When I get a laptop

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Surreal
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#16 Post by Surreal » Sun May 11, 2008 7:45 pm

Don't let itunes organize your music. Use something else to maintain the library structure (or do it manually) and keep more complete filenames that include artist/track/year/etc.

If keeping everything in itunes, you could simply append the artist name into the track name: One O'Clock Jump (Basie), or insert the year, etc.

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J-h:n
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#17 Post by J-h:n » Mon May 12, 2008 12:25 pm

Surreal wrote:Don't let itunes organize your music. Use something else to maintain the library structure (or do it manually) and keep more complete filenames that include artist/track/year/etc.

If keeping everything in itunes, you could simply append the artist name into the track name: One O'Clock Jump (Basie), or insert the year, etc.
Good ideas both. Should have thought of them a bit earlier.

At this point, with many CDs still left to rip, I have about 2000 songs in the SwingDJ folder. That's a lot to rename manually. Are there simple ways of automatizing the process (that is, ways that don't include writing your own script or other magic tricks)?

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JesseMiner
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#18 Post by JesseMiner » Mon May 12, 2008 12:46 pm

J-h:n wrote:
Surreal wrote:Don't let itunes organize your music. Use something else to maintain the library structure (or do it manually) and keep more complete filenames that include artist/track/year/etc.

If keeping everything in itunes, you could simply append the artist name into the track name: One O'Clock Jump (Basie), or insert the year, etc.
Good ideas both. Should have thought of them a bit earlier.

At this point, with many CDs still left to rip, I have about 2000 songs in the SwingDJ folder. That's a lot to rename manually. Are there simple ways of automatizing the process (that is, ways that don't include writing your own script or other magic tricks)?
You can easily do this with software like MediaMonkey or Mp3 Tag Studio. Both have the utility to rename files based on mp3 tag information. Both will also allow you to create a directory structure as well from the tags if you don't just want all of the files in a single folder. I use both programs on a regular basis. Great programs!

In your case, you can rename all of the files and then reimport them into iTunes. Just be careful with this process if you have non-smart playlists or tags that have been written to the iTunes database, instead of to the mp3 files themselves, as they will be lost during this process.

Here is my file naming convention for example: Artist - Album - Title - BPM.mp3. I include the BPM in the file name just on the off-chance that it somehow gets erased from the tag as it is the most difficult piece of information about a song for me to recreate.

Jesse

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J-h:n
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#19 Post by J-h:n » Mon May 12, 2008 2:33 pm

JesseMiner wrote:You can easily do this with software like MediaMonkey or Mp3 Tag Studio. Both have the utility to rename files based on mp3 tag information. Both will also allow you to create a directory structure as well from the tags if you don't just want all of the files in a single folder. I use both programs on a regular basis. Great programs!
Thanks for the tips! These programs both look very interesting. They seem to overlap a lot in what they do; which one do you use for which tasks?

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JesseMiner
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#20 Post by JesseMiner » Mon May 12, 2008 4:35 pm

J-h:n wrote:
JesseMiner wrote:You can easily do this with software like MediaMonkey or Mp3 Tag Studio. Both have the utility to rename files based on mp3 tag information. Both will also allow you to create a directory structure as well from the tags if you don't just want all of the files in a single folder. I use both programs on a regular basis. Great programs!
Thanks for the tips! These programs both look very interesting. They seem to overlap a lot in what they do; which one do you use for which tasks?
When I am just doing some simple tagging from filenames or renaming from tags, I always go to the bare-bones Mp3 Tag Studio.

MediaMonkey is a more robust music management software tool like iTunes but with additional functionality such as the tools mentioned above. So when I want to use a software application that allows me to listen to music, create playlists, burn CDs, get tag information and album art from Amazon.com, etc..., I use MediaMonkey.

I have not switched over to using MediaMonkey exclusively (I still use iTunes primarily for listening to music on my computer, burning CDs and interfacing with my iPod), but I would definitely recommend considering MediaMonkey as a worthy replacement for iTunes.

One last note: both of these programs are free, but if you really love MediaMonkey, it is worth buying the gold edition for even more functionality.

Jesse

Surreal
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#21 Post by Surreal » Mon May 12, 2008 7:29 pm

I use J.River Media Center, which is another multipurpose program similar to Media Monkey. I've linked to their free version. I have now abandoned itunes completely in favour of it.

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Cyrano de Maniac
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#22 Post by Cyrano de Maniac » Tue May 13, 2008 11:23 am

Serious question.

Why would a person want to keep all/most of their files in a common directory, particularly if they're using iTunes? I don't see any particular advantage to that, and in fact can see quite a few disadvantages, both organizationally and performance-wise (it can take a lot longer to get a directory listing, for example).

I ask because before I used iTunes at all I kept my collection organized almost exactly the same way iTunes does (i.e. ./Artist/Album/Track-Title.mp3, with a slightly different organization for compilations and soundtracks). With programs that aggregate all of your collection into a single searchable database (e.g. iTunes, Amarok, etc) the location of the files make no difference since you rarely interact with them directly.

Is it perhaps just an artifact of how one's brain works as to whether a hierarchy or a flat directory works better for you? Or are there some solid arguments one way or the other?

In any case, even now that I use iTunes I don't let iTunes organize my files because I need to keep the files synchronized between multiple machines and not all of them can run iTunes. But I still keep the hierarchical organization rather than a flat directory.

Thanks,
Brent

Surreal
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#23 Post by Surreal » Tue May 13, 2008 1:11 pm

Cyrano de Maniac wrote:Is it perhaps just an artifact of how one's brain works as to whether a hierarchy or a flat directory works better for you? Or are there some solid arguments one way or the other?
For simplicity sake really. All my music is stored simply in /music. When I want to do manual file operations, I can (for the most part) find where my music is. I don't do things manually all that often, but it comes up with enough regularity that I appreciate being able to find songs without having to open up the media player. In the event that my media player dies a horrible death, it's nice being able to still figure out your music collection.

I can see some uses for keeping separate libraries for different styles of music, or making directories that clump artists into stacks (A-G, H-Q, R-Z for example), but all of these run into the problem of getting cluttered just as a single directory would if you have enough songs.

I think another use for the directory structure is as a means to store file information. Johan mentioned earlier the problem of multiple files having the same name. The quickfix to that was to append more information to the filename. Depending on your file system, this can get a bit clunky too (and I think sometimes filenames over 256 chars cause problems too) and making reading files increasingly difficult. The directory structure allows a quick way to identify artist, album, etc. On the other far end you simply assign coded names to files (sort of like how songs are stored on an ipod), but this forces you to rely entirely on your media player to identify your music.

Bah, I'm just rambling. My point is, I consider the directory structure important because you can't always rely on the machine to do everything for you.

lipi
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#24 Post by lipi » Tue May 13, 2008 3:58 pm

Surreal wrote:
Cyrano de Maniac wrote:Is it perhaps just an artifact of how one's brain works as to whether a hierarchy or a flat directory works better for you? Or are there some solid arguments one way or the other?
For simplicity sake really. All my music is stored simply in /music. When I want to do manual file operations, I can (for the most part) find where my music is. I don't do things manually all that often, but it comes up with enough regularity that I appreciate being able to find songs without having to open up the media player. In the event that my media player dies a horrible death, it's nice being able to still figure out your music collection.
that hardly seems an argument against a tree structure. in a tree you can still find the files easily (since you know how the tree is formed: artist/album/track), and, even if you couldn't, you can easily search within the tree (or even a subtree) for your file. there is no dependency on the entity that created the tree (itunes, or whatever).
I can see some uses for keeping separate libraries for different styles of music, or making directories that clump artists into stacks (A-G, H-Q, R-Z for example), but all of these run into the problem of getting cluttered just as a single directory would if you have enough songs.
the point is that they don't get cluttered just like a single directory! they get cluttered at quite a lower rate (in the case of the itunes library at a geometrically lower one, with factor dependent on number of tracks per artist and number of tracks from an artist per album).

i think it's really a size argument: once you have more than some limit N files, it's cheaper and easier to use a directory tree. how many levels your tree has depends on how many files you have. what that level N is depends on who's using the data (human, program, highly optimised program, ...).

for the cs geeks (though they already agree with me, i suspect): that's why pagetables have multiple levels.

er, where were we? oh, right. something about music.

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fredo
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#25 Post by fredo » Tue May 13, 2008 4:47 pm

One screwy thing iTunes does that makes the organization a bit difficult is how it treats "compilations". I was not consistent in my decision to check or uncheck the "compilation" box when I ripped my CDs, so I likely have some that are in the Compilations folder, and some albums that are spread across several artist folders with only a song or two in them. Plus, there are compilations of various artist, then there are compilations of tracks from various albums of one artist.

I guess its a matter of preference, but if you're going to let iTunes organize your music, I would recommend making a decision about how you want to treat 'compilations'.

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GemZombie
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#26 Post by GemZombie » Tue May 13, 2008 8:42 pm

I think i've discussed this before, but what the heck.

I prefer not to use any "library" of any sorts, and organize my music as such:

+ Style/genre
+ Artist | Compilation Name
+ Album Title
- <track>.Artist - Title.mp3

So for example:

d:\music\Classic Swing\Artie Shaw\The Complete Gramercy Five Sessions\02 - Artie Shaw - Summit Ridge Drive.mp3

In each Genre I have an "orphans" directory that is organized by artist for songs that I don't have the entire album for (single eMusic downloads etc). The collector in me rarely likes to break up a set, so I keep the whole album even if there's only one or two playable songs.

My Genre's curently include: Classic Swing, Classic Swing [Collections], New Swing, Neo Swing (this folder has collected dust for years now :P), Jazz & Groove, Rock/Jive/Boogie, Rock/Jive/Boogie [Collections], Non-Swing, and Western Swing. I'm looking to break out my Jazz/Groove Collection, as well as my "Classic Swing" into more sub-genres, but it's harder to do on a full album basis. My organization doesn't leave room for genre overlap which obviously exists, so that's where learning my collection becomes important.

I used to store bpm in the title, but as I've mentioned in other threads I found that to be a crutch. I know my collection well enough to know what songs are where, and if I really need to search for something I just do a quick search through windows explorer.

BPM Studio can store bpm notes about songs, but I've probably only stored those in about 2% of my music.

I'm fairly obsessive about keeping the music organized, and putting it all in one folder would totally drive me bat@#$!.

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#27 Post by dogpossum » Tue May 13, 2008 8:47 pm

fredo wrote:One screwy thing iTunes does that makes the organization a bit difficult is how it treats "compilations". I was not consistent in my decision to check or uncheck the "compilation" box when I ripped my CDs, so I likely have some that are in the Compilations folder, and some albums that are spread across several artist folders with only a song or two in them. Plus, there are compilations of various artist, then there are compilations of tracks from various albums of one artist.

I guess its a matter of preference, but if you're going to let iTunes organize your music, I would recommend making a decision about how you want to treat 'compilations'.

Out of interest, would you organise an album of the 'greatest hits' (tee hee) of one artist as a compilation? If not, how would you organise it, especially when an artist like Ellington recorded not only with his own orchestra, but also with a range of smaller groups using completely different names?

...I guess this just emphasises the difficulty of using 'album' as an organiser for jazz, particularly when many of the songs we use weren't actually recorded as part of an 'album' in the contemporary sense...

I have an ongoing struggle with how I organise songs when the individual artists in the recording group are significant in their own right, perhaps even more than as part of that particular group (I'm especially thinking of songs like 'Wholly Cats' (1940) which featured Goodman, Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Christian, etc etc. I spose it helps to know your music and to know your musical/recording history... :D

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trev
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#28 Post by trev » Wed May 14, 2008 12:37 am

dogpossum wrote:I have an ongoing struggle with how I organise songs when the individual artists in the recording group are significant in their own right, perhaps even more than as part of that particular group (I'm especially thinking of songs like 'Wholly Cats' (1940) which featured Goodman, Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Christian, etc etc. I spose it helps to know your music and to know your musical/recording history... :D
With groups like that, when i'm really organised I add the other names in to the comments field, so I can type in Cootie Williams in the search field, and get his own band, plus all-star groups he was in. (If I had no social life whatsoever, I would add his name to the comments field of every track he plays on, but that would be WAY too organised!)

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Lawrence
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#29 Post by Lawrence » Wed May 14, 2008 9:24 am

Surreal wrote:Don't let itunes organize your music. Use something else to maintain the library structure (or do it manually).
YES! OH, My GOD, YES!!

ITunes completely screwed up my entire music library, even breaking apart all my "various artist" compilations and such to relocate files to new folders that it created for different artists. I felt absolutely FURIOUS!! It relocated literally tens of thousands of songs, all without my knowing it.

ITunes even moved albums for an artist from the artist folder that I had created to an artist folder that was spelled slightly differently: like moving "MxPx" to a new folder it called "MXPX." Then if some screwball mistyped the "Artist" tag on one of my songs, then I would have ANOTHER folder for that same artist: like "Mx Px."
You can disable it, and I did, but not until AFTER it wreaked massive havoc on my music library.
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Lawrence
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#30 Post by Lawrence » Wed May 14, 2008 9:27 am

fredo wrote:One screwy thing iTunes does that makes the organization a bit difficult is how it treats "compilations". I was not consistent in my decision to check or uncheck the "compilation" box when I ripped my CDs, so I likely have some that are in the Compilations folder, and some albums that are spread across several artist folders with only a song or two in them. Plus, there are compilations of various artist, then there are compilations of tracks from various albums of one artist.

I guess its a matter of preference, but if you're going to let iTunes organize your music, I would recommend making a decision about how you want to treat 'compilations'.
I don't understand why ITunes considers a "greatest hits" album to be the same thing as a sampler "various artists" album. ITunes just puts both types into the "compilations" folder, even though it would be MUCh more logical to put a "greatest hits" CD into the artist folder. That is yet another way in which ITunes organization REALLY missed the boat.
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