Organising Music Collection

Hi Guys, first post here so please be nice to me :slight_smile:

Just wondering what you all do to organise your music collections? Over the years I have accumulated various formats(lossy and lossless) and put them in folders or didn’t, also on a few occasions ripped CD’s but didnt sort out the file name (cd01.wav etc…). What do you guys do to organise this mess? Use open source tools? Manually sort it as you go along? tips please!

Yes i know it pays dividends to organise as you go along but alas its 20+ years of being lazy.

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Nice first post! I need help with this myself, because my collection is also a mess.

So when it comes to the digital collection i have all my individual artists that i care for with their own name, album etc. but flr lets say mainstream songs one hit wonders and stuff I collected all the songs and put this in the same folder and each song in that folder is tagged as Various Artist and the slbum for each is Best of Song Tree. I use mp3tag, best free tag editor support for batches of tagging . Its the best way to have everything together without having various artists that i simply dont care about . I do it like this since i like finding my music based on artist and sometimes genre (altho these days i make more playlists instead of genres). My FAVORITE player is n7player as it just shows all artists names at launch, click on one you get all the albums of each. But yeah the most important part is how i split one hit wonders from artists that have many songs I actually like, and thats all by using a tag editor to put the one hit wonders in 1 album by the same label


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MusicBrainz Picard is a fantastic tool for organizing music files. It can use audio fingerprinting to identify tracks. Once the track has been matched with an album in the MusicBrainz database, it will add the metadata, rename and move the file into your desired directory structure.

If you’re going to reorganize your collection, do it in small, manageable chunks, preferably one album at a time.

In my CD collection i sort my albums by artist (alphabetically), and release year of the album under each artist.

On my computer i have 2 folders, mp3 and flac. The mp3 folder is from when i used to rip CDs to mp3 due to the lower file sizes, but at one point i went over to flac and re-ripped all my CDs to flac, so the mp3 folder is pretty much discontinued (although i do have some downloaded stuff there from when napster was a thing :wink:

Inside the flac and mp3 folders, i have sub-folders naming the artist and album title, i.e “flac/pink floyd - animals/” and in that album folder the filenames are set as “tracknumber - track name.flac”

Most music is ripped with tags from cddb, but i use foobar and the “folder” view to navigate, and using its search feature to quickly navigate to a certain artist or album.

On my ripped music i dont set any playlist or anything, but on spotify i do tend to make playlist. Not sure why i do that differently though :slight_smile:

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thanks for this @EvilGnome6 - will check it out. Likely take me a few months to sort out :slight_smile:

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