When I get a laptop

[Lawrence]

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?

Yes, good point, and it is partly just a force of habit. But there is more to it.

I want to keep the underlying files organized so that I can manage the files, find and replace them, transfer them, back them up more easily BY MYSELF. Yes, a software program CAN do it for me, but that does not mean that it MUST do so or that it is the easiest, most efficient way of doing so. It boils down to organizational control, and I don't trust programs like ITunes to manage the files logically, especially because I have been screwed so badly by ITunes' reorganizing my entire library without my knowing it.

After ITunes pulled the reorganization, I tried to just think that it wouldn't matter for exactly the reasons you mentioned. But it didn't; it made it VERY difficult to weed out trash, weed out duplicates (ITunes' find duplicates" function is crap), find and replace corrupted files, move them from one computer to another, and so on.

I also like to listen to entire albums, not just mixes of individual songs. One of the things I cannot STAND about ITunes file structure (and the IPod interface) is that you have no idea whether a certain artist has one song or fifty songs on a device. They all appear in the index equally.

I always had tried to organize my digital music the way I organized my LP records: with 12-inch albums over here, and 45 singles over there. And even my albums were organized alphabetically for the single-artist records over here, and the "various artist" albums over there. Keeping the singles-oriented music in one folder, and the album-oriented music in another folder has become the only way I have found to keep that distinction straight so I can find albums when I want to listen to albums, and singles when I want to listen to just singles.


For some (perhaps even most) people, it probably does not matter. But once your collection gets to a certain size, I found that I really need to keep it organized, myself.

[Cyrano de Maniac]

I want to keep the underlying files organized so that I can manage the files, find and replace them, transfer them, back them up more easily BY MYSELF. Yes, a software program CAN do it for me, but that does not mean that it MUST do so or that it is the easiest, most efficient way of doing so. It boils down to organizational control, and I don't trust programs like ITunes to manage the files logically, especially because I have been screwed so badly by ITunes' reorganizing my entire library without my knowing it.

Well I do hope I wasn't misunderstood. I personally favor an Artist/Album/Track-Title directory structure and naming scheme. I tend to have a good memory for exactly which Artist/Album a particular track is on, and can drill down to it very quickly. And before iTunes, if I'd forgotten where a track was, it was easier for me to do `find /music -name "*Jump*"` than most any other way of finding what I was looking for.

What I was actually questioning was why someone would encode the artist and album into the filename itself, ala the apocryphal "18 One O'Clock Jump.mp3" back on the first page of this topic. I can only see the addition of artist and album to the file name being useful if a person keeps a flat directory with all their files (or for the special case of compilations, where the path /music/Various Artists/Best of Swing/ doesn't give you an indication of artist).

So I guess my assumption was that various people advocate/use a flat directory, since I saw no other use for encoding the artist and album into the filename, compilations notwithstanding. Perhaps I misunderstood?

[Toon Town Dave]

I just organize my files in a 2-tier structure with a directory/folder for each album with artist/album title encoded in the directory name. Within each, the individual files encode track number, track artist and track title. This maps nicely to the way the music is organized in the physical world.

When I'm actually looking for stuff I use other tools to search/sort. While managing the files themselves, I use tools like find (or search on Windows). Just what Brent is saying. For other meta-data and while playing, I'd use a library tool such as iTunes.

One of the things I wish I had done was make more extensive use of the ID3 tags to attach meta-data to assist with searching/sorting. The ID3 standard allows user defined fields so for our purposes, we could include classifications or keywords that would help us. Unfortunately most library software I've tried ignores the user defined fields. Granted I haven't revisited this in a few years so there may be better software now.

[Surreal]

ID3 tags still aren't standardized as far as I'm aware. All the main ones (name, artist, track, etc) are ok, and bpm and comments are pretty safe. The rest aren't guaranteed, and user-defined fields generally don't transfer well if you use a different program. Lately, I've just been shoving all my extra metadata into the "comments" field.

[Toon Town Dave]

True. Also unlikely that ID3 will ever be recognized by a standards body since the once that count (ISO, ECMA, etc.) are all very formal and expensive processes.

It can be considered a defacto standard since most programs that create and play MP3 support at least a subset of ID3v2 or up. The specification is freely available and free to implement. Unfortunately most implementations are incomplete.

[Lawrence]

I want to keep the underlying files organized so that I can manage the files, find and replace them, transfer them, back them up more easily BY MYSELF. Yes, a software program CAN do it for me, but that does not mean that it MUST do so or that it is the easiest, most efficient way of doing so. It boils down to organizational control, and I don't trust programs like ITunes to manage the files logically, especially because I have been screwed so badly by ITunes' reorganizing my entire library without my knowing it.

Well I do hope I wasn't misunderstood. I personally favor an Artist/Album/Track-Title directory structure and naming scheme. * * * *

What I was actually questioning was why someone would encode the artist and album into the filename itself, ala the apocryphal "18 One O'Clock Jump.mp3" back on the first page of this topic. I can only see the addition of artist and album to the file name being useful if a person keeps a flat directory with all their files (or for the special case of compilations, where the path /music/Various Artists/Best of Swing/ doesn't give you an indication of artist).

So I guess my assumption was that various people advocate/use a flat directory, since I saw no other use for encoding the artist and album into the filename, compilations notwithstanding. Perhaps I misunderstood?

Yes, I misunderstood. By your question, I thought you were saying that ITunes or any other media player file can find and organize music files even if they are scattered all over your hard drive, so why bother keeping them together in a common directory/folder or worrying about how they are stored or re-arranged?

Yes, just relying on a single folder into which you dump all your music files would seem rather unmanageable, too. But I think that people who code album name into each file's title do so because they want to make sure that the information sticks with the file.

Also, some players (like my MP3 CD player in my car) display the text for only the file name, so including the album and artist in the name of the file would be the only way for it to be displayed. It is useful to see it just to remind you what song is playing without needing to pull out a paper index. IPods and laptops (that display tag info) are not the only sources for playing MP3s.

[J-h:n]

Got the laptop.

It's a Toshiba Satellite Pro A200, Pentium 2330, 200 gig harddrive, 2 gig RAM - and it runs Windows XP! (I recently asked about Vista for DJing in another thread and nobody said they had any issues, but we've had enough trouble with Vista at work that I really didn't want it on this machine. For DJing I need stability, stability and stability, and in my experience that's not exactly Vista's forte.)

I run JRiver Media Center on it for DJing - I'm mostly happy with it, but it does take some getting used to, and I still have a couple of problems. I thought I'd revive the JRiver thread to address those separately, though.

For an external sound card I tried to get the tiny Turtle Beach Micro, but I couldn't find any store that would ship it to Sweden, so since I had to go with something bulkier and more expensive I opted for the Creative Xmod. Works great, really simple to use, and it has a sound enhancement feature that, to my ears, actually enhances the sound.

As I've mentioned I started out months ago, before I had any idea what software or what machine I would use for DJing, by ripping a lot of music to MP3 in iTunes. I let iTunes organize it and used the Grouping field to designate the SwingDJ tracks.

Recently, I copied all the SwingDJ tracks into a single SwingDJ folder on an external hard drive. That's when I ran into the problem of the multiple "18 One O'Clock Jump.mp3" files discussed above. I took Jesse's advice, downloaded MP3-Tag Studio and let it rename the tracks in the SwingDJ folder in a way similar to what he described. First I tried to do it exactly like Jesse, "Artist - Album - Title - BPM.mp3", but strangely enough MP3Tag Studio wouldn't put the BPM in the filename, although it did show it in the tag information window. Well, no biggie, I trust I can restore the BPMs if they should get lost, so I opted for "Artist - Album - Title - Track number.mp3". Since I'll keep the original files unchanged in the iTunes library I could theoretically run into the same problem whenever I copy new music from iTunes into the SwingDJ folder, but if I only add a limited number of songs at a time and then rename them it should be manageable.

When I got the laptop, XP installed, JRiver installed, I copied the entire SwingDJ folder onto it and let JRiver import it all to its library. A few small glitches - somewhere in this process a bunch of tracks (maybe 20-30 out of 2000) lost all or parts of their metadata. I noticed immediately since I like to have everything sorted by BPM, so all the tracks that lacked a BPM got dumped at the end. I'm not sure where this happened - in some cases the data was still there on the external hard drive, in some cases I had to go all the way back to iTunes to restore them, but it could all be fixed without too much trouble.

So now I have the full original albums in the iTunes library for listening, the SwingDJ folder on the laptop for DJing and another SwingDJ folder on the external hard drive for intermediate storage and backup. I can easily keep the two SwingDJ folders synchronized (I think there's even a feature in JRiver that will do this automatically, but I haven't found it yet). I won't bother to keep the iTunes library synchronized, but if by some extreme misfortune both SwingDJ folders should get destroyed I always have the iTunes library to fall back to.

If I had to do it again from scratch I wouldn't use iTunes to begin with, but given that I'm quite happy with this setup. It's pretty much what I had in mind when I started this thread, and I'd like to thank everybody who contributed, as well as everybody who provided useful information in other threads. I couldn't have done it without you guys - you rock!