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Music Media Data Storage

Organizing MP3s and Other File Collections? 174

Posted by Cliff from the virtual-file...filing dept.
Anonymous Coward asks: "After trying to merge several sets of media files that I've had laying around across several PC's (and looking at the short-comings of my own Perl script), I began looking at some commercial products and was overwhelmed. Does Slashdot have advice for organizing MP3 collections and what software works well for them?"
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Organizing MP3s and Other File Collections? More

Organizing MP3s and Other File Collections?

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  • itunes does it for me (Score:5, Informative)

    by FiDooDa ( 23111 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @10:55AM (#12431793)
    Just use it with the option "Keep itunes music folder organized"

    it does a great job for me.

    • iTunes could do a great job for me, if Apple didn't miss to implement support for FLAC, Musepack, Monkey's Audio and some other formats.

      Unfortunately Apple made the design flaw that you can't simply drag audio files in a special folder and they are useable, so I have to install iTunes to put music on my iPod.

      • My gripe (Score:3, Informative)

        by numbski ( 515011 ) *
        I can't allow iTunes to manage the music for me. It won't allow me to control how it names files. It insists on reading the song title from the id3 tags, and then creating this structure:

        Artist Name/Album Name/Song Name.mpg

        That seems fine, but for me, I want it to come out this way (which has been the standard since, oh Napster):

        Artist Name/Album Name/Artist Name - Song Name.mp3

        That way if I'm using something OTHER than iTunes or my iPod, maybe something that only reads filenames, I'll know what the s
        • If you have a very large collection, iTunes management is a nightmare. You can end up with a music folder with hundreds and hundreds of folder, to the point where it is a headache to deal with. If you never look at your music folder - then it's fine I guess. I prefer this structure:

          1st Letter of Artist Name/Artist Name/Artist Name - Album Name/Track Number - Track Name

          So of course I have to manage my library by hand.

          I also don't like throwing partial albums together into a folder with the album name.

          • Re:My gripe (Score:4, Insightful)

            by node 3 ( 115640 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @12:09PM (#12432508)
            If you have a very large collection, iTunes management is a nightmare.

            then (about not using iTunes):

            So of course I have to manage my library by hand.

            I can't imagine how using iTunes can be a nightmare, but doing it by hand isn't.

            You can end up with a music folder with hundreds and hundreds of folder, to the point where it is a headache to deal with. If you never look at your music folder - then it's fine I guess.

            That's the whole point. iTunes essentially *is* your filesystem. Your standard tree-based filesystem is really poor for managing songs (quick, find that one Beatles song, oh, which album is it on again?).

            With iTunes, you can still access your songs directly via the Finder/Windows Explorer (but any changes should be done through iTunes itself). You can even drag a song from iTunes and drop it (this will copy the file) somewhere if you want to do use it outside of iTunes.

            I prefer this structure:

            1st Letter of Artist Name/Artist Name/Artist Name - Album Name/Track Number - Track Name

            That's the trade-off, isn't it? Easier song library management vs. fine-control over the filesystem structure. When iTunes first came out, I wasn't too keen on the idea of not being in direct control of the mp3 files and their folder structure, but *quickly* came to stop worrying and love the bomb.

            Now, the idea of managing, by hand, thousands of songs... <shudder!>.
          • How is that a nightmare? My iTunes library is only managing 16,000+ tracks, (small, compared to some collections, I know) and it's automatically keeping them in 1047 artist folders under "iTunes Music" (each of those containing album folders as well).

            It's a breeze. Any track I want to find, I type a couple of characters in the search field in iTunes to narrow it down to the track I want, click the song in question, type cmd-R and the file is instantly revealed. I never have to drill down through those fold
          • I needed that first letter thing for my DensionMP3 a while back so I wrote a java program (it's what I had at hand) that created NTFS reparse points from my normal collection
            Artist/Album/Track Number - Track Name
            to
            !ABC/1st Letter of Artist/Artist
            Worked well for me because I could rip to the more normal structure then just run the program to get my ABC folder updated.

        • Re:My gripe (Score:2, Insightful)

          by tommertron ( 640180 )
          My other problem with iTunes is that it keeps the original file in its same location when you drag it into the libarary, so you've got to really keep track of what you've added when you're adding files from... ahem... legal, creative commons downloading services that you've downloaded. Otherwise you'll have duplicate files all over the place and clog up your hard drive.

          Oh, and try dragging your library in a second time. That was a fun hour of manually selecting all the duplicate songs and deleting them.

        • It's also annoying when you're sharing compilation albums. Instead of having all track tracks together in /music/Cool Movie Soundtrack

          you have them all scattered about in /music/Foo/Cool Movie Soundtrack /music/Bar/Cool Movie Soundtrack /music/Xyzzy/Cool Movie Soundtrack

          etc...

          Very annoying.

          • Except when you click that button that labels a track part of a compilation in which case all of the related tracks end up in /music/Compilations/Cool Movie Soundtrack/

            Seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

          • The combination of:

            1. Preferences -> Advanced -> Keep iTunes music folder organized
            2. Preferences -> General -> Group compilations when browsing
            3. and setting the 'Part of a compilation' option to 'Yes' on the tracks of the compilation album

            does exactly what you want. At least on my system (iTunes 4.7.1) it does.

            JP

          • Shouldn't do that if they're properly tagged; iTunes defaults to a structure like this for Compilations:

            \Compilations\Album Name\Artist - Title
            • Did you properly tag all the hundred of megabytes of music you downloaded from Napster? Or did you dump them in folders like mpe3\Rock\Metallica ?
        • That way if I'm using something OTHER than iTunes or my iPod, maybe something that only reads filenames, I'll know what the song is.

          Something that only reads filenames? Welcome to 2005, where 99% of the players out there support ID3 v1 or v2!

          I don't seem a point to even putting your files in a Artist\Album\ folder structure if you're just going to duplicate the Artist information in the filename. The only time I put the artist name in the filename is when it's a compilation/various artist album.

      • Re:itunes does it for me (Score:5, Informative)

        by node 3 ( 115640 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:47AM (#12432304)
        iTunes could do a great job for me, if Apple didn't miss to implement support for FLAC, Musepack, Monkey's Audio and some other formats.

        iTunes supports FLAC, OGG, and any other format for which there is a QuickTime plug-in. Unfortunately, QuickTime plug-ins are (it's said) really annoying to program. The release of QT 7, though implies that this might change for the better.

        Unfortunately Apple made the design flaw that you can't simply drag audio files in a special folder and they are useable, so I have to install iTunes to put music on my iPod.

        This is intentional. When the iPod came out, the main HD-based player was the Nomad, which suffered from horrible performance. This was because the songs were just stored as files with no database. The reason the iPod can search through many thousands of songs instantaneously is because of its song database, which iTunes creates (you actually don't need iTunes for this--any program can read/write the iPod database).

        You could easily write a program that lets you just drop songs on it from your filesystem, which will automatically copy them to the iPod, and update the database.
        • I bought a Samsung YH-820 MP3 player with a 5 GB HD, color photo display, etc.

          It wants you to use either the Napster client or Windows Media Player 10 to synch files to the player and update the database. I open it up in Explorer (it doubles as a removable storage device) and add the files that way (much faster) and then run the "Recovery Utility" and tell it to rebuild the database. 2 GB of MP3 files took about 35 minutes to copy (my work PC has only USB 1.1) and the database rebuild took all of about 9
          • In other words, it's just like the iPod in that it uses a database.

            What's the difference between running the "Recover Utility" and using one of the existing tools that does the same thing on the iPod? Not much.

            There is absolutely no reason someone couldn't write a program (a perl script, even!), and stick it on the iPod. Then you could mount the iPod on *any* computer, copy songs over, then run the program (Mac, Linux, or Windows), just like you do with your Samsung player, and do it on any platform and a
        • iTunes supports FLAC, OGG, and any other format for which there is a QuickTime plug-in.

          Oh, thank you for pointing out one more huge PITA in iTunes: it installs QT, even without asking, and ceases to work for no reason if you remove this useless annoyancy called Qicktime.

          This is intentional.

          That would make it even worse. What kind of an idiot must one be to leave the handling of an internal database to some external software instead of implementing it in the iPod?

          You could easily write a program that
          • Oh, thank you for pointing out one more huge PITA in iTunes: it installs QT, even without asking, and ceases to work for no reason if you remove this useless annoyancy called Qicktime.
            That's because iTunes IS QuickTime (more or less) + some playliist, organizational functionality and a different interface.

  • Dspace. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:00AM (#12431833)
    http://dspace.org/introduction/index.html [dspace.org]

    "What Kinds of Content Does DSpace Accept?

    DSpace accepts all forms of digital materials including text, images, video, and audio files. Possible content includes the following:

    * Articles and preprints
    * Technical reports
    * Working papers
    * Conference papers
    * E-theses
    * Datasets: statistical, geospatial, matlab, etc.
    * Images: visual, scientific, etc.
    * Audio files
    * Video files
    * Learning objects
    * Reformatted digital library collections
    "

  • MP3 Tag Tools (Score:4, Informative)

    by dotgod ( 567913 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:00AM (#12431834)
    I use MP3 Tag Tools [sourceforge.net]. It hasn't been updated for a while, and I'm sure there's newer stuff out, but this does everything I need. You can manipulate both tags and filenames automatically. I don't think it supports OGG though.

    • Re:MP3 Tag Tools (Score:2, Informative)

      by Albigg ( 658831 )
      Be careful, tag tools does some odd things. For example, EAC put an "Encoded By" tag in my MP3s with the 'Exact Audio Copy (Secure mode)' as the value. Tag Tools stripped that. Also, the track numbers got re-formatted. Instead of "X/Y" (where Y is the number of tracks) Tag Tools just redid the track number to X.

    • Re:MP3 Tag Tools (Score:2, Informative)

      by DisKurzion ( 662299 )
      FYI...it does do OGG for tagging, but other features (like NFO generation) don't work for OGG.

      MP3 Tag Tools is AWESOME. It's a little quirky at first, but once you have everything configured the way you like it (No ID3v1 tags or misc tag nfo thanks!), you can have it automatically generate playlists, sfv files, and more.

      Also, configuring CDex properly for ripping your own stuff goes a long wait to good management of your MP3s (or OGGs).
  • I keep my music organized in seperate folders, like so:
    Artist\(Year) Album\Artist - Album - Tracknumber - Title
    Orginizing it at first took a while, especially with bad tag info and weird filenames, but fb2k and it's masstagging and freedb lookup took care of that. Now, whenever I get a new CD, I've got CDex set up to automatically rip to the proper folder, so it's pretty easy to keep it organized.
    • Pretty much the same here.

      All appropriately named folders and filenames.

      I guess it reflects the way I listen to music. Rarely do I pick individual songs out of an "album", make a playlist, etc. Usually, I grab a whole CD and copy it to my iaudio u2 or drag it onto the player. I don't listen to "dance music", "easy listening", fast, slow, or whatever genre designations you can come up with. I listen to volumes of work as published by artists.

      Kinda like reading a novel I guess. I don't pick out chapters an
    • That's pretty much the easiest solution. I have everything sorted into 5 basic genre umbrellas:

      Rock-Pop-Alt-Country\
      Rap-HipHop-RnB-Reggae\
      D ance-Techno-Electronic\
      Jazz-Classical-Internatio nal-Vintage\
      Scores-Soundtracks-Words\
      Then after that into albums.

      Artists-Album-Year\Track-Artist-Song.mp3
      If an artist has more than one album, they get their own folder. I generally group related artists together (Dave Matthews Band, Dave Matthews, Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds). There are a few artists that co

  • The GodFather (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tozog ( 599414 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:03AM (#12431870)
    The GodFather is by far my favorite. It has mass tagging, renaming, organization, and handles mp3/ogg/mpc/ape/flac/aac/apl/wv/mp4/ofr/spx tags, scripting abilities, pull info from online sites, and free, but not open source.

    http://users.otenet.gr/~jtcliper/tgf/ [otenet.gr]
    • Looks okay, GUI-wise. Features I would like:
      • Linux port, KDE-friendly
      • Data saved in portable format, preferably something XML

      However, the way the question was asked (or phrased by Cliff) suggests not so much an application as a system.

      It should be possible to cobble something from a script and some metadata reading utilities. Start with mp3info (or whatever) & vorbiscomment (or whatever), and gradually add functionality for metadata in other documents.

      Ideally the collected data should lend its

  • How about (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:04AM (#12431874) Homepage Journal
    Mac OSX Tiger + Spotlight?
    • Something that I am curious about: does Spotlight actually look inside audio files for information, or does it simply index information in the iTunes database?

      For example, if I have an MP3 file in my home directory, and it has not been added to iTunes's database, can Spotlight still find the file based on ID3 information?
      • IIRC it has an architecture which allows metadata importers to be defined for different formats, and MP3/ID3s are part of the default set.
        • That's how I was hoping it worked, but I could see someone trying to take a short cut and just use the information that is in the iTunes library file.
          • It's interesting to wondera bout what we might be able to someday with this technology. If you had a smart enough importer, you might be able to create a folder that has all your heavy metal rock in it based, not on metadata, but on how the music actually sounds. I've seen some cool image database stuff where you draw a red rectangle, and it can find a picture of a double decker bus.

    • "After trying to merge several sets of media files that I've had laying around across several PC's"

      The guy doesn't have a Mac. Why would you infer that he purchase an expensive computer (with the OS attached to it) just to manage his mp3 collection?

  • ID3-TagIt (Score:5, Informative)

    by Winterblink ( 575267 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:06AM (#12431902) Homepage
    ID3-TagIt is a FANTASTIC application for managing MP3 metadata, as well as filenames. I used it to completely overhaul my collection so the filenames and tags were what I wanted them to be. Unfortunately it's only a windows application, but it really helped me when I put my collection into iTunes and the browse panes had everything all nice and neat. Best of all, it's free. :)

    • Re:ID3-TagIt (Score:2, Informative)

      by Albigg ( 658831 )
      After surveying many MP3 tag programs ID3-TagIt was the one for me too. Once I straightened everything out, I imported everything into iTunes. iTunes works well once you have the major things sorted out. Just make sure that you have the directory laid out correctly and most of the mass tagging complete. Here is the link: http://www.id3-tagit.de/ [id3-tagit.de]
      • The best part about it was having not only the filenames what you want them to be, but being able to clean out the cluttered tags. Nine times out of ten, when I get an mp3 it's full of advertisements in the tags or something equally useless. And iTunes (or any other jukeboxer for that matter) really works better for you when the tags are kosher.
    • No offense, but after trying ID3-TagIt and The Godfather.. The Godfather wins, hands down:

      http://users.otenet.gr/~jtcliper/tgf/ [otenet.gr]

      Supports any audio format you can think of, supports scripting, online tagging/album art tagging, batch renaming/re-tagging, etc... too many features to list here. And for FREE!
    • I used MusicBrainz to completely overhaul my mp3s. If it can't figure out the name of your song exactly (through id3 or otherwise, it'll compare hashes to songs in it's database and provide the closet matches.

      http://www.musicbrainz.org/ [musicbrainz.org]

      --Dave
    • For Linux, I prefer EasyTag http://easytag.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
  • I like MPFreaker

  • What I do... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pjl5602 ( 150416 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:14AM (#12431983) Homepage
    This is something that I started a long, long, long time ago and it's worked well for me. I have a "Music" directory. In that directory, I have directories 0-9 and a-z. In these, I put the artist by last name. So, if it's Lenny Kravitz, there is a directory (also, I remove all characters that aren't a-z, 0-9, -, _ and replace them with _): /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny

    If the album is Circus I make a directory: /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus

    Then to know if it's the complete album or incomplete, I append a '(c)' (complete) or an '(i)' (incomplete) on the end of the album name. So we end up with: /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)

    Each track is the song name and playlists for XMMS , WinAMP and XBox Media Center are generated.

    When all is said and done, I've got:

    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/beyond_t he_7th_sky.ogg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/can_t_ge t_you_off_my_mind.ogg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/circus.o gg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/don_t_go _and_put_a_bullet_in_your_head.ogg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/god_is_l ove.ogg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/in_my_li fe_today.ogg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/magdalen e.ogg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/playlist
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/playlist .m3u
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/playlist -xbox.m3u
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/resurrec tion__the.ogg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/rock_and _roll_is_dead.ogg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/thin_ice .ogg
    /content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)/tunnel_v ision.ogg

    Compilations are put in /content/music/c/compilations. Soundtracks go in /content/music/s/soundtrack___theme (Soundtrack & Theme.)

    This has served me well for years and I can pretty much find anything in a matter of seconds and I can immediately tell if it's the complete album or not.

    • Re:What I do... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What possible reason is there to replace apostrophes and spaces with _? Are you in the habit of playing your oggs on an ENIAC or something?

      • Re:What I do... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Just Some Guy ( 3352 )
        No kidding. An excerpt from my music directory is:

        /usr/share/media/music/The Crystal Method - Vegas/The Crystal Method - Vegas - 01 - Trip Like I Do.ogg
        /usr/share/media/music/The Crystal Method - Vegas/The Crystal Method - Vegas - 02 - Busy Child.ogg
        /usr/share/media/music/The Crystal Method - Vegas/The Crystal Method - Vegas - 03 - Cherry Twist.ogg
        /usr/share/media/music/The Crystal Method - Vegas/The Crystal Method - Vegas - 04 - High Roller.ogg

        Graphical programs don't care about the spaces, and I hav

        • In my case, the file contains the meta infomation (ID3, Ogg tag) so I don't need the file to convey that information.
        • find . -type f | xargs chmod 644

          How does that work for you? :-)
          • Why would he want to make his mp3s executable? :)

            But assuming he did, there are two ways of going about it:

            find -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

            or if you must use xargs:

            find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644

            better throw in a --max-arguments to the invocation of xargs however, you don't know how many mp3s this guy has!
            • Why would he want to make his mp3s executable? :)

              chmod 644 file

              makes them non-executable. :-)

              As for 'find ... -print 0 | xargs -0 ...'

              Cool. I never knew about that. Thanks!!!
  • I organize all of my files by putting them into directories organized by type: music/ mp3/ mid/ wav/ ogg/ etc... Files themselves are titled as "[Artist Name] - [Song Name]" I've found that titling them this works well since all of a particular artists songs are all grouped together. Or, if you have a huge collection (>500) you could put them in subdirectories titled after the author: "[Artist Name]/[Song Name]". If you use a cd ripping program such as CDex goto Options -> Settin

  • Cantus? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mad_Rain ( 674268 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:31AM (#12432144) Journal
    There is a tool called Cantus [debain.org] that can be used for mp3 organizing. And of course, once you get them organized, you can set them up to be streamed over the web with Jinzora [jinzora.org].

  • MusicBrainz for acquiring and checking metadata (Score:4, Informative)

    by oldbox ( 415265 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:33AM (#12432161)

    Use MusicBrainz! [musicbrainz.org]

    I have just started to use the MusicBrainz Tagger to organize my mess of mp3 files. It does all of the normal re-tagging functions, but it will also make an AcousticFingerprint of the music file, and check your it with their database. This solves the problem of tags that are incorrect or missing altogether. It is a little slow, but otherwise a good program. It is available as Windows, MacOS X, and Python. Works with mp3 and Ogg. It's free & GPL'd.

    tagbox
  • Well, the last free version as a feature called "Media Library" that has satisfying search/edit functions.

  • Organizing MP3s and Other File Collections? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bozzio ( 183974 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @11:43AM (#12432269)
    Organizing MP3s and Other File Collections?

    Don't be coy Roy. Just admit you have a pr0n collection.
    • Just admit you have a pr0n collection.

      And the best way to organise it is to post it on the web, and let us investigate the best solution for you.

    • Don't be coy Roy. Just admit you have a pr0n collection.

      Actually, on that topic, I would have to say that organizing one's... "image" collection takes quite a lot more thought than music.

      With music, a dozen posters have already suggested trivial variants of what most of us already do - "music_root/artist_name/ album_name/song_title", possibly throwing a release year in there somewhere, possibly an a-to-z layout above the artists' names, and with a few ways to deal with hard-to-describe material such as
  • An old machine with a beefy harddrive, running apache and zina [pancake.org]
    Works nicely, and you can listen to whatever songs you want, on any machine in the house.
  • I'm a big fan of the Audio Tag Tool for linux: http://pwp.netcabo.pt/paol/tagtool/ [netcabo.pt] Simple, intuitive, powerful.
  • Cliff,

    You do not state what operating system you are using, so it is not easy to answer this question. However, speaking generally, there seems to be about a million ways to organize audio files.

    I had the easiest time managing MP3s when I was running BeOS. There was a tool call MP3 Army Knife, IIRC, that made it very easy to copy ID3 tags back and forth to BeFS file system attributes. (Using BeFS queries to create playlists was the bomb!)

    When I switched to NetBSD, I kept all my audio files in a single di

  • as a related question -- SQL v. LDAP v. whatever (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Shaleh ( 1050 ) <shaleh.speakeasy@net> on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @12:42PM (#12432887)
    Ideas on some form of database / directory / foo? Clearly SQL is a well trodden path, but is it the "best" choice?

    • Boy, there's the itch that I want scratched!

      Stop storing music as files in a disk directory. Craft up a database that keeps the music AND ALL the metadata (artist, title, album, track #, date, album genre, song genre, lyrics, album cover, liner notes, producer, guest artists, record label, drugs the band was on while recording, etc.). Work up file-system API's into the database to present the data as if it were actual files with appropriate filenames/ID tags. Plug in an API appropriate to your OS and co

  • MusicBrainz Tagger (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bammel ( 841841 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @12:45PM (#12432923)
    An amazing program that allows you to not only modify the ID3 tags of your mp3s, and rename them accordingly, but does so automatically, by creating an acoustic fingerprint (TRM) of the song, and comparing that to other TRM's from its online database. The more people use it, the better it gets, as there are more TRM's to compare your own against.

    From the description on its homepage:

    The MusicBrainz Tagger application allows you to automatically look up the tracks in your music collection and then write clean metadata tags (ID3 tags or Vorbis comment fields) to your files. As you tag the files in your collection that MusicBrainz didn't recognize, you submit the acoustic fingerprints (TRM ids) of your files back to the server. Submitting acoustic fingerprints will allow MusicBrainz to automatically identify these tracks in the future, so that other people using the Tagger can benefit from the work you have done.

    Don't let that discourage you, though. The program is fully usable right now.
    From the Statistics page:
    Artists 155884
    Albums 261790
    Disc IDs 124538
    Tracks 3211514

    It's a gem.

    For now there's only a Windows version out, but the program is GPL'd, and the source code is available to everyone.

    Download it here:
    http://www.musicbrainz.org/tagger/download.html [musicbrainz.org]

    • I tried it and it didn't work for crap. It found about 1 out of every 30 songs.
      The last thing in the world I'm going to do is register to use a product then use that to upload fingerprints of all my mp3's to some company that knows exactly where they came from. I can't wait till the RIAA figures out how to get their hands on that database. Though it can't be used directly, it can show them who has tons of files so they can watch their IP's.
    • A similar program that actually works is MoodLogic [moodlogic.com].

      Best $40 I've spent on software in a long time.

      My technique is to let MoodLogic tear through a pile of MP3s and rename them/tweak the ID3 tags. I then let iTunes arrange them into folders.

      As a bonus, you can pick a song you like and tell MoodLogic to create a mix of similar songs from your collection. I think that is what the program was originally intended for, but I use it more for renaming files and ID3 info.

  • My pr0n example. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig...hogger@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @01:00PM (#12433062) Journal
    I have 59,224 pornographic files (including 879 movies and clips), all organized by category (sex acts performed, races involved, clothing worn, kind of kink, etc.).

    Since I have several of those that span more than one category, I put everything on a Linux server and I put hard links to directories containing the various categories the pictures are into.

    So whenever I crave for a particular kind of kink, I have no problem locating the series of files I want to look at.

    • Re:My pr0n example. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by slaker ( 53818 )
      Porn is normally self-organizing. You have to work pretty hard to find random collections with no central theme.

      Several years ago, while I was learning Delphi, I wrote a simple program that basically lets me browse directories of pictures and videos and tag each directory with metadata (girl-girl, softcore, transexual midget porno etc) that gets saved in a text file with those pictures. With that metadata in place I've rearranged my collection several times. Whenever I'm particularly bored I can take some
    • Jokes aside, KimDaBa [kde.org] is an excellent image database. You create your own tags to apply to each picture or selection, and then search on those tags. I don't know how it'd hold up to huge collections, but since it only stores metadata and not the images themselves, I imagine it'd do pretty well.
    • Oh man, if only you'd posted two years ago, I could have likely hooked you up with the best porn organizing system ever developed. You haven't lived until you've built a categorizing system for hundreds of gigs of porn (hundreds of thousands of pics, tens of thousands of movies). 'Course having access to all that porn doesn't hurt either!

      At the time I was a partner in a company that envisioned creating the mother of all porn sites. We were dealing with such an amount of content that we had to devise our ow

  • ...there's always the poor man's organizer:

    1. (optional) Create genre directory
    2. Create Artist/album/year/etc. directories
    3. Rename MP3s according to track/title/etc.
    4. Copy files to appropriate folder
    5. (optional) Burn to CDs

    Most of the popular players out there should be able to autogenerate playlists starting at your base directory.

    I always like to listen to my music in the car, so 8-10 hours/disc at 160-192kbps is fine for me.

  • Tag and Rename (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jjeff1 ( 636051 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @01:30PM (#12433347)
    Tag and rename [softpointer.com] handles a bunch of different files, and has a pile of tools for editing tags.

  • GnuMP3d (Score:3, Informative)

    by fiori ( 45848 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @01:30PM (#12433350) Homepage
    If you always have network access to a server, drop your music files on the server and point GnuMP3d [gnu.org] at the directories. GnuMP3d has ACLs and password moderated accesss.
  • Are there any player/tagger combinations that support multiple ID3 tags per file? Not as in "one ID3, one ID3v2" but as in "three ID3v2s, the second two of which are hidden in library/playlist except when corresponding to a search".
  • I arrange my files by directory structure to suit me, then use a simple script running the id3tag utility (part of the id3lib package on Linux) to update the ID3 tags to match my configuration. That way, whether the my mp3 player uses the physical hierarchy or the ID3 tags, the results are the same, and what I want them to be. If I rearrange the files, I just rerun the script. It's simple, but effective.
  • Grab a MusicBrainz tagger [musicbrainz.org] while you're at it.

  • Jamdb (Score:2)

    by richieb ( 3277 )
    iTunes is pretty bad. It insists on keeping the files in one directory. My music files are spread across several computers.

    Instead I set up a server with Jamdb [linuxcc.de] running. I drop my files on one of several disks, and every night a script runs to update the database of what I have.

    With a web UI I can search and play whatever I want. By opening some ports on my firewall, I get access to my music from the office too.

  • In Linux I'm really liking Amarok [kde.org] for searching and playing and Easy tag [sourceforge.net] to mass tagging. Newer versions of Amarok are really cool, they even download the CD covers from Amazon, fetch lyrics, and submit what your are hearing to audioscrobbler. I also use Grip [nostatic.org] with cdparanoia to scan tracks from CDs.

    My only problem is with accented chars in id3 tags. It looks like the id3 lib doesn't like the utf8 enconding, and they look corrupted in a lot of places. Does anyone know how to convert a bunch of id3 flags f

  • one big directory (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cheeze ( 12756 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @05:08PM (#12435565) Homepage
    Just dump everything in one big directory and get google desktop or something
  • Have a look at NetJuke [netjuke.org]--Nice web-based app that does streaming and makes a good effort at organizing by artist, album name, category, etc.
  • http://www.lyrasoftware.com/disclib/ [lyrasoftware.com]

    Its for windows, but free. Have not tried it under wine.

    Works great when you have easily over a thousand CD's to deal with.

  • Myself... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Shadikka ( 876072 )
    I use foobar2000+Masstagger for that. It does the job just great with my structure being: Artist\Album\## - Song.mp3 I recommend that one :o)
  • Since most of the comments have diverged a bit from the original question, I might as well diverge a bit more...

    Most of my music is stored on a headless Linux box, with SSH and Samba running. That PC has a decent sound card, and cheap-but-serviceable speakers. Normally, if I want to have some music playing, but keep the desktop's CPU free (I've been doing a lot of radio and topographical-related work of late, which chews up CPU), I have to SSH into the other system, decide what to listen to, and run mpg123

  • What I do... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kymermosst ( 33885 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @01:37PM (#12453661) Journal
    I modeled it after /dev I just give them all a prefix serial number and plop them in one directory, like such:

    mm000000.mp3
    mm000001.mp3
    mm000002.mp3
    .
    .
    .

    "mm" stands for "mystery music".

    This way, I never need the shuffle button. Stripping the ID3 tags makes it even better. Every song is a surprise!

    I also do the same thing with pictures, movies, and everything else. You should see the directory containing my college homework!

    ~/u/essays/essay001.sxw
    ~/u/essays/essay002.sxw
    ~/u/essays/essay003.sxw
    .
    .
    .

    What, you think the /dev model leaves much to be desired? Pfft! Blasphemy!

    P.S. I organize all my web bookmarks like /etc.

  • No question about it, Media Center [jrmediacenter.com] is a great solution. Federates all media (audio, video, photo) across multiple directories or file systems. Can play back any format either simply, by playback Zone, or using streaming (with optional on-demand transcoding/re-encoding) across LAN or WAN. Tagging system is open-ended, there are dynamic SmartLists, and there's a progammable API with expressions for querying the database and spitting back results. You can also use HTGML and Flash to make your own "Now Playing"

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