 5stars
Score >= 3.5 is  5 star album
 "         = 3.3 is  4.5  "
 "         = 3.1  is 4  star album
...etc
 
                                                                                    
You see i was not aware what a 10 ,9, 8 star etc album was from just listening to it. So once i got done i looked at my highest scoring albums and deduced a band system that could accomodate my system. You could very well set up a subjective album rating but a numerical one gives a better idea of how much more you liked any album. I have a minimum rating of 6 stars, if an album falls below that, i just keep the 3+ star tracks and move the incompete album to a Various folder. The tracks are still kept in the album folder.



I setup partitions for various Genres, there is a current directory where all newly ripped albums arrive. They get tagged + analysed + rated in here. Once done are moved off to to various genre folders.

Genre
|____Artist - Album (if its an original artist album)
|____VA     - All compilations live here

Singles are just dumped in one dir called Singles, i let MC handle the rest.

Use one library that gets backed up at the rate of 1 album modification/bakup. I got burned once and lost lots of time. There are any number of reasons a library can get corrupt, all that matters is you have a recent backup. Thankfully this is done in a few seconds.

File->Library->Backup Library (preferably to a different Hardrive), rewrites the older one
If there is one habit you need to learn it is this.

[Mastiff]

Also, it makes finding track on your HDD much faster.

You do mean by looking manually, right? It doesn't change the time MC use to find/open a track?

[cascius]

Correct. I just mean that when you want to manually find a track from Moby (for example), you would just have to go browse to My Music/M/ and find your Moby folder. I find it much easier to do it that because finding 1 name out of 50 is always faster than 1 out of 1000+... ;-) It also make brwosing those folders just plain faster, especially if you're in thumbnail mode.

Hope this clarifies what i meant.

- Cas

[Mastiff]

Cascius, that's what I thought. And I gotta tell you that I lost a couple of hours sleep last night because of you! Or rather because of your link:

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Musical_genre

Very interesting, I saw so many subgenres that I didn't even know about. By following interesting links I jumped all around the place (luckily the page looked just right on my PPC, so I could do it from bed, at least), but I kind of gave up when I had been reading about Esoteric Hitlerism in 15 minutes (by way of heavy metal, norwegian black metal, Varg Vikernes and a few even more strange associations!

[KingSparta]

What are some of the custom fields that you use?

None Really

How do you physically organize your music on your drives?

OTR

AlbumName = YYYY-MM-DD (####) (Show Full Year, Month, Day, And Episode #) If Aval, If Not xxxx-xx-xx (xxxx)

ArtistName = Adventures Of Phillip Marlow, The

Name = Show Title

E:\OTR-Files\A\Adventures Of Phillip Marlow, The\YYYY-MM-DD (####) Series Name - Show Title.mp3

Music

E:\My Music\A\ArtistName\ArtistName - AlbumName - Song Name.mp3

How do you organize your singles?

Same

What are some other special considerations that you have?

None

Do you use separate libraries for certain collections?

Yes

Rating systems?

OTR
None

Music

I Allow My Plug-In "Chart Finder" Rate Them based On The Chart Rating

[LonWar]

I only have music so, here is mine.

I use ape, and have a duplicate in mp3 160.

My folder structure is :

Genre - Artist - Album (File Name) track # - Track Name

Genre = The starting Artist Letter  ie,   A-B; C-D; E-F
Composer is the same, but albums.

I tag the following

Genre - Described above
Composer "" ""

Using atagger I tag

Bios -
Info = Album Review
Comments - Other tracks on the album
Notes - Album Styles ie, Hard Rock; Aussie Rock.... This I think I'm going to remove and have band members

Lyrics, King Sparta's Lyrics Finder

Special Fields;

Original CD;  ie Damaged; Yes; Missing; Box Set
Converted - Y/N if it's converted to mp3 160.
Album art are all in the file and at 200x200

I think that's about it.