PodTech Chronicles #1: Organization of Music/Video Files…

June 6, 2008 by tgrundy
Filed under: General/Misc, PodTech, music 

Hey Peeps! I’m starting this new series of posts that I’ve been thinking about for awhile.

For lack of a more creative name, I’m calling this series “PodTech Chronicles” (or PTC for short {smile}). The purpose of these posts will be to get some discussion going about some of the technical and/or organizational aspects of producing a podcast. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not necessarily talking about your basic, garden variety “how-to-podcast” type of information. THAT kind of info can be easily found online by doing a basic search on Google (or your search engine/site of choice). Rather, my interest is more inclined towards those little, “background/behind-the-scenes” kinds of tasks that we all have to do such as:

  • organizing our audio/video files (the first discussion)
  • cleaning up/improving the sound quality of our files
  • digitizing analog audio sources
  • mixing applications
  • mixing techniques

…and many other things.

In this first post I am posing the question:

“How do you organize and catalog your music files?”

Let’s face it, before you can make the perfect mix you have to select the individual song files. However (and I can speak from experience here), if your files are not properly organized and tagged the whole process can become rather tedious at best and downright painful at worst.
(Note: from here on I’ll only be using the terms “audio”, “music” and/or “song” when referring to the files we’re talking about, since I work with audio much more so than video. However, much of the conversation applies to video and graphic files as well. I just want to make sure you understand that discussion of those types of files are welcome here too)

So, as an example and to get the conversation rolling, here is the organizational structure I’ve implemented that seems to be working out best for me. Oh, that reminds me, organization and cataloging IS a pretty subjective type of thing. What I’m about to present to you here is WHAT WORKS FOR ME, TGrundy. It may or may not be the best way to do it and, it may or may not work for you. That’s part of the reason for this conversation, to see what different ways we’re all using to accomplish these tasks. Maybe I can pick up some pointers from you, maybe some of the things I use will work out for you. If we never discuss it, we’ll never know {smile}.

OK! On to the organizational structure. First I’ll outline the points in the following and then expand upon the details and/or reasoning for each item below that. Here is what I do:

  1. Separation of Audio Files: files are split up on two physically separate drives
  2. Created Directory Categories: I have 4 major MP3 file directories, 2 major archive file directories
  3. Directory Sorting: top level category directories are sorted in alphabetical order in LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME format
  4. Album Subdirectories: subdirectories are created for each album underneath each Artist/Group top level directory

1. Separation of Audio Files
One of the worst days I had a couple of years ago when I first started collecting music in electronic format was when my then current hard drive (40Gb) crashed taking 3/4 of my collection with it into the bit bucket. Suffice to say that I was *not* a happy camper that day! After that I started burning my audio archive files to CD for backup. However, as the collection grew into the gigabyte range this became time and cost prohibitive. Fortunately technology has advanced a lot since that black day and I now have a couple of 320Gb USB external drives that I store my collection on. Half (A-I) on drive #1, the other half (J-Z) on drive #2.

2. Create Directory Categories: 4 Top Level MP3 Directories, 2 Top Level Archive Directories
As stated above, I have gigabytes of files in electronic format. To make it easier to locate a specific artist or song I have arranged my top level directories into 4 major categories:

A) Music_Albums_A-I
B) Music_Albums_J-Z
C) Music_Jazz
D) Music_Blues-Gospel

These are my “working” directories that contain my music files in MP3 format. When I want to play a particular piece of music, I go to the major category and then drill down through the top level artist/group directories to find what I’m looking for.

Additionally, as another form of backup/protection, I keep a compressed archive file (RAR or ZIP) of each album also. These are stored in only two major directory categories:

A) Music_Albums_A-I_RARs&ZIPs
B) Music_Albums_J-Z_RARs&ZIPs

Lastly, the six “category” directories above are split between the two external drives as follows:

DRIVE 1
1. Music_Albums_J-Z
2. Music_Jazz
3. Music_Blues-Gospel
4. Music_Albums_A-I_RARs&ZIPs

DRIVE 2
1. Music_Albums_A-I
2. Music_Albums_J-Z_RARs&ZIPs

This is done so that in the event that either HDD crashes I’ll lose only half of my collection and (in theory) that half can be recovered via the archive files on the good drive.

3. Directory Sorting
Ah, directory sorting! This is the most subjective and (sometimes vexing) part of the entire process. Do we use FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME format or LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME? Do we lump everything together or do we break things out by different genres? And just how in the hell do we deal with artist and group names that begin with the word “THE”?!

What I have found works best for me and the way I think about music (especially when I’m searching for something) is to organize my “Top Level” directory structure in alphabetical order using the LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME format. Individual artists are organized according to their last name, while groups are organized according to the FIRST LETTER OF THE GROUP NAME. You can see examples in the screen shot below:

Group names that begin with the word “THE” always tend to throw things off when trying to sort things efficiently. After researching this particular issue quite a bit, I decided to treat the “THE” in the name as if it were the FIRSTNAME of an individual artist. So… a directory for a group like “The Dells” becomes:

Dells, The

and is properly sorted within the “D’s” and not the “T’s”

4. Album Subdirectories
With most artists/groups you will usually end up with more than one album by that particular performer. Again, what I have found to work best for me is to create a subdirectory underneath the “top level” artist directory for each album release. This IMHO, creates a nice, efficient directory structure for storing and or locating specific song files. You can see an example in the screen shot below:

In addition to storing each album’s worth of music in its own subdirectory, I also like the list of albums to be sorted in chronological order according to release date (year). Therefore what I came up with is a naming convention/format for these subdirectories as follows:

(ARTIST) - ([YEAR]) (ALBUM TITLE)

so in the case of The Dells and their album “Love Is Blue” the directory is named:

Dells - [1969] Love Is Blue

Let me offer up a couple of points of note and/or clarification here as to why I chose this particular format…

  1. You may notice that I don’t use the “THE” in the artist/group name in this naming convention. Purely a subjective choice on my part; just saving some typing time is the practical reason.

  2. You may also be wondering why, if I am interested in the chronological sorting of the directories, I don’t start off the directory name with the (YEAR) field instead of the (ARTIST) field. Good point. I originally did do it that way at first, however when I’m making my mixes I actually copy the album subdirectory to another drive and by starting the subdirectory name with the (ARTIST) instead of the (YEAR) field makes it easier to locate under those circumstances.

  3. Another good question you may be asking is why do I use the (ARTIST) field at all in this directory name format. After all this album subdirectory is underneath the top level artist name directory, so I already know what artist it is. I’ll refer back to the point I made above. If/when I copy the album subdirectory to a different location, having the (ARTIST) field as a part of the subdirectory name makes it easier to quickly identify.

Whew! This ended up being a lot longer than I originally thought {smile}. Now, while I WAS going to talk about naming conventions for individual song files, I think that topic really deserves its own discussion space and we can tackle THAT conversation in the next installment of the “PodTech Chronicles”.

In the meantime, I am REALLY INTERESTED in what you think of the ideas outlined here and also STRONGLY ENCOURAGE you to let us know how YOU go about organizing your files so we can compare notes and/or discuss the pros and cons of the variety of ways that this type of organization task can be accomplished.

Enjoy!

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4 Comments on PodTech Chronicles #1: Organization of Music/Video Files…

  1. PodTech Chronicles #1: Organization of Music/Video Files… on Sun, 8th Jun 2008 11:55 am

    2. [...] PodTech Chronicles #1: Organization of Music/Video Files… I originally did do it that way at first, however when I’m making my mixes I actually copy the album subdirectory to another drive and by starting the subdirectory name with the (ARTIST) instead of the (YEAR) field makes it easier to … [...]

  2. Fave on Sun, 8th Jun 2008 12:03 pm

    3. I organize my music files with iTunes, my MacBook’s hard drive and an external HD. The directory sets itself up by artist and album.

  3. EJ on Sun, 8th Jun 2008 8:14 pm

    4. I pretty much do the same thing, except most of the time I don’t take out the word “The.” I don’t organize it with iTunes as iTunes has some discrepancies with file names (which I’m sure you will discuss later.) I also use a different directory for orphan files, soundtracks, radio blogs, and podcasts, but that’s another story also.

  4. Jennifer on Sun, 8th Jun 2008 8:29 pm

    5. I need to try your method. I never saved music files (video) until recently but I just bought a huge external HD so I will organize there. [[TGRUNDY]] Thank you!

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