Wait, you guys are organizing your music files?

I tag metadata on everything with MusicBrainz Picard, and then store it in a /{Album Artist}/{Album}/{Track} hierarchy.

This is a copy of an older comment of mine:

Everything is tagged and organized using Picard. I use a modified version of https://community.metabrainz.org/t/repository-for-neat-file-name-string-patterns-and-tagger-script-snippets/2786/156.

I’ve been meaning to write a guide for how it works. My current WIP script can be found here: https://gitea.baerentsen.space/FrederikBaerentsen/DataHoarder_scripts/src/branch/master/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/T/(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 3+ years 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 + Prism. I run Picard in a docker container and access it over web, so it can run on my headless Debian server.

The lidarr way.

All my music rips go into the Lidarr indexer, and it handles the rest. Playback handled by Plex

Lidarr does the management and either stores soundtracks in /data/media/soundtrack or music under /data/media/music
Sorted by folder is per artist.

/music/Artist_Name/Album_Name/

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.

/music/{artist}/{year - album}

All sorted by hand by my lovely husband. He liked doing it lmao.

beets is a godsend for managing the file layout. If you need to make changes down the line it makes it super easy to migrate

I recently started organizing my music to use with Jellyfin and/or Navidrome. Since Jellyfin requires a particular folder structure, I used this, and I’ve also used MusicBrainz Picard to tag all my music so that it works better with Navidrome. I ended up just using Jellyfin as it suited my needs perfectly, and using it with a desktop client on my laptop (Feishin) and mobile client on my phone (Finamp).

The way Jellyfin requires it to be organised is the way I would’ve done it myself anyway:

Artist 1
|-- Album 1
||----Disc 1
||----Disc 2
|–Album 2
Artist 2
|-- Album 1
etc …

In my experience, if you try to organize based on genres, you need to have a very defined sense of what genres everything you have is. Either you stick with very broad genres (Rock, Jazz etc.) or you get tons of subgenres that you quickly lose control over if you don’t know exactly what is what. Since the clients I use have the possibility to sort by genre, I am planning on giving it an overhaul at some point, but then I will use very broad genres.

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.

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.

My music library is such fire it’s uncontainable.

QudoLibet plus mp3s metadata