Music Library Management

Keeping your digital music library organized is important for several reasons, but it’s often overlooked because it takes time and most people don’t think it’s worth it.  I’m hoping this quick post on the organizational methods and tools I use can be helpful and can save you a lot of time in organizing your library.

Organization

My music library is organized by folders in the format Music/Artist/Album. Pretty simple.  Filenames are in the format <track> – <title>.mp3.

For multiple-disc albums, I still only have one folder for the whole album, and then the files are named <disc>.<track> – <title>.mp3.  This makes more sense (to me, anyway) than having separate folders for each disc – it’s all the same album, anyway.

I still don’t have any good way to take care of Various Artists albums, though.

There’s also a Music/Soundtracks folder, which contains a folder for each soundtrack I own.  This seems like a more logical way to organize these than by artist.

Tools

For collection of music, I use either Exact Audio Copy or Amazon MP3. Exact Audio Copy rips CDs with the highest accuracy possible.  I usually rip to 256 or 320kbps MP3s.  Amazon MP3 is great because it provides 256kbps MP3s with no DRM (both advantages over iTunes).  Even better, it’s not too expensive and you’re still supporting the artists.

Once I’ve obtained MP3s via any avenue (except Amazon MP3), I run the album through MusicBrainz Picard to ensure that all the ID3 tags are accurate.  Sometimes, though, I need to resort to fixing parts of tags manually.  (I don’t do this with Amazon MP3s because files from that service are already accurately tagged.)

I use ID3-TagIT to fix tags (especially adding the disc numbers to multi-disc albums) and rename files.  This program can rename files based on the ID3 tags, making renaming a bunch of music files super-easy. It can also organize files into a folder structure (like the one I described above) automatically based on the ID3 tags – great for taming an out-of-control music library.  This is a really great, powerful program, and I’m sad to see that it’s no longer being maintained…I’ll have to find a replacement eventually, I guess.  For now, though, it looks like it’s still available.

Before adding the files to my music player, one more step: I run them through mp3val to make sure there are no issues with the files which could cause skipping, etc. This isn’t usually necessary with files from Exact Audio Copy or Amazon MP3, but it can’t hurt, and it’s invaluable for files from any other source. (mp3val is a command-line program, but there’s a graphical interface available for Windows at the Web site.)

Finally, you can add the files to your media player of choice. For iTunes, I use the free version of iTunes Folder Watch.

A Note

I know this looks like it would take a long time, but once you get the hang of it, it really only adds a minute or two to the process of importing each album – a small price to pay for a well-organized and maintained music library.