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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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File structure for music (alien.top)

submitted 2 years ago by analog_field@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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I’m a music hoarder, getting close to 6tb of High Res. My file structure is pretty simple right now, all artists in one large folder and then albums within each artist folder.

My question is how others structure their folders of music. Do you do the same or maybe break it up by media type (high res, SACDs, vinyl rips etc)?

I’m coming close to completing a collection of Mofi SACDs all in DSF format and thought of switching up my file structure. Which is why I came here to see what others do.

Thanks all!

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[–] jay_chy@alien.top 1 points 2 years ago

Just my way of doing it...

I found that I had to create directories with starting letter of the album artist name to make my library usable, then subdir of Artist, and subdir of Album, then file name as song name.
#, A, B, C... I do not really care about source media but may specify it if the content of media differs because of the media (a DVD release has different content than a similarly-named CD release). I don't care about file format, just dump them all in. I DO NOT allow any videos in my audio collection, but I do allow audio rips from videos.

I end up with
music/A/ABBA/Super_Trouper_1980/Super_Touper.flac

You also want to standardize filenames on things like live versions, remix, alternate versions, bootlegs

You may want to standardize album names with release year, remaster, bonus, japanese version, DVDRip, etc.

music/J/Journey/Arrival_2001_DVD/Dont_Stop_Believin.ogg

You also may want to put a Non-Album_Tracks directory out there and standardize that directory name in each artist directory

music/A/ABBA/Non-Album_Tracks/Boots/1979_Las_Vegas_Aladdin/Waterloo_Live_1979_bootleg.flac

I have not figured out how to do related artists well. For example should Brian Wilson's work be under Beach_Boys? Should Geoff Tate be under Queensryche. Should Yes ARW be under Yes? I also americanize any words that have non-american letters such as Queensrÿche, and I replace spaces with _ and slashes with - and remove all parenthesis and apostrophes. Fora few bands, I tend to capitalize: QUEEN, MUSE, AC-DC. I have no idea what to do with bands that change name, Should Starship be under Jefferson Starship, Should Wendy Carlos also have Walter Carlos? Should Emerson, Lake, and Powell be under Emerson, Lake, and Palmer? Should Triumvirate and New Triumvirate be the same?

For movie or musical soundtracks, I do not put under album artist unless that artist is known outside of soundtracks and is highly prevalent on the soundtrack. For example, Blade Runner goes under /music/v/Vangelis/Blade_Runner/, but The Replacement Killers, goes under "/music/r/Replacement_Killlers" .. yeah it's a judgement call.

Also if you aren't using musicbrainz picard, you need to be using picard for tagging.