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[djharry]

I'm starting to use MJ more and more and would like some guidance on how best to setup my song library. Is it best to dump all songs in one folder in Explorer, and let MJ's Media Library do the grunt work?

Should I worry about how my files are named (in Windows), or just concern myself with getting them named correctly in MJ?

[JimH]

Others will have a lot more to say than I do, but if you organize your directories by artist and then album, you can have MJ 8.0 rename your files later.

It the files have tags, you can do the reverse.

Best to experiment on a few before you do a lot.

[zevele1]

Can be convenient to have folders in some cases
Let say you get cds from a friend.But he wants them back in 1 or 2 days
You can rip them in APE,scan the sleeves and give him back the cds.If you open a folder -under his name "peter",latter you just have to clean your library,import 'peter' folder and work on it.
Delete,rip,tag,import sleeve

The same if you use any P2P.If you have a folder 'audiogalazy'.First you can scan it with your anti-virus.Again cleaning the library,you import 'audiogalazy'folder and you work on it.
You can check songs with mp3checker to see if some are bad quality,or if you have one song many times.After that you can try to find info from Media Jukebox,get sleeves,change tags
After all of it done ,you just move songs in 'the general folder'
It helps a lot to not mess around

The only problem is that audiogalazy-or any other P2p- will not 'remember' if you had a song allready ,cause you had remove the songs from the folder

If you plan to use only Media Jukebox for all tasksrganize,play,rip,burn, you do not need to have many folders.Just one 'music' will be fine.And you use ,as i said,some folders as a temporary folders

[mike_s]

JimH is right. Different folks will have different 'systems' that work for them. As for me, I have a single music folder within which I have folders named '0-9', 'a', 'b', etc. Within these I have folders for each artist (lastname first) so under 'b', for example, I have folders named 'benson, george' and 'braxton, toni'. Within these I have individual .mp3 files or sometimes folders for albums by that artist. This setup allows me to find a particular song file (if I need to) using Windows explorer (ugh). The thought of having all 11000 songs in one folder scares me. But that's just me.

Where my scheme becomes a pain is when I rip CDs with songs by different artists. I suppose that's the price to pay for being slightly retentive.

[claudio]

Hey djharry

I use the Artist/Album folder structure, and then I rename the tracks to be track #- Track Title. I also have a couple of general folder where I download from Emusic before importing etc. I use this folder structure because I mirror my disk (well, only part of it) on my portable Archos Recorder 20, and I need the track name to be as short as possible to avoid slow scrolling text while lookign for songs on the portable.

But if you keep the tags clean, it's a breeze to change structure with MJ proprieties screen if you need to. I've changed it a few times completely automatically without any significant problem

Claudio

[Chico]

I have two basic folders for my Music.  One is a folder with MP3's that were not associated with an album when they were aquired.  I have around 1200 songs in that folder.  I set up a library in MJ for this folder called "Single MP3s".
The second folder is for the albums that I had ripped, and is called "Albums" (go figure). In the Albums folder, are separate folders for the "Album Artist", and  in each of them are folders for each album by that artist.  Compilation albums are under "Various" artist.  And, of course, I set up a library in MJ called "Albums".
Finally, I have setup a library in MJ that is a combination of both the Albums and Singles, so I can review my entire collection.

The bst for you do, is to play around with it and come up with a system that you like and feel comfortable with.  MJ can handle whatever scheme you choose.

[djharry]

Thanx for all the suggestions. Wanted to get some organization before I dive into controlling my files from MJ fulltime.

[lise]

If you library is large, I would not recommend having them all in one folder.  If you ever have to open that folder with Explorer, it could take days!

I used to have all my files under c:\music\ and then 26 subdirectories for each letter of the alphabet.  But opening the "s" folder, for example, with explorer took way too much time.

So, I now have the same structure, except that under the alphabetical folders, I have Artist folders.  These folders were all automatically created by Media Jukebox, in very little time.

I name all my files Artist - Album - Track - Title.
If the files names are way too long, like:
Kelly Hogan & the Pine Valley Astronauts - Beneath the Country Underdog - 05 - Papa was a Rodeo
then I would create an album folder under the artist, and leave the album info out of the actual file name.  This is so that when you copy this file to a cd, it will accept the name (if it's too long, you have to rename it, & it's a pain).

I wouldn't name my files Track - Title, basically because when copying them to a cd for backup purposes, it could become difficult identifying what's what.  Unless you also include the folder structure on the cd, which you can do within MJ.