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[dasphd]

I have different genres of music and I was wondering if it would make sense to set up a new library for each genre or if this would make accessing my music more difficult.

Thanks,

David

[blgentry]

Libraries should not be used for organization of any kinds of music (or other media) that you might ever want to access together.  Genre is *definitely* not a good reason to use a separate library. 

Separate libraries make it harder to get to your media, because switching libraries is slow.  Libraries can NOT be easily joined either.  So I would definitely recommend that you use one library for your entire music collection.

It's very easy to build views to separate your media in many different ways.  Separating by Genre is very easy, within the same library, assuming you have Genre tags applied to all of your files.

Brian.

[dasphd]

thanks Brian, very helpful.

david

[chriswimlett]

One thing I do is have different top level folders for different types of music (I use a dedicated external hard drive for all my audio).  I then use the Genre tag for the different sub-genres within each type of music, e.g. Orchestral, Concerto, Chamber, etc for classical - though at present I only do this for classical.  You can then create library views based on both file location and genre, which I find gives great flexibility.

[blgentry]

One thing I do is have different top level folders for different types of music (I use a dedicated external hard drive for all my audio).  I then use the Genre tag for the different sub-genres within each type of music, e.g. Orchestral, Concerto, Chamber, etc for classical - though at present I only do this for classical.  You can then create library views based on both file location and genre, which I find gives great flexibility.

You can also automate this with an Auto Import rule that automatically tags the files in these directories with their Genre.  So your Concerto directory can be configured to automatically apply the Concerto Genre to all files *as* they are imported.  Then your Genre based views will be more simple because they only have to look at Genre and not at location.

It's just, yet another way of doing things in MC.  Each of these techniques has it's own advantages and disadvantages.

Brian.

[chriswimlett]

You can also automate this with an Auto Import rule that automatically tags the files in these directories with their Genre.  So your Concerto directory can be configured to automatically apply the Concerto Genre to all files *as* they are imported.  Then your Genre based views will be more simple because they only have to look at Genre and not at location.

It's just, yet another way of doing things in MC.  Each of these techniques has it's own advantages and disadvantages.

Brian.

Thanks for the tip Brian.  I keep all of my classical albums in one folder tree, mainly because a lot of them have more than one genre on an album, but I will certainly start to do this for my jazz, folk, etc. CDs

Chris

[bluedy1]

Hi Brian,
You recommend using only 1 library for all the music and it makes sense. However I have a large library of 270.000 tracks and when I move tracks from folders, although the import goes extremely fast there is some other work in the background that regularly stops MC 22 and I have to relaunch. I was so frustrated (my macbook pro has 16gb of ram) that I decided to spread my library into 5 smaller ones hoping it would be more reliable. Yet every time I move files it takes ages, beyond the tagging to cool down. What is your advice? I would much prefer having 1 library with everything at hand. It seems that once the tagging is done music playing is alright. And I dont see much difference, in time response, between large and small libraries (I have kept the large library as one of them).
One thing I must confess is that of all players MC is the most reliable for large libraries.
I like the grey modern skin.
Have a good day,
martin

[bluedy1]

Brian,
I read something you answered recently so I understand that all my issues have to do with moving files and folders. Once that is done MC works alright.
So I could very well live with only 1 library, although very large. No need to divide it.
Much Thks.
martin

[blgentry]

With a library that size, if you like your on-disk organization to be a very specific way, and you want to move files and folders around, I can totally understand.

So, with that in mind, you should learn to use the Rename, Move, and Copy files tool.  Don't do it through the Mac Finder.  Do it with RM&C.

http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Rename,_Move,_and_Copy_Files

I do about 95% of my moves and renames with RM&C.  This includes audio as well as video files.  It's very powerful and easy to use once you understand it.  At first it seems a little complex. But once you get past that, it's a really fantastic tool.  It's really one of MC's best features that doesn't get a lot of attention.

Sometimes I do moves outside of MC.  In those cases I generally do something that's simple and I still use RM&C to UPDATE MC's database, so it knows where my files have moved to.  I do NOT want MC re-importing my files as I move them.   I want MC to keep the same information about all of the files, all the time, even when I move them.  If you move externally, and re-import, MC may lose some information and re-write things like the Import Date.

So learn to use RM&C and be happy. 

Brian.