I tag metadata on everything with MusicBrainz Picard, and then store it in a /{Album Artist}/{Album}/{Track}
hierarchy.
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Seconded. Precisely how I organize things. I use MusicBrainz Picard to clean up metadata before adding music to my collection.
I tried both Lidarr and Beets before, but their automation tended to pick matches with a "eh, close enough" attitude, so I just decided I'd do it properly myself.
Music folder > Artist name > Album Name > Numbered tracks.
Since all the files contain metadata, any music player I use can automatically sort my collection however I like.
Honestly, keeping the actual folder structure simple is more than enough. You aren't playing tracks from the file manager.
Wait, you guys are organizing your music files?
reworking the whole library, I had 1.5 TB of mp3s, but they were super messy organized. Sure, I could have gone through organizing it but still mp3s suck.
So I'm starting over with a FLAC only music library. I use Navidrome on a local server and with a Subsonic client on my phone I can choose to download certain songs or playlists to use when I'm away.
CD quality FLACs are the minimum for me. They are nineties technology and still most digital music isn't even close to that. I find it hilarious how Spotify is still serving mp3s.
Spotify serves mp3s because it uses less bandwidth and most people can't tell the difference on their 30€ Bluetooth headset.
Spotify serves mp3s because it uses less bandwidth and most people can’t tell the difference on their 30€ Bluetooth headset.
I think this highlights a bigger issue when it comes to this discussion.
The issue isn't the mp3 format -- for the most part, the format of any lossy encoder can sound good with the right settings. The problem is that, unlike flac, all encoded lossy files are essentially untrustworthy audio formats. So when people say mp3 sounds bad, it's only a half truth in the same way that it's a half truth to say that people cannot tell a difference. You are putting trust in the person who encoded the audio to make the right choice and the encoder is putting trust in the idea that the person consuming the media can't tell the difference.
When it comes to being cheap on bandwidth since most users can't hear it, that's a huge cop-out being made for a company that can do better. While Apple is pretty notorious for making terrible decisions for arbitrary reasons, even they respect the user enough to allow you to opt into higher audio format quality. It's decisions like these that cement Apple as the kings of the creative computer user.
Where do you get FLACs?
You rip your cds or buy direct from the artists (he says without suggesting you can easily find everything for free online)
I use musicbrainz Picard to sort it for me and then host it with jellyfin.
All my music rips go into the Lidarr indexer, and it handles the rest. Playback handled by Plex
/artist initial/artist name/album name
(It's a fool's errand trying to create a folder scheme that accounts for every classification edge case. Accept the mess!)
Tagging is outsourced to the BT tracker community. Playback via cmus or Emby.
All my music is properly tagged. Navidrome can combine artists and albums across the folder.
Then it's just down to Deemix to grab it properly tagged. Most of my music is artist/album/song, but plenty is loose or in just artist folders.
I don't know if this will help, but I've been using Plex to manage my music and other audio for more than a decade. It pulls in metadata from online sources and allows me to search or apply filters. That is a lot more versatile than anything I could do directly with the files.
If you aren't interested in running your own server, look at some of the more sophisticated player apps. Many of them can provide similar metadata features. Then you wouldn't have to worry about how the files are physically organized.
/music/Artist_Name/Album_Name/
I usually manage it by Artist/Album/ReleaseId/# - Trackname. I use Beets, because it's the only one that seems to have a concept of release.
beets is a godsend for managing the file layour. If you need to make changes down the line it makes it super easy to migrate
Lidarr does the management and either stores soundtracks in /data/media/soundtrack
or music under /data/media/music
Sorted by folder is per artist.
I have my music organized by artist and (mostly) album subfolders. My music is also tagged and that's what really matters most to me in terms of Navidrome.
Did you know about !navidrome@discuss.tchncs.de , btw?
I recently started organizing my music to use with Jellyfin and/or Navidrome. Since Jellyfin requires a particular folder structure, I used this, and I've also used MusicBrainz Picard to tag all my music so that it works better with Navidrome. I ended up just using Jellyfin as it suited my needs perfectly, and using it with a desktop client on my laptop (Feishin) and mobile client on my phone (Finamp).
The way Jellyfin requires it to be organised is the way I would've done it myself anyway:
Artist 1
|-- Album 1
||----Disc 1
||----Disc 2
|--Album 2
Artist 2
|-- Album 1
etc ...
In my experience, if you try to organize based on genres, you need to have a very defined sense of what genres everything you have is. Either you stick with very broad genres (Rock, Jazz etc.) or you get tons of subgenres that you quickly lose control over if you don't know exactly what is what. Since the clients I use have the possibility to sort by genre, I am planning on giving it an overhaul at some point, but then I will use very broad genres.
@mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world I should have /ARTIST_NAME/ALBUM_NAME/TRACKNUMBER_TRACKTITLE.EXTENSION
What if the track/song has multiple authors? What do you do then?
Cry because the metadata is never right.
But really this is usually solved with proper labelling of ARTIST and ALBUM ARTIST tags separately.
I mainly use youtube and Spotify nowadays but when I was playing local music I had a music folder with artist subfolder and album subfolders inside that.
I have a lot of music most of which is video game soundtracks and rips. I have tagged most of it using VGMdb years ago but most tools have poor or no support for it now. MusicBrainz is missing far too many albums and usually prioritizes translated track titles. It also lacks the huge amount of images for albums that VGMdb has
I used to manage the file hierarchy myself, but I haven't done that for years at this point. Same goes for tagging files and such. I just download everything to a root folder called "music" and let lidarr handle everything from there.
Lidarrs default file structure is something like {Artist}/{Album}{Year}/{Track} . This can of course be changed. Then I let lidarr just tag everything for me automatically, embedding album art and such.
It's a great setup overall, but I don't know where Lidarr indexes it's music library from, because some artists and albums might be missing sometimes. That's really the only pain point.
I used to have folders, but that meant a typo or a variation in the artist name made redundant folders and also I had to periodically run some tool that moved and renamed files and folders according to the id3 tags.
Now I prefer to have a big messy folder with 15k unorganized files
Anyway I'm listening via ampache compatibile players, so I won't even know what's the file name, for all I know it could be 3c31cd9b-3c9d-42b0-b873-631f1552a24f.mp3
My music library is such fire it's uncontainable.