Ho do you organize your music?

Starfox

How do you organize your mp3s/wavs/whatever and cds ect?

How do
- You go about Burning cd's to add to your cd collection.
- Labeling (alphabetical?, Genre?....)
- If they're new tracks to add, do you make a whole new cd for just those few tracks?
- When organizing your music, do you put those tracks in the collection that you know you'll never play in front of people, but more for your listening?
You can come up with your own questions aswell

Ive allot of time on my hands coming up so i will finally be able to relax and organize all my music (which is allot)

Zascar

With difficulty. Over the years I've tried a few different methods but never really settled on any one, it just changes. My taste in music changes a lot as a listen to knew stuff and begin to explore new sub genres etc, so its a pain to keep everything organised. I use software which helps, but within windows I make folders and Basically what I do is I put all my newest music in one folder, and gradually sort it into a few sub folders split into genre. House, Techno, Minimal etc. I have tried to go even further (deep house, tech house - or even heavy techno or deep techno etc) but it rarely works for the simple reason that I don't have the time or the patience to do it properly, and also I can often change my mind on exactly what sub-genre a track is - it just gets messy.

I'm changing to Traktor now and it has a different way of managing music than Torq does so I might try to get into that.

I had CDJ's for a while but messing with CD's did my head in so I sold them and went back to Digital. So much easier having a screen with all your music, not trying to read handwriting on CD's or even deal with the crappy screen on the CDJ's to read mp3 names.

I've been playing a bit of vinyl lately and its nice making piles of records etc - but if you had your entire music collection on wax I'd say it would get tricky, not to mention heavy!

Executive Steve

don't do cd's; vinyl is organised by genre, and then alphabetically by label and then by catalogue number

mp3's are in serato crates sorted by genre and by month of acquisition

Musicman2000

4 udg cd wallets:) Would have to take a year off to rip them onto a laptop:D

joker77

Musicman2000 wrote: »

4 udg cd wallets:) Would have to take a year off to rip them onto a laptop:D

Piece o' p*ss mate, try converting a 300+ vinyl collection to mp3... now there's a year's work. Very satisfying having done it though

gazmc

I prefer to use organised chaos myself!
I play cd's so try and keep genres together or by month the track was released.
But generally just good memory, if anyone looked at my wallets they would not have a clue how its organised but it makes sense to me

ED E

HDD Plus WMP(I know, I know, it is a piece of sh1te)

I have one folder(Plus Backups) will all the files in under the format [Primary Artist] - [Track Name][(Additional Artist)][(Notes)] *Notes: RE, Cover, Club Mix, Original, Live etc etc.

Within WMP I can then do what I like, and with one click shuffle to my devices. 1350 tracks on my phone is nice, with Bluetooth headphones(Fine for anyone but Audiophiles).

Stacks of CDs would drive me nuts. Searching at 5400RPM is sooo much easier.

Executive Steve

joker77 wrote: »

Piece o' p*ss mate, try converting a 300+ vinyl collection to mp3... now there's a year's work. Very satisfying having done it though

That's why there's no way in hell i'm even going to bother converting my 2500+ vinyl collection...

joker77

[cm]tyranny wrote: »

That's why there's no way in hell i'm even going to bother converting my 2500+ vinyl collection...

Wowzer, that would be a lifetime's work! I stopped really collecting vinyl a few years ago, so I just wanted to get all my stuff easily available.

In terms of categorizing, I haven't got a system, yet. But the rate it's been growing the last while, I'll need to do an overhaul pretty soon to get it sorted. That idea of genre and month acquired sounds interesting

Zascar

joker77 wrote: »

Wowzer, that would be a lifetime's work!

Just download the mp3, I would not bother ripping it. If you have bought the track on vinyl and you are allowed rip it yourself, I don't see any problem in saving yourself the hassle and finding it online in a fraction of the time.

joker77

Zascar wrote: »

Just download the mp3, I would not bother ripping it. If you have bought the track on vinyl and you are allowed rip it yourself, I don't see any problem in saving yourself the hassle and finding it online in a fraction of the time.

A fair amount of it would have been pretty difficult to find online

Executive Steve

The bulk of the stuff I have is very unlikely to ever come out on mp3 legally...

Knowledge magazine used to do a pretty cringey monthly diary type feature on "a week in the life of a dnb celeb"; they did one on Kenny Ken and it was basically two pages of him spending sunday, monday, tuesday, wednesday and thursday morning ripping old dubplates to his hard drive, followed by a radio show, two gigs, a kick-around in the park, a trip to teh movies with his daughter, and then back by himself to his gaff to spend another week ripping his old dubplates... He'd been at it for eight hours a day for a few years on the trot working through them in chronological order and was still barely getting into his 1994 crates! And a sizable chunk of those would have been tunes that literally nobody else had (VIP versions, alternate unreleased versions, tunes that fell through the cracks because Grooverider got stoned and lost the master DAT tapes for etc etc etc


Jaysus!

BaZmO*

Zascar wrote: »

Just download the mp3, I would not bother ripping it. If you have bought the track on vinyl and you are allowed rip it yourself, I don't see any problem in saving yourself the hassle and finding it online in a fraction of the time.

I'm with Zas here. I've over a 1000 tunes on vinyl so if each one averaged 20 mins that'd take me over 300 hours to rip. And that's before I get into cataloguing them.

I used to know where every tune was when I was starting out as I use to have a system. New stuff would be in the box along with the big tunes and gradually moved to the back or onto shelves. But because I've moved so many times in the last few years everything just got jumbled up and now I haven't a clue where anything is.

My mp3's are all over the place. Still have sussed out a system for that.

So in answer to the OP's question......very badly!

VinylJunkie

The problem is more than likely he will have white labels and also some tunes that did not go on general release. Espically in the case of D&B records.

For me I try Techno then split it into sub genre's.

Zascar

Yeah fair enough but at least for one the ones you could get, you could save yourselv some time finding them online rather than ripping them.

However, do you actually need every single one of your records at your disposal all the time? Like most people I have a shed load of music in mp3 I have collected over the years, but the vast majority of it I almost never play. The rest is just in other directories archived. I might take a look through it every once in a while and pull out one old track, or maybe choose to mix out of a random directory of house from 5 years ago just for the fun of it, but trying to make a set out of a choice of thousands just makes things messy.

Executive Steve

VinylJunkie wrote: »

The problem is more than likely he will have white labels and also some tunes that did not go on general release. Espically in the case of D&B records.

For me I try Techno then split it into sub genre's.

White labels aren't too hard to deal with TBH - it's just a question of typing the catalogue number or any inscriptions on the vinyl into http://www.rolldabeats.com (or googling it)

I've never had that hard a time figuring out what a record is that i actually own, and although i have had a few over the years that haven't been in any online database i've always been lucky enough to have known what they were

BaZmO*

Isn't all DnB the same anyway?

Zascar

BaZmO* wrote: »

Isn't all DnB the same anyway?

LOLOLOLOL!

Executive Steve

BaZmO* wrote: »

Isn't all DnB the same anyway?

it's actually easier to tell the tracks apart because of the lack of that donk-donk-donk noise you technoid housey trancey people all seem unable to live without


:pac:

Jev/N

Similar to what Executive Steve mentioned on the previous page - Serato folders genre -> year -> month

Naked Lepper

various subfolders on serato, theyre pretty much all over the place but i know where everything is, i pity the fool who tries to find tunes otherwise

for dnb (the music i play mainly) i have

Drum and Bass (all my tunes, mainly old stuff)
New Tunes (not so new anymore)
Summer 09 Purchases (stuff i bought since june 1)

and now at the moment im trying to start dragging tunes into the three below folders based on how banging the tune is (ha, i know..) i will probably never use it as i know all the tunes myself but im giving it a bash as to make it easier when looking for something heavy to follow on.. kinda annoying having to scroll through folders looking for something suitable at times..

Low
Mid
High