Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[JimH]

I'd like to ask your advice and get a better idea of how you organize your media.

Right now, I have:

e:\music -- my ape library on a big new drive
c:\music2 -- mp3 library on the primary drive
e:\images
e:\video

I'm leaning toward moving everything to a media directory.  Here's my proposal:

e:\media
and under that directory, the following directories:
    music
             then artist, then album  
    video
    images
             then year, genre, comment (sub-genre)
    tv recordings (although maybe this belongs under video)
             
In addition, I'd like to move cover art and data to the same root directory:

e:\media\cover art
e:\media\data

The last two would be changes to the default way we set up MC.  Is this good, bad, or indifferent?

I would like to have a directory structure that doesn't clutter up the root of the drive and that can be moved easily to a new drive.  

When data and media are on the same logical drive, the data files should have relative paths that would allow the media files to exist on any logical drive (c:, d:, etc).

Thanks for any feedback.

[Rands]

I'm fairly anal about my collection and the only structure I've come up with so far that is pleasing to me is:

Genre/Artist/[Year] Album/## Songtitle.mp3
(or ## Artist - Songtitle.mp3 on a VA)

The genres I use are not official ID3 genres which, I suppose, would annoy some but they match my approach towards organization.

Examples:
Electronic - Downtemp & Ambient
Electronic - Goa & Psytrance
Electronic - IDM & Glitch
Indie & Punk
Jazz & Swing
Rock & Alternative
...

I tag all of mp3s this way so they show up the same way in MC9 in a Genre/Artist/Album view scheme.

Works great for me.

I personally don't collect images and videos so I can't offer my help there.  As for mixing of media types, I wouldn't make a separate library for each media type;  just bundle them together and maybe add something to the directory structure to denote the format (e.g., Genre/Artist/[Year] Album {Format}).

[NoCodeUK]

My current setup is thus H:/My Music/[ARTIST]/[YEAR [ALBUM]
All tracks are named as Artist - Track # - Name- Album.

Adam

[dragyn]

I have my full albums setup as x:\audio files\<type>\<artist>\<album>\<artist> - <album> - <track#> - <name>

and then soundtracks and whatnot as:
x:\audio files\<type>\<various artists>\<album>\<album> - <track#> - <artist> - <name>

then I keep everything else in the root folder <type>. I use ape/apl files for full albums

When I import, I create a UNC name and leave it as read-only. If I need to make changes, I change the permissions to the path. That way, nothing will be able to change anything. I also use UNC because of the other PCs on the network and they each can access the files the exact same way.

[KingSparta]

Siince all My Music is Properly Tagged To Include The Year.

E:\My Music\1940\ArtistName - Album - Track# - SongName

To

E:\My Music\2002\ArtistName - Album - Track# - SongName

I have no Video\Pictures Loaded In MC, Just Music Since thats The Only Thing I use MC For.

[Autoelph]

I have 5 drives for media:

1 is Comps (soundtracks, mixes, compilations)
2 is A - I
3 is J - P
4 is Q - Z

Each letter is broken down on each drive, then artist\artist - album

Year and genre begone! It's all a big fun pile of tunes.

5 drive is x:\video and x:\images

[phelt]

I prefer that programs keep their data in their install directory. I don't do cover art. As long as I don't have to keep deleting or moving MC-generated directories out of my media folder - that would be annoying.

[nila]

This is how I have mine set up:

ALL my media files are on one drive (M) and are all .mp3 files. I like having all my music together instead of all over the place. Even if it was in different formats I think I'd still have it in this setup except maybe re-name the folders to have say: <Artist> - <Album> - <format>

M:\ (root)

- Full Albums\<Artist> - <Album>
- Incomplete Albums\<Artist> - <Album>
- Soundtracks\<Album>
- Compilations\<Album>
- Singles (rips of full singles with like 2 or 3 versions)\<Artist> - <Single>
- Random Songs (random songs downloaded)
- Music Videos


All my Full Albums have a .m3u playlist file inside their folder as well as the covers and a .sfv file although I recently realised these are all becoming useless as when I change the tags from within MJ these are no longer valid and would fail any checks. I recently used Album View 2 to copy and rename all my covers to : Folder.jpg so that even in Explorer I can get album cover type view of my albums which works quite nicely even though I prefer MJ. I like having my covers with the albums so if I move the albums they retain their covers. The two are directly connected and so should reside together


Inside MJ I then have some view schemes set up to reflect my album types - I have:
Full Albums (incomplete and complete ones)
Soundtracks
Compilations
Singles (mix of singles and random songs)

(All of these have as the criteria the path to the folders)

[Robert Taylor]

I have M:\MP3s\

[Album Artist]\[Year]-[Album]\[Track #].[Name]

I have the album cover art in the Album directory (as this also works under Windows XP nicely).

It appears that I can't use [Album Artist] any more, so my compilation CD's end up scattered all over the place - that's great news...

[rar2667]

My $.02 on organization is that (as this thread indicates) everyone has their own little fettish, as do I.

The really keen thing about MC/MJ is that you can cram all those peices of info into the library file and use MC/MJ to slice/dice it. Everything could be dumped in one big directory for that matter.

I've got a folder for Stuff from vinyl, one for iMesh, then the usual artist/album folders for everything MJ/MC has ripped. I'd prefer major folders aligning to source (e.g. CD, tape, vinyl, download, borrowed CD, etc.).

Thanks for listening.

[Swordsman]

MJ/MC is so flexible using the library "View Schemes" that I let it do the organizing.  Here's what I have set up (keep in mind that I abhor extra clicks!!):

C:\Music\Megadeth - Risk\01 - Insomnia.mp3
C:\Music\Megadeth - Risk\02 - Prince of Darkness.mp3
C:\Music\Megadeth - Risk\03 - Enter the Arena.mp3

If I have a complete album, it goes into it's own subfolder of "Artist - Album" with the files as "Track# - Name".  I tried "Artist\Album" but I quickly got tired of clicking down the tree of folders.  I have the cover art stored in the folder as folder.jpg.  

C:\Music\Indigo Girls - Galileo.mp3
C:\Music\Rob Zombie - Dragula.mp3

The last two are singles - all singles are stored in the root of the Music folder as "Artist - Name.mp3".  I treat some complete albums as singles.  Collections like the Forrest Gump soundtrack, Greatest Hits of the 80's, Masters of Rap, etc - I can't really consider those as albums since none of the songs are related to each other (except sometimes in genre).  As for cover art - it is stored within the file for singles.

I don't use MJ to organize my video/image files - Explorer in XP has enough oomph for my needs.  I can see dimensions, Date Picture Taken, comments, and it has slideshow, resizing, quick thumbnails...


Now with this nice simple organization, I can easily generate all sorts of library "View Schemes" - by album, artist, singles, genre, decade, and even "tag status" (a custom field indicator I set to show I've completed tagging the file).  I just couldn't understand why people would even need MJ as an organizational tool if they already used their folders and file naming as complex organized structures....

[Galley]

I have a 100GB partition on a 120GB drive strictly for media.

E:\Documents
E:\Downloads
E:\Images
E:\Movies
E:\MP3's
E:\WAV's
E:\WMA's

That's also creates a MUCH shorter file path than storing everything in My Documents (especially on XP systems).

[Cmagic]

Hi,

My setup :
/Media/Music
/Media/Photos

MUSIC :
for regular complete single artists albums
/Media/Music/(Artist)/(Album)/Artist - SongName.ape (or mpc or mp3)
isolated tracks (not in album) for given artist is in
/Media/Music/(Artist)/Tracks/Artist - SongName

for complete multiple artist albums:
/Media/Music/Various Folks Album/(Album)/Artist-Songname

for isolated tracks from artist with less than 5 tracks in library:
/Media/Music/Various Folks/(Genre)/Artist - SongName

PHOTOS:
Photos are organized by year and months.
/Media/Photos/YYYYMM/YYYYMMDD--location_topic/yymmdd-nnnn-a--subject_of_photo.jpg (or CRW, or TIF)
exemple : 200207/20020712--Vacances_St_Tropez/020712-0768-a--at_the_beach.jpg
photo (at the beach) was taken on 2002 july 12th (from exif), it is number 0768 in the series (taken from original camera file name). The letter 'a' denotes an original (negative). Different edited versions would have letters 'b,c,d,....'. Finally this picture is part of an album named "Vacances St Tropez".

Ciao !

[V-Man]

Please see this thread for my preference.

I love the way you can specify the media type as part of the directory structure. This is really important as I've now pretty much settled on a rename scheme for all media files which makes sense.

A nice touch would be this - each time you modify the properties of a file, calculate a new filename based on the currently preferred scheme. If it's different to the existing filename, ask the user if he wants the file to be renamed.

[SBrandsborg aka Mouseman]

I have all my stuff on a media server where i have my television and my work computer connected to on the media server is it like

d:\server\Full albums 1
d:\server\TV Shows 1
e:\server\Full albums 2
e:\server\TV Shows 2
g:\server\movies 1

my full albums is like:
ARTIST - ALBUM/#TRACK - ARTIST - Title.ogg
all the files is in OGG bit rate 128-224 Kbps
and they have all album cover in 600x600 in the idtag

my TV Shows is like:
Season x Episode Number - Title.avi

my Movies is like:
Title.avi

[Jaguu]

As my media pc crashed and had to buy a new one with Raid 0/1 I have to rethink on how to organize all my media. I feel the most important thing here is utmost flexibility as things are changing pretty fast. We now have audio and images and with falling disk prices even complete videos on disk will become natural.

There should also be a distinction between new and casual users and the real MJ Pro's. New users and casual users might expect the standard way given by Windows 2000/XP.

So I would propose an overall organization scheme such as:
Microsoft Standard
Microsoft Shared
JRiver Standard
JRiver Shared
Custom

Microsoft Standard would default to:
My Documents/My Music
My Documents/My Pictures
My Documents/My Pictures/Cover Art
My Documents/My Videos
Documents and Settings/Application Data/J River/MC/Library1
Documents and Settings/Application Data/J River/MC Library2

Microsoft Share would be the same, but everything would go to the Shared folder in All Users, so that all users on a system would see the same.

J River Standard/Shared would be the best choice given by JRiver.

Custom would be fully customizable by the user.

This would give the utmost flexibility for ever changing data structures.

Also I found that a few other things should go to some place outside the J River program folder - things like MegaMe and MiniMe Skins and also Visualization/Track Info. Every time you uninstall MC for any reason, they are wiped out and you have to download them again. This could really be avoided.

So my proposal: Define a high level organization scheme and MC takes care about all these small file and folder definitions automatically. This would make it easier for users as they don't have to care much about individual settings, although this should always be possible.

As add-on, if you do a reorganisation, then you could define a new organisation scheme and then everything would move automatically according to the new scheme.

PS: Having done a few NT-Domain reorganisations I know very well how much time you can save by working with such high level definition schemes.

[Jaguu]

Also: If you use the Microsoft Standard with all files in the Users Home Directory, it would be easy to use the Home Directory Redirection feature in Windows XP.

If you compare the size of My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, then in most cases My Documents (with all Office and other data files) is relatively small, so that redirecting the whole Home Folder to a new disk makes sense as Doof pointed out once.

I remember him posting his folder structure once, where he keeps everything in the Home Folder redirecting it to a very large disk.

In my case:
My Documents: 1.8 GB
My Pictures: 1.35 GB
My Music (APE + WMA): 45 GB
My Videos: Not used yet

[Polonio]

I'm leaning toward moving everything to a media directory.  Here's my proposal:

e:\media
and under that directory, the following directories:
    music
   then artist, then album  

It seems a good proposal to me. But how do YOU manage multiple artists albums using MC9?

I'm really interested in your opinion. Actually, I am not able to get a JRiver answer regarding this aspect. How do you organize multiple artists albums on your HD. Do you use MC9?

[JimH]

Polonio,
Yes, I use MC9.  I think I've used every build since we began releasing them.  

If you want to discuss album artist, please see if you can find a thread that's already going, but I'm not going to participate.  It's a "tastes great" -- "less filling" discussion.  If you can get people to agree on what they want, we'll do it.  We don't have an official position.

Jim

[Sam]

I'm surprised about how people here organize their music.  I had figured that everyone would do it the way I do.  But it seems that no one does.

I use just the tags to organize my music.  I put the songs in general directories, and I use MC to find and play songs.  Since I can do the artist/album thing from within MC, I don't need to build all these directories.

I back up my music onto DVDs, and so I keep songs in directories of about 4.3GB.  (I have problems when I try to burn DVDs larger than that, but I haven't bothered to figure out why.)

e:\music\DVD 01
e:\music\DVD 02
e:\music\DVD 03
e:\music\DVD 04
etc.


I like your proposed directory structure.  Less clutter is good.  

And relative paths is an interesting idea.  I guess that would allow you to match a song to its image when using storage devices whose driving mapping can change.  That's not very important to me, but that sounds like the right approach.

[Polonio]

If you want to discuss album artist,

I want to disscuss about Media File Organization. You propposed to put your music in a music folder, then artist, then album.

It seems a good proposal to me. But HOW can you do that using MC9? Ho dow you manage multiple artist album?

I am not asking anything so wierd.

[KingSparta]

Polonio

Look At the Rename Function for files already on the drive.

--------------------------

Under Setup You Need To Also Look at "File Naming And Location"

[Polonio]

Come on, KingSparta.

MC9 does not allow using "Album Artist" while renaiming. Please, try it by your self. But don't forget to back up your files. MC9 is going to mess your library.

[rocketsauce]

For single artist albums:

D:\Music\Artist\Artist - Album - Track# - Name

For various artist albums:

D:\Music\Album\Album - Track# - Artist - Name

[phelt]

My directory structure is similar to, but not quite as complicated as, the one presented by Cerebus. It's just:
Genre/Artist

Similarly, my View Scheme is pretty simple:
Genre/Album Artist/Album
(yes, still using MJ8 day to day until MC9 is further along)

My point is that I don't care what MC does by default, as long as I don't have to change my method of organization and MC does not try to change it for me.

[JimH]

My point is that I don't care what MC does by default, as long as I don't have to change my method of organization and MC does not try to change it for me.

No fear.  We're new age sensitive guys.  We would never make you store your stuff in "My Stuff".

[zevele10]

I have 3 drives -320 GB for music.
And still not sure if there is any organisation ....
At  more than 80% they are full albums.
I open folders like Emusic -Audiogalaxy -S..S..-A..mp3 - JimH [means cds i got from JimH  and gave him back when i ripped them on my computer] and so on.
Folders are important to me  to check quality ,  tags ,put sleeves.
If i got all my music at once ,i lost strenght ,there is to much work to do.
I prefer to work on Emusic folder ,after on folder X or Y.
When i get cds from friends i allways rip to APeE In a second time i listen to it.
From it i keep some in APE ,others i convert to mp3 192 VRB ,and others i just delete.
I use another program for tags and sleeves and try to import 'finished tracks ' in MC.
I want to see artist - album - track number- track name in MC.
I do not use really genres .Only for countrys ,like french metal-israpunk ,grecpsy.
I put sleeves in the tags because i use serious about quality p2p and soon i will have all my music downloadable from FTP.
There is something i miss from MJ8 ,but you know it already...
I know that i do not use  MC to is full capacities. But i have so much songs that i prefer import 'finished songs ' in it.
From it i can see incomplete albums  ,missing sleeves  ect and i can use  Replay Gain.
Where is my music in my computer is not important.
I still have to deal with pictures ....soon  for sure.