Topic: How to organize music files on server

[jbraveman]

I just rolled my own 3TB NAS and it is now running freenas.
I have all my music backed up on optical media.  I'm not interested in RAID right now.  The box has 3 1TB drives and room for 3 or 4 more.
Soon I will be adding a squeezebox to serve up the music.  I plan for everything to be tagged properly.

I'd like to hear some opinions about how to organize the music in terms of file structure.

All of my CDs are ripped and stored in a folder like this:
Grateful Dead - American Beauty (1970) [FLAC] {comments}
    01 - Box of rain.flac
    02 - ......


Here are some Ideas:
1)  Put all albums in root directory.  They should sort themselves alphabetically anyway and have all of the relevant information.
2)  root > artist names folder  > album folders
3) root > genre > artist names > album folders

Any ideas to simplify, browsing, organizing and then integrating with squeezebox -- especially considering they will be spread across a number of drives.

[grtphl]

I just rolled my own 3TB NAS and it is now running freenas.
I have all my music backed up on optical media.  I'm not interested in RAID right now.  The box has 3 1TB drives and room for 3 or 4 more.
Soon I will be adding a squeezebox to serve up the music.  I plan for everything to be tagged properly.

I'd like to hear some opinions about how to organize the music in terms of file structure.

All of my CDs are ripped and stored in a folder like this:
Grateful Dead - American Beauty (1970) [FLAC] {comments}
    01 - Box of rain.flac
    02 - ......


Here are some Ideas:
1)  Put all albums in root directory.  They should sort themselves alphabetically anyway and have all of the relevant information.
2)  root > artist names folder  > album folders
3) root > genre > artist names > album folders

Any ideas to simplify, browsing, organizing and then integrating with squeezebox -- especially considering they will be spread across a number of drives.

I prefer separating by artist, because genre labels can be murky.  I tend to cluster related-genres on a drive, so none of my drives are completely random.

With this much music, we need a better system they simply directory navigation. An idea I've considered is creating a MySQL database for my kollektion.  Each show would have an ID , and artist, date, venue, show notes and more would have their own fields.  Reviews/comments from archive.org and bt.etree, and excerpts from across the web about a show would also be included.  THEN, it's almost like a tagging system, where I can search for a song and see all the versions and who covered it.  Or if Person X sat in for Person Y's show, I could search for Person X and have all their shows, and whichever shows they were sitting in on.  Or if there's funny banter, you can add a note about that, and be able to pull up all the shows you've marked that have good banter, or specifically regarding certain band members talking, or what they were talking about.  Jerry-Gear Banter, Jerry-Crowd Banter, Jerry-Venue Banter.  It's ambitious and would require you to manually input entries for every show, after or while critically listening.  But once it's set up... oh man. 

[F0CKER]

If everything is tagged properly why don't you just use something like Media Monkey to organize your files in a dedciated software app? 

I keep all my bvands in a separate folder, each album / show in a separate folder under that.

Everything is loaded into Media Monkey.

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

With this much music, we need a better system they simply directory navigation. An idea I've considered is creating a MySQL database for my kollektion.  Each show would have an ID , and artist, date, venue, show notes and more would have their own fields.  Reviews/comments from archive.org and bt.etree, and excerpts from across the web about a show would also be included.

If you really want to put in that amount of effort, you might consider starting with MythTV as a base and expanding the support for meta-data in the SQL database that sits behind the myth server application.  Then contribute your changes back into the code base.

Myth is pretty decent and it offers a means to automatically identify commercial releases.  It has a upnp server API so you should be able to get to it using any conforming client like a PS3. 

[cybergaloot]

If everything is tagged properly why don't you just use something like Media Monkey to organize your files in a dedciated software app? 

I keep all my bvands in a separate folder, each album / show in a separate folder under that.

Everything is loaded into Media Monkey.

I use media monkey as well but not for this particular application. If I had a real NAS setup I'd consider using it though. Not a bad app for the bucks but it does have a couple of weak points.

BTW, I just told my boss, who is going on vacation, that if one of our SANs were missing when he got back, I wouldn't know what happened to it. And oh, I'd need one of the servers too!

[it-goes-to-eleven]

I have approximately 900 artists in my collection and use:

/artist/album (or show)

Everything is under linux.  FIles are stored on individual disk drives and symbolic links place them under one musicdir.  The Slimserver indexes everything by tag content.  Maybe in 2009 we'll get cheap 2TB drives and I'll consolidate everything under one big volume.

Tagging and management software has improved over the years but it was pretty poor back when I really needed it.  I wrote some scripts to dump and restore all of the tag metadata to/from a flat file.   That way I can easily do version control on tags, diff changes to tags, script tag updates or changes.  If some tool messes up my tags, I can easily restore just the tags.   And I can review and edit all of my tags in emacs

[jbraveman]

Tag and Rename and live show tagger have been great.  Anyone have any experience with FreeNAS?

[stevetoney]

I have approximately 900 artists in my collection and use:

/artist/album (or show)

Hey Freelunch...I'm curious what conventions you use when naming the artist.

For example, where to you put the 'The' because some bands are more anal about 'The' being part of their official band name.

Also, for bands that are also named after the main person, do you use the Last Name, First Name convention even though the band name is now technically no longer a name?

Examples:

Williams, Keller

or

Keller Williams

and

Dave Mathews Band, The

-or-

Mathews, Dave Band, The

-or-

The Dave Mathews Band