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!
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Lidarr organizes it for me.
I’ve tried to use lidarr but I think my archive is too weird for it.
Not only do I have a lot of obscure releases, but I also have things like vinyl and cd rips of every version of every album by certain artists. Like I have a huge amount of frank zappa for example, sometimes I will have 10 versions of the same album, sometimes more. I have collections of the different live variants of many tracks, archives of guitar solo variations ets…
Lidarr has no idea how to handle that so I do it all manually.
Yeah nope for that case. Lidarr can only understand one release at a time.
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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.
beets is a godsend for managing the file layout. If you need to make changes down the line it makes it super easy to migrate
the amount of plugins are also amazing
convert non-lossy files automatically to aac? fetch lyrics? push updates to mpd/sonos/jellyfin?
All my music rips go into the Lidarr indexer, and it handles the rest. Playback handled by Plex
@mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world I should have
/ARTIST_NAME/ALBUM_NAME/TRACKNUMBER_TRACKTITLE.EXTENSIONWhat 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 tag metadata on everything with MusicBrainz Picard, and then store it in a
/{Album Artist}/{Album}/{Track}hierarchy.Beets is my favorite tagger since I prefer CLI. Match making policy can be adjusted and discogs plugin can be added I recommend the folder structure /artist/album/track
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.
Well, I can say Picard has been pretty well flawless for me. And in those few instances where it misidentifies something, you can always do a manual search and match.
Nine times out of ten my process is to load the tracks into Picard, cluster them, look them up, do a quick scan to confirm it looks good, and then save the updated metadata. For those few times it messes up, I just reload the files, cluster them, then do a manual search to find the appropriate release. It really is very good at its job.
Wait, you guys are organizing your music files?
Lidarr does the management and either stores soundtracks in
/data/media/soundtrackor music under/data/media/music
Sorted by folder is per artist.Yeah, lidarr just takes care of it, and plexarr for playback.
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.
Where do you get FLACs?
soulseek
You rip your cds or buy direct from the artists (he says without suggesting you can easily find everything for free online)
yes, pretty much this.
Bandcamp and Qobuz sell high quality FLACs.
Other way to do it is subscribing to Tidal HiFi tier and using tidal downloaded to legally download FLACs with your account. But this supports artists less than actually buying from them in Bandcamp.
This is the most ethical way of doing it. I respect it
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.
Spotify serves OGG Vorbis, not mp3
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.
By not having one. I just use Pandora.
/music/{artist}/{year - album}All sorted by hand by my lovely husband. He liked doing it lmao.
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.
My thought process exactly
/music/Artist_Name/Album_Name/
