When you’re a music lover, there’s nothing quite like a good mess. It’s like getting your hands on a new album and discovering all the tracks you never knew existed. You can’t help but add your own tracks to the mix, and it’s always fun to see how different combinations work together. But when it comes to organizing your music collection, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. First, make sure you have an idea of what kind of music you want to keep track of. If you only have vinyl records, then it might be best to just stick with that. But if you have CDs and digital downloads as well, then it might be helpful to create some sort of playlist or order list for each genre. Next, make sure you have enough space for all your albums and singles. If you only have a few shelves in your home or office, then it might be best to just store them all in one place. But if you have an entire room dedicated to music storage, then it might be helpful to create some sort of shelving system or organization plan. This way, when you want to listen to an album or single again later on, all the tracks are at the same place! And finally, make sure that everything is properly labeled and stored! This will help make finding specific songs or albums easier in the future and also help keep track of where each song came from (and who made it).
Earlier this week we asked you to share your tips, tricks, and tools, for managing a messy music collection. Now we’re back to share so great reader tips; read on to find ways to tame your mountain of music.
Several readers were, despite having tried various techniques over the years, fans of doing things largely the manual way. Aurora900 explains:
Bilbo Baggins would love to automate, but eclectic music tastes make it hard:
Lenny shares his manual sorting method:
Other readers sang praise for automation tools like Music Brainz Picard. Kerenksy97 writes:
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Long description:
These tracks go in a folder named first with the year, then the album title (“[2010] Man Alive”), which itself is in the artist folder (“Everything Everything”). I have the added bonus of albums being listed in release order within the artist folder. These artist folders go into a folder for my music library, whilst everything I am yet to organize is in a general “!SORT” folder.
Every time I find myself wanting to add music to my library, I go through the above steps. It works well, but it can be time consuming – I’ve only done 8gb of a 120gb library in the six months since getting annoyed with, and wiping, my terribly organized iTunes library. However, it does mean I’m not regularly skipping songs when they come on because I don’t actually like that album (and wondering why it’s still in my library).
Another popular tool is Media Monkey; Wander writes:
As for actually listening I use MusicBee but by time they get there the tracks have been tagged by Picard, cleaned by MP3tag, and normalized with mp3gain.
MM is also fast as hell, got about 10 000 songs and it loads the whole list in about 2 seconds.
