Submitted 1 year ago by mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
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!
Wait, you guys are organizing your music files?
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.
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 out 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
Where do you get FLACs?
You rip your cds or buy direct from the artists (he says without suggesting you can easily find everything for free online)
soulseek
This is a copy of an older comment of mine:
Everything is tagged and organized using Picard. I use a modified version of community.metabrainz.org/t/…/156.
I’ve been meaning to write a guide for how it works. My current WIP script can be found here: gitea.baerentsen.space/…/Picard.txt
My files is setup like:
~/Music/A/Artist/(YYYY) Title [Type - Format] [MusicBrainz ID]/[side] Title [length][Bandwidth].ext
eg:
/Music/Q/Queen/(1973) Queen [12 Inch Vinyl - FLAC] [1783da6a-9315-3602-a488-1738eb733a0f] /A1. Keep Yourself Alive [3m48s][320+ 48000KHz VBR 2ch].flac /B1. Liar [6m26s][320+ 48000KHz VBR 2ch].flac /Music/B/Bruce Springsteen/(2019) Western Stars [CD - FLAC] [a50ffce7-0532-41a7-b85b-7d02f8c7af00] /01. Hitch Hikin' [3m38s][320+ 96000KHz VBR 2ch].flac /02. The Wayfarer [4m18s][320+ 96000KHz VBR 2ch].flac
if the album isn’t a studio album, theres an extra folder. eg:
/Music/B/Bruce Springsteen/Compilation/(1996) The Lost Masters I_ Alone in Colts Neck (The Complete Nebraska Session) [CD - FLAC] [8531e427-495a-443a-8fc3-0dd2ef459c93] /01. Nebraska [4m27s][320+ 44100KHz VBR 2ch].flac /Music/P/Phil Collins/Singles/(1981) In the Air Tonight [7 Inch Vinyl - FLAC] [e805dd53-9257-4c78-8bff-a95f0cdd767e] /A. In the Air Tonight [5m29s][320+ 96000KHz VBR 2ch].flac
I have special categories for:
Compilations Cover Tribute Singles Live EP
If an album contains multiple disks, there’s an extra folder. Eg:
/Music/M/Michael Jackson/Compilation/(2004) The Ultimate Collection [CD - FLAC] [2d37b204-ed26-3795-9710-1514f0fd931a] /Disc 1 /01. I Want You Back [3m00s][320+ 44100KHz VBR 2ch].flac
For soundtracks it’s:
~/Music/Soundtrack/A/Artist/(YYYY) Title [Type - Format] [MusicBrainz ID]/[side] Title [length][Bandwidth].ext
eg.
/Music/Soundtrack/L/(2001) The Lord of the Rings_ The Fellowship of the Ring - The Complete Recordings [Digital Media - FLAC] [cad73ae7-5966-4de1-bad4-4a603891fd27] /Disk 1/01. Prologue_ One Ring To Rule Them All [7m15s][320+ 48000KHz VBR 2ch].flac
Been using this for about a year and it’s solid.
I’ll try and make a better write up at some point and share my script.
This setup also works flawlessly with Plex.
My music library is such fire it’s uncontainable.
All my music rips go into the Lidarr indexer, and it handles the rest. Playback handled by Plex
/music/Artist_Name/Album/
/music/{artist}/{year - album}
All sorted by hand by my lovely husband. He liked doing it lmao.
Lidarr does the management and either stores soundtracks in /data/media/soundtrack or music under /data/media/music
Sorted by folder is per artist.
All my music is properly tagged. Navidrome can combine artists and albums across the folder.
Then it’s just down to Deemix to grab it properly tagged. Most of my music is artist/album/song, but plenty is loose or in just artist folders.
I don’t know if this will help, but I’ve been using Plex to manage my music and other audio for more than a decade. It pulls in metadata from online sources and allows me to search or apply filters. That is a lot more versatile than anything I could do directly with the files.
If you aren’t interested in running your own server, look at some of the more sophisticated player apps. Many of them can provide similar metadata features. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about how the files are physically organized.
beets is a godsend for managing the file layour. 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|mp3|ogg}? fetch lyrics? push updates to mpd/sonos/jellyfin?
I used to have folders, but that meant a typo or a variation in the artist name made redundant folders and also I had to periodically run some tool that moved and renamed files and folders according to the id3 tags.
Now I prefer to have a big messy folder with 15k unorganized files
Anyway I’m listening via ampache compatibile players, so I won’t even know what’s the file name, for all I know it could be 3c31cd9b-3c9d-42b0-b873-631f1552a24f.mp3
QudoLibet plus mp3s metadata
By not having one. I just use Pandora.
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.
I usually manage it by Artist/Album/ReleaseId/# - Trackname. I use Beets, because it’s the only one that seems to have a concept of release.
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.
Auto tag built into strawberry music player
I have a lot of music most of which is video game soundtracks and rips. I have tagged most of it using VGMdb years ago but most tools have poor or no support for it now. MusicBrainz is missing far too many albums and usually prioritizes translated track titles. It also lacks the huge amount of images for albums that VGMdb has
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.
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My thought process exactly