Help me organize my music!
 

So, my music collection is getting out of hand, and I'm trying to get it in order before my friend dumps another 200 gigs into it this week. Right now, I have about 2000 albums from every possible genre just dumped in a big "Albums By Artist" folder, with only subfolders for Techno, Country, Classical, and Christmas music....I've also got five or six unsorted directories of one-offs, one hit wonders, and singles.

How do other people handle their collections? I'm almost thinking at this point that setting up any further file structure is just going to make life miserable, and it may be time to start using a program with some built in smart databasing. All the ID3 tags are pretty much intact, and almost everything has album art.

My question is, what do you suggest as a media library manager? I mainly use Windows Media Player or Winamp, but am willing to play exclusively through some other player with database functionality, rather than subdivide the collection any further.

I don't really like WMP, and haven't used iTunes enough to know if I like it or not. Any ideas where to start?

I use iTunes and I spent the better part of a year grouping and subgrouping my music collection. I wouldn't trust a program to do it for me...I'm too particular.

It was a lot of work, but now that it's done, my collection is very easy to manage, add to and manipulate in iTunes.

I'm like mixedmedia, I don't use iTunes, but I took the time to get my music organized alphabetically by artist. Every album is under artists, and if it is a compilation I put it in the Compilation folder, Soundtrack in Soundtrack folder. I don't do singles, unless it is an entire singles album. It took me some time, but whenever I get a new batch of music I dump it in an "upload" directory, and take the time to sort it to its proper place before I even import it into Winamp. Then, I make sure the id3 tags are labeled correctly. It is tedious, but now that I have an order to it, it really isn't difficult at all. Definitely was worth the effort. Like mixedmedia, i don't trust a program to go through and do that work for me without messing up the tagging, or misplacing files.

You're asking the wrong person! All of my 25,000 songs are put it 2 folders - "Collection Part 1" and "Collection Part 2."

Then I just use the Winamp Library to do the rest. Winamp can sort by artist, title of song, by album, genre, etc. Of course, it's dependent on the ID3 tags.

Winamp's greatest feature is to instantly "jump" to a song by pressing "J" and typing in the name. You don't have to go and click on a "Search bar" and make it spend 20 minutes searching - it's instant, every time, even with 25,000 songs loaded onto one playlist!

I use iTunes with "Keep My Library Organised" switched on.

I've had to make sure the ID tags are right on the whole lot (around 35,000 tracks) and have applied artist names in "encyclopedia rules" - so McCartney, Paul not Paul McCartney.

It works very well for me, and I use Genres, Release Dates, Play-lists and so on to find what I want.

iTunes can also jump straight to the song you want by typing the name into the bar at the top - it takes no more than 2 seconds on my rather venerable PC.

I've been having this same problem. Most of the tags on my songs are totally screwed.

I have this app on my phone called shazam that will listen to music and identify it. It's surprisingly accurate.

I was hoping that there was some version of this that would go thru your music collection, "listen" to the tracks and then re-write the proper ID3 tags to the file. Does any app currently do that or do I have to wait a little while before technology gets to that point?