So, I’m finally getting around to cleaning up my (local) music library that’s fairly old. This library started out not with an empty folder, but rather with a flat folder containing thousands of audio files from my hard drive after its MBR & fs header tables got corrupted. While I did go through it at the time and remove all the weird system sounds & other miscellaneous non-music files that got jumbled in, and I’ve tried using MusicBrainz’s Picard (the only option I could afford at the time) to grab as much tag information as I can for them, they’re still largely organized as a flat file structure.
Does anyone have any recommendations on how they prefer to keep their music folder(s) organized? Are there any tools you use to help maintain that structure automatically?
I’m perfectly willing to pay for a solution that “just works”, now that I’m no longer a broke college student.
I’d also love recommendations for tooling to scrub files that are low quality/available at higher quality via either Qobuz or Tidal. Thanks for all the help!
Most people use artist\album\track folder organization. DBPoweramp has a utility to automate this. JRiver has a similar tool, but like everything else in JRiver it’s confusing and complicated. There are probably others.
If your tags are decent, mp3tag (and this works on almost all types of files, not just mp3) can automatically rearrange your files based on the tags.
For example, if you pointed to the top folder of your music, then selected all the files, and then, from menu, selected CONVERT > Tag to Filename, and entered this in the target field:
\%artist%\%album%\$num(%track%,2) - %title%
This would create and rearrange your files into the following structure:
Artist/Album/tracks… (named with 01 - track name, 02 - track name, etc.
(assuming you have Artist tag filled in, Album tag filled in, Track Number tag filled in, and song title tag filled in)
In my own case, I have:
d:\music\lossless\artist\album\tracknumber - track title
d:\music\lossy\artist\album\tracknumber - track title
for artist albums. For compilations (various artists) I have:
d:\music\lossless\compilations\album\tracknumber - track title - trackartist
d:\music\lossy\compilations\album\tracknumber - track title -trackartist
edit: as noted, the dbpoweramp version of this works well too. It’s using the [ARRANGE AUDIO] utility DSP function.
Thanks Scott, I would go for albumartist\album(discnoifmultidisc), you can rename songs using SongKong or Jaikoz and both recognize musicbrainzid fields that you may have added with Picard.
I use MediaMonkey for this. As long as you have good embedded metadata in your files (eg., from Picard), it has a feature (Auto-Organize Files…) that you can use to automatically move (or copy) your files to a folder structure that matches that metadata. You can customize the template to get the results you want and even preview the results before applying.
Cool. I don’t think there’s any advantage to the paid version of MediaMonkey for this use case. Please let us know which one works best for you since I’m sure others will come by later with the same question.
