Organizing music, folders, or one huge mass of files?

[photon]

I'm ripping a bunch of stuff for my wife and I figured I'd better start the process of cleaning up my music collection, as it's all over the place.

Just wondering, how do you keep your files organized? Do you maintain any kind of directory structure? Or do you have a huge mass of files in a single directory?

With tags it doesn't really matter I don't think, but I find I'm running into problems now with album art (i.e. I change one and it changes for another album).

[underGRADFlame]

I just let iTunes do the work.

[photon]

I hate iTunes though

I found this one program called MediaMonkey which seems to be doing what I want. I figured I might as well have different directories, and it lets me embed the album art in the tag in each MP3 individually as well, which is nice as it'll always be displayed.

iTunes doesn't know about 80% of the stuff I'm importing right now, it's more obscure stuff like kids music, spanish stuff, etc...

[REDVAN]

iTunes works good for me, but one thing I hate is when my iPod shows the wrong album art- I have the new iPod classic 80gig, but when I switch songs it seems to show the old album art from the previous song sometimes.

but on topic: I just download all my music into one folder, and if it's in sub folders I just leave it. if I rip, or legally download, they go in another folder.

[Hakan]

Use musicbrainz to retag, rename and file mp3s.

[photon]

Oh yeah, I forgot about musicbrainz, I've used it before and it's an awesome piece of software.

[The Goon]

Originally Posted by fotze

How do you guys organize photos. Mine are a nightmare and with a baby there are a trillion of them. They are going to be a bitch to organize and I don;t look forward to it.

The software that came with my camera automatically uploads the pics from the camera into a new folder that is named by date; I take those folders and place them into a larger folder by month.

My "My Pictures" has folders in it that are called "November 2007", "December 2007", etc, and there are sub-folders inside with the photos, by date. Simple drop-and-drag.

Don't make the mistake my parents do and give descriptive names to each picture file.

[photon]

I've heard people say they like to use something like this:

http://picasa.google.com/

Then you don't have to do the directory thing, and I think you can tag them as well (so select a bunch and tag it as "holiday" or "baby" or whatever).

[Azure]

Originally Posted by photon

Oh yeah, I forgot about musicbrainz, I've used it before and it's an awesome piece of software.

It sure is!

Man, find of the century right there.

[REDVAN]

Originally Posted by photon

I've heard people say they like to use something like this:

http://picasa.google.com/

Then you don't have to do the directory thing, and I think you can tag them as well (so select a bunch and tag it as "holiday" or "baby" or whatever).

I use picasa, but it is sometimes an annoying program. Hard to describe exactly what annoys me, it just does. But in general, it is really nice for getting all your photos in one spot.

[Burninator]

I organize my music into folders of artists and within those folders I'll have the albums.

Is there a way to add the album art to the files outside of iTunes?

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by Burninator

I organize my music into folders of artists and within those folders I'll have the albums.

Is there a way to add the album art to the files outside of iTunes?

Window$ Media player will do that fairly well. I don't think it will embed the art into the file though

[photon]

There is a way to do it with Media Player actually, in the tag editor there's an area for images. But I had enough problems with it that I just abandoned it. I do use it though to check my music organization, and iTunes as well. I'm starting fresh so I want to make sure that everything I add into my main library is tagged properly.