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The best way to organize music files and folders

Bits and Bytes Featured — 07 November 2012

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The best way to organize music files and folders

As the writer of the Music Library Management blog I get a lot of emails asking for advice. And a lot of those emails concern the best ways of organizing file and folder paths. Should I use genre in my file organization? Should I use groupings (e.g. A-D) to lower the number of child folders? When all is said and done, I find the best general advice is that, when it comes to music file organization, the bare minimum is the best way to go.

In other words, all you really need is the album (or more generically, release) and artist names as folders, and the track name and number used in the filename.

Modern music organizers offer the ability to add extra data to your collection, which are added to internal tags inside music files. Within the tags, you can store genre, year, mood, album/record label and many other items. The same music organizers then allow those pieces of data to be applied to your music file and folder paths. For example, you could have a folder of ‘Jazz’ albums.

There are two key reasons that it’s a bad idea to start adopting these more exotic, subjective, multi-applicative tags.

The first is that files and folders, on modern computer filesystems at least, are hierarchical. Each file or folder on your hard drive may only have one parent, and then that parent may only have one parent, and so on. Music metadata is not hierarchical, in the main part.

Imagine you operate a multiple genre tagging scheme. If a given release has multiple genres, that means you have to decide which folder the release appears under. If you do take the time to choose a parent genre folder then you have to remember which genre you used and why, so that you may write them down and remember them for next time, and perhaps apply the same reasoning to another release. Otherwise, you will quickly have a dis-organized folder structure, or at least one that is lacking consistency.

The second reason is that some music metadata is more subject to change than others. For the most part, artists and the album names won’t change from the moment that you input the data. They are identification tags, pretty unique to any given release. If you include values for mood, genre and the like in your music tags then you are subject to change those based on how you feel at the current point in time.

So far so good. After all, genre is a useful classification by which you can browse your music collection and changing genre in tags is not a big deal. The trouble is when you apply these to file paths. For instance, imagine you organize your music files by genre, and you include the genre in the track filename. You decide to change all ‘Trip hop’ albums to ‘Downtempo’. Originally you have the following filenames:

../01-Mysterons-Trip hop.mp3
../02-Sour Times-Trip hop.mp3

You then must change each one to:

../01-Mysterons-Downtempo.mp3
../02-Sour Times-Downtempo.mp3

Basically, you will need to make sure that you resynchronise the filenames with the new metadata. This is duplication, and duplication is evil. You have to remember that when you change a tag, you are also changing the file organization. The more songs and albums that you make these changes, the more time consuming it becomes. For hundreds of albums, this will take a long time.

There’s another reason that renaming music files is something to be avoided, other than the work in doing so. This is that a music file’s location in your file system is often used as an identifier of that track, with certain assumptions that this won’t change. Music players, for instance, may store any extra data, such as play counts or ratings as linked to this. Change the file name and you lose that data (and the music file may have to be “re-imported”). Another place this can cause problems is with playlists. Static playlists simply record the name and location of each file, so changing the file path will break the playlist.

That is why it’s best to stick to as little information as possible in your file paths. Ultimately a file path exists to locate one given track in your music library. Therefore, include the minimum possible information to identify that track: its name, its containing release, its position in that containing release, and the containing release’s artist. For instance:

Portishead/Dummy/02-Sour Times.mp3

That’s an ideal. I do recognise there are some occasions where you have to diverge from this, for instance grouping folders. In some cases, if you have a massive music library, you might get to the point where you exceed the number of allowable child folders in a folder, or performance considerations mandate you reduce the number. But that said, you should be aiming for a bare minimum file organization for your music files.

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About Author

Dan Gravell

Dan is the founder and programmer of bliss, a software tool to organize large music collections by ensuring the completeness, correctness and consistency of your library. Dan has been working with computer audio since 1996 when he ripped his first CD at university... he's been organising music libraries ever since! +Dan Gravell

(4) Readers Comments

  1. Gordon

    December 8, 2012 at 8:25 am

    Hi Dan,
    I fully agree with the keep it simple approach.
    Just like how Audiophiles can get caught up in their equipment I also have friends who have made it their life ambition to have “perfect” meta data. They are always in bad moods lately.

    I really like the Bliss concept of field selection and the ability to set one’s own criteria but it seems to me that the weak point is still the master data bases that we need to draw the data from.

    If nobody sets a STANDARD then everyone will attempt to set their own.
    For example I might have a Buddy Guy cd split between Blues and Blues Rock genres for mood reasons in case I want to shuffle within a genre. It does indeed save a child field but no software in the world could ever make that decision consistently or me.

    Somehow it might make more sense to have a few MAJOR and Standard fields and to put the more subjective and variable user requirements in the sistered Player Program so preference can be selected and saved without affecting the master tags.

    This would make it easier to do a Wiki type data base for the main data which would be more accurate by following one standard.

    keep up the good work!
    Gordon

    • December 9, 2012 at 7:40 am

      Interesting thoughts Gordon. I do think there’s much more to be done in the ‘data pipeline’ from master online database through to your own tags, and I do think that if automation makes the process painless then you can be more receptive to allowing your own music files to vary with time.

      That’s why I’ve started work on OneMusicAPI. Currently it contains only the lookup smarts that bliss has, e.g. it can answer the cover art for a particular release. Later I want to progressively add the pipeline bliss supplies. For example, OMA may find the genre for a given release, then your account inside OMA says “but this user just wants high level genres” so it changes “Acid grunge post dubstep revival” into “Rock”.

      What do you mean by major and standard fields?

      The trouble with stored data in players is always that the data is not as transferrable. For many I guess that might be an academic concern.

  2. countessouroboros

    May 20, 2013 at 5:18 am

    I realize this post is a bit old now, but for future viewers I feel I need to point out that the file names you suggest are a little too simple. Only having the track title and number leads you into all sorts of dilemmas. First of all, various media players have an option for you to look at all of your tracks at once and some will sort them alphabetically by their file name. Having the file name start with a track number will mean that when the list is populated you will be looking at a bunch of tracks sorted by 01, 02, 03 and so on. While not overly concerning, it is annoying. But consider that many song titles are very simple and used by many different artists. If you are looking at songs that have the same name, how do you know what is what unless you happen to remember which track it happened to be? And what if you have multiple versions of the same song? The radio edit, the live and the remix for example. When you look at them in your file tree on your computer it is all fine and dandy, but realistically, we aren’t likely to do that very often.

    If you want to have a file system that works for your media player (which, let’s face it, is what you are going to be using the majority of the time) you should set up your files like this:

    Computer\Music\Artist\Artist – Name of Track (Name of CD – Track no).MP3/WAV

    Yes it does make for longer file names but does that really matter? If you have a lot of albums by the same artist you can add in folders to separate each CD but I haven’t found it to be necessary. This format also has the added benefit of the file being recognizable if you want to make mix cds.

    The way you name the actual file doesn’t affect the tags so providing you have complete tags your media player will be able to sort out genre and all those other little details. You can use MediaMonkey or MusicBrainz Picard to sort out your collection for you to save doing every track individually.

    • May 21, 2013 at 9:12 am

      Great comment! It comes down to how your music player works. Personally, I don’t see filenames *at all* in my music player, so the artist and album name just get in the way in the track name. The only time I see file names are when synchronising my files with mobile players, which works well with the hierarchical folder approach.

      The most important thing is that this is still identifying data we are using to form the path, rather than classifying data. The trouble with the latter (e.g. genre) is it’s more subjective.

      Note that some OSes struggle as folders get larger. As such, your pattern may not work so well for “Various artists”. You’re going to have some biiiiig folders.

      One other thing missed in both my original post and your comment are medium numbers. For multi disc releases you probably want to include these.

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