Hello!

This question is mainly directed to people who use navidrome or similar software. How do you organize your music library in regards to files? Do you keep them all in one folder? Or folders with author names? Or folders where music belongs based on genre? I can’t get the right way to organize my music library, hence this question.

Thanks in advance for all the answers!

  • MoogleMaestro@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I have a kind of complicated system for organizing my music files – some of which is admittedly way too much maintenance but it might be of interest to some.

    For my general “commercial” music collection, the folder structure is roughly
    Music/%Release Artist | Band%/%Album%[%Year%]/%Track No.% - %Title%.%Format%

    This is simple to maintain. I basically just use MusicBrainz Picard and set up appropriate paths.

    For my soundtrack collection, it gets a bit more complicated. For Anime/Film/Whatever, I have it sorted basically the same way but in a different root folder. So something like:
    Music/Anime/%Release Artist | Band%/%Album%[%Year%]/%Track No.% - %Title%.%Format%

    Which is also easy to maintain since most of these also have commercial releases.

    But games are sorted more strangely. To put it simply, I have a folder structure that puts the console or platform first, followed by the game name and then the loose files. Since some of these files are emulated formats (.vgm, .nsf, .spc), I generally don’t bother renaming them and keep them as is and trust that the music program in question has tagging support. It also means that having them sorted by console is mostly beneficial to quickly find emulated file formats, but YMMV and I have regretted the choice on occasion.

    Obviously game soundtracks are spotty when it comes to releases. Some companies have reliable metadata you can get from MusicBrainz Picard, like SquareEnix, but others have no tagging at all or very incorrect tag values. Because of this, I generally use something like VGMDB, which is usually higher quality but not always. I do have to resort to manually correcting files on occasion.

    If anyone has a nice automated way to sort this stuff out, it would be a real benefit to me as well.