The ID3 tag is good for now your player sorts them. I always fill out the Sort Album As, Sort Artist fields, Artist.

With solo artists, the Sorta Artist is always last name first, so George Michael is under M, not G. It's Michael, George under the Sort Artist field. Also for one name people that might have a last name like Janet going by Janet Jackson, I can display her albums under Janet (that were credited that way from janet. onward), but as long as it's still Jackson, Janet in the Sort Artist field, it'll sort them as Jackson, Janet.

Groups or bands have name comma the, as in Rolling Stones The as the Sort Artist. However, a band that starts with the word A should have the A first. As in A Flock of Seagulls is grammatically correct under A, not F.

Albums, songs, or bands with a number first - the display name is whatever the band/artist/song is, but the Sorta As changes.

The group 702 is Seven Zero Two under Sort Artist As. Prince's "200 Balloons" is "Two Hundred Balloons" under "Sort Song As". (This whole step is optional but I find it works great. I learned this working in a law office, where numbers were sorted alphabetically.)

Most of those rules are minor fixes, but it depends on what you have to work with. It's sure worth the effort to fix all your ID3 tags the same, whatever method you use.

As far as file structure: I have a folder for every letter of the alphabet, and subfolders by the artist under those. So if I'm looking for George Michael, I'd go to Music > M > Michael, George.

I do have a few special folders. I have some lossless ALAC files that are either stuff I've downloaded and converted from FLAC, or are rips of my own CDs and vinyl. Those folders are ALAC (stuff I've downloaded in lossless), CD Rip, LP rip (both my own lossless rips). It seems an extra step, but it keeps all my lossless stuff somewhat separate from older mp3s or iTunes files.

I don't worry too much about the file name itself. I do try to have track number - song (01 - Rhythm Nation.mp4) so they sort easily. Some people just rip w/ song title, but if someone were to rip multiple songs with the same name into the same folder, it could overwrite and not ask you first (depending on your program/app).

These bootlegs we get are often untagged in the ID3, so it takes systematically adding one CD at a time, setting the track numbers first (and disk X of X if necessary), then setting the Song and Artist fields, etc. If you drag 4 CDs of stuff in at once and they aren't marked, it's a fuckfest trying to sort them in a player and tag them correctly. It's a headache, but worth it, later on, to have your stuff sorted right.

With Prince, I can label them Prince & The Revolution, Prince and the New Power Generation, or even , and as long as I put "Prince" in the Sort Artist field, they'll all fall in the right place. won't be on the Os or anything weird like that. The three NPG albums are listed as New Power Generation, but sorted as Prince. Madhouse, The Family, are all under their respective names.

I'm also a stickler for good artwork. I don't need it huge, but nothing less than 1000x1000 or 1200x1200 makes it in. Amazon, Discogs, Google Images, etc. are good places to find artwork. In Google, you can Show Image Sizes, and search for Large only, so you get a quick view of what's available and a square.

FunkOnTheOne said:

Thats interesting, you make a really good point about taking the time to label the tracks before storing them, something I am paying for not doing now. Appreciate the post, food for thought.

Before I knew all that, I use to strip the ID3 tag. Winamp sorted by file name and that was enough. Later on, most players didn't have that option, and I was stuck. Years later, I spent a month going through tens of thousands of files, one album, artist, or even song at a time and fixing the ID3 tags. Since then, I've religiously fixed any ID3 tag hiccups in a rip or download. Stay on top of it and let it just be a habit once you get them all fixed and set.

My Prince music is all separate from my other music. I keep MP3's and Itune copies and have a 2TB hard drive with back ups.

.

My Prince folder has 6 categories and 3 extras. They are

1. Prince Official Albums (Each a separate folder with cover art and year - also NPGMC, Live, Hits collections and Rereleases like PR Deluxe)

2. Prince Singles and EP's (CD single burns and non album singles like FUNK and SST, eps include Undertaker and Deliverance amongst others)

3. Prince Unreleased (Includes The Work 2.0 and I vault)

4. Prince Bootlegs (Several sets of bootlegs all with own folders)

5. Prince Live Concerts (About 30 concert boots)

6. Proteges (Time, Family, Vanity 6 etc)

.

Other folders

7. Prince Best - A playlist of my 200 favourites and some boot favs

8. Pictures - Collection of Prince pictures

9. Podcasts - Mix of Prince Podcast and Peach and Black podcasts

.

It works for me and I have much of the physical music too.

I have ALL my Prince & Related Artists music (approaching 6000 songs) in my iTunes Music Library sorted as PURPLE MUSIC.

Albums with everything else in the albums folder.

Non-album tracks folder has one subfolder by year, though not all subfolders are completely well organized.

Live bootlegs and rehearsals are pretty well organized by date in their respective folders

Outtakes are a mess. Albums configs are fine but random outtakes are more or less organized by year or sessions, but it's a work in progress and for the most part a huge mess with several versions for many songs that I have to sort out.

I think it'll all be clean and well organized by 2025 or so...

TrivialPursuit said:

FunkOnTheOne said:

Thats interesting, you make a really good point about taking the time to label the tracks before storing them, something I am paying for not doing now. Appreciate the post, food for thought.

Before I knew all that, I use to strip the ID3 tag. Winamp sorted by file name and that was enough. Later on, most players didn't have that option, and I was stuck. Years later, I spent a month going through tens of thousands of files, one album, artist, or even song at a time and fixing the ID3 tags. Since then, I've religiously fixed any ID3 tag hiccups in a rip or download. Stay on top of it and let it just be a habit once you get them all fixed and set.

I'm still using Winamp to this day, so I never had to care about tags.

iTunes and Winamp are pretty bad and messy for large music libraries (+100 CD's). I started using a Media Server to manage my Prince collection which has grown MASSIVELY over the last two years. Basic folder structure is one for each artist with folder for each album and if nescessary addtional folder for each CD for muti CD albums.

I can browse and search my collection instantly by song name, album, decade and artist very quickly. Plus it has all the artwork and where possible lyrics automatically pulled in. But the real awesome thing is I also have instant streaming access to my Prince collection (+8000 tracks) from any computer/ipad or phone from anywhere in the world!

Music can be stored as FLAC (lossless) the media server does all the hard work simply auto converts the files to MP3, AAC on the fly to devices that cant handle FLAC files. Its basically like my own private version of Spotify and works in very much the same way.

My collection gets auto backed up so if my media server breaks down or house burns down I can re create my collection from scratch with no problems

Only the best for my Prince music which I cant live without!

[Edited 1/7/18 9:49am]

maceoparker007 said:

iTunes and Winamp are pretty bad and messy for large music libraries (+100 CD's).

Not sure that's totally true. I have over 20K songs in my collection, and mostly use iTunes on my Mac to handle them. I can find anything I want in an instant.

TrivialPursuit said:

maceoparker007 said:

iTunes and Winamp are pretty bad and messy for large music libraries (+100 CD's).

Not sure that's totally true. I have over 20K songs in my collection, and mostly use iTunes on my Mac to handle them. I can find anything I want in an instant.

I gave up on iTunes a long time ago so not sure how good it is now. The reason I chose a dedicated Media Server is that I wanted it to work with everything... Mac, Windows, Android and iOS. It can stream music to basically anything. If you haven't guessed I am using a PLEX Media Server (which can also stream video if required).

[Edited 1/7/18 10:09am]

maceoparker007 said:

TrivialPursuit said:

Not sure that's totally true. I have over 20K songs in my collection, and mostly use iTunes on my Mac to handle them. I can find anything I want in an instant.

I gave up on iTunes a long time ago so not sure how good it is now. The reason I chose a dedicated Media Server is that I wanted it to work with everything... Mac, Windows, Android and iOS. It can stream music to basically anything. If you haven't guessed I am using a PLEX Media Server (which can also stream video if required).

[Edited 1/7/18 10:09am]

I've used PLEX in the past. It's good. I have an in-house cloud I store all my music and media on as well. I can access it on my FireTV (via the VLC app), and my roommate can on his Roku. The 4K TV in the living room has a media player built into the apps and can access it. iTunes can load the music media on it as well. I know iTunes isn't the golden child, but for playing music around here on a computer, it works.

databank said:

Outtakes are a mess. Albums configs are fine but random outtakes are more or less organized by year or sessions, but it's a work in progress and for the most part a huge mess with several versions for many songs that I have to sort out.

Yes, I can't work out what to do with all the various outtake boot collections - especially as higher quality versions of tracks leak. Can't decided whether it's worth keeping them grouped in their (fairly arbitrary, really) collection as decided by a label, or whether to break up the outtake album (or whatever) and just keep the best sounding version of each track and group them by year of recording / session.

TrivialPursuit said:

The ID3 tag is good for now your player sorts them. I always fill out the Sort Album As, Sort Artist fields, Artist.

With solo artists, the Sorta Artist is always last name first, so George Michael is under M, not G. It's Michael, George under the Sort Artist field. Also for one name people that might have a last name like Janet going by Janet Jackson, I can display her albums under Janet (that were credited that way from janet. onward), but as long as it's still Jackson, Janet in the Sort Artist field, it'll sort them as Jackson, Janet.

Groups or bands have name comma the, as in Rolling Stones The as the Sort Artist. However, a band that starts with the word A should have the A first. As in A Flock of Seagulls is grammatically correct under A, not F.

Albums, songs, or bands with a number first - the display name is whatever the band/artist/song is, but the Sorta As changes.

The group 702 is Seven Zero Two under Sort Artist As. Prince's "200 Balloons" is "Two Hundred Balloons" under "Sort Song As". (This whole step is optional but I find it works great. I learned this working in a law office, where numbers were sorted alphabetically.)

Most of those rules are minor fixes, but it depends on what you have to work with. It's sure worth the effort to fix all your ID3 tags the same, whatever method you use.

As far as file structure: I have a folder for every letter of the alphabet, and subfolders by the artist under those. So if I'm looking for George Michael, I'd go to Music > M > Michael, George.

I do have a few special folders. I have some lossless ALAC files that are either stuff I've downloaded and converted from FLAC, or are rips of my own CDs and vinyl. Those folders are ALAC (stuff I've downloaded in lossless), CD Rip, LP rip (both my own lossless rips). It seems an extra step, but it keeps all my lossless stuff somewhat separate from older mp3s or iTunes files.

I don't worry too much about the file name itself. I do try to have track number - song (01 - Rhythm Nation.mp4) so they sort easily. Some people just rip w/ song title, but if someone were to rip multiple songs with the same name into the same folder, it could overwrite and not ask you first (depending on your program/app).

These bootlegs we get are often untagged in the ID3, so it takes systematically adding one CD at a time, setting the track numbers first (and disk X of X if necessary), then setting the Song and Artist fields, etc. If you drag 4 CDs of stuff in at once and they aren't marked, it's a fuckfest trying to sort them in a player and tag them correctly. It's a headache, but worth it, later on, to have your stuff sorted right.

With Prince, I can label them Prince & The Revolution, Prince and the New Power Generation, or even , and as long as I put "Prince" in the Sort Artist field, they'll all fall in the right place. won't be on the Os or anything weird like that. The three NPG albums are listed as New Power Generation, but sorted as Prince. Madhouse, The Family, are all under their respective names.

I'm also a stickler for good artwork. I don't need it huge, but nothing less than 1000x1000 or 1200x1200 makes it in. Amazon, Discogs, Google Images, etc. are good places to find artwork. In Google, you can Show Image Sizes, and search for Large only, so you get a quick view of what's available and a square.

Great responce.

Same here although i do try to have the file titles as "year album title_track number_song title" that way the albums list in order of releasse rather than alphbetically.

I use mp3tag (works with flac and other files as well) to tidy up and add artwork etc. I spend ages chnging file names initailly, then realised it made very little difference and that id tagging was much better had had loads of additional fields for information (album name, year, comments, artwork,disc number....)

I have all my official stuff filed as the artist name, live stuff as "artist Live" (original yeah?) and albumed as concert dates (yyyy-mm-dd, venue, country) rather than bootleg titles and ureleased as "Artist Outtakes", with my Prince folder & album being titled "...From The Vault" with a photo of the vault door (from google) as the album cover.

Using a mass tager also allows a selection of files to be edited the same so for instance you don't end up with a spelling mistake of the album for 1 track thuss putting it sepperate on your audio player! not that I've done that of course....

My collection is ever expanding an i have no idea what is correclty labled and what is not, but I ensure all new additions get donne proppery and randomly check artists if I find one mistake when listening to it (seeing the music player info) but then over 32000 files and 3712 folders is a bit much to start from scratch with!!!!

Year/release date.

TrivialPursuit said:

The ID3 tag is good for now your player sorts them. I always fill out the Sort Album As, Sort Artist fields, Artist.

With solo artists, the Sorta Artist is always last name first, so George Michael is under M, not G. It's Michael, George under the Sort Artist field. Also for one name people that might have a last name like Janet going by Janet Jackson, I can display her albums under Janet (that were credited that way from janet. onward), but as long as it's still Jackson, Janet in the Sort Artist field, it'll sort them as Jackson, Janet.

Groups or bands have name comma the, as in Rolling Stones The as the Sort Artist. However, a band that starts with the word A should have the A first. As in A Flock of Seagulls is grammatically correct under A, not F.

Albums, songs, or bands with a number first - the display name is whatever the band/artist/song is, but the Sorta As changes.

The group 702 is Seven Zero Two under Sort Artist As. Prince's "200 Balloons" is "Two Hundred Balloons" under "Sort Song As". (This whole step is optional but I find it works great. I learned this working in a law office, where numbers were sorted alphabetically.)

Most of those rules are minor fixes, but it depends on what you have to work with. It's sure worth the effort to fix all your ID3 tags the same, whatever method you use.

As far as file structure: I have a folder for every letter of the alphabet, and subfolders by the artist under those. So if I'm looking for George Michael, I'd go to Music > M > Michael, George.

I do have a few special folders. I have some lossless ALAC files that are either stuff I've downloaded and converted from FLAC, or are rips of my own CDs and vinyl. Those folders are ALAC (stuff I've downloaded in lossless), CD Rip, LP rip (both my own lossless rips). It seems an extra step, but it keeps all my lossless stuff somewhat separate from older mp3s or iTunes files.

I don't worry too much about the file name itself. I do try to have track number - song (01 - Rhythm Nation.mp4) so they sort easily. Some people just rip w/ song title, but if someone were to rip multiple songs with the same name into the same folder, it could overwrite and not ask you first (depending on your program/app).

These bootlegs we get are often untagged in the ID3, so it takes systematically adding one CD at a time, setting the track numbers first (and disk X of X if necessary), then setting the Song and Artist fields, etc. If you drag 4 CDs of stuff in at once and they aren't marked, it's a fuckfest trying to sort them in a player and tag them correctly. It's a headache, but worth it, later on, to have your stuff sorted right.

With Prince, I can label them Prince & The Revolution, Prince and the New Power Generation, or even , and as long as I put "Prince" in the Sort Artist field, they'll all fall in the right place. won't be on the Os or anything weird like that. The three NPG albums are listed as New Power Generation, but sorted as Prince. Madhouse, The Family, are all under their respective names.

I'm also a stickler for good artwork. I don't need it huge, but nothing less than 1000x1000 or 1200x1200 makes it in. Amazon, Discogs, Google Images, etc. are good places to find artwork. In Google, you can Show Image Sizes, and search for Large only, so you get a quick view of what's available and a square.

This is me exactly...I had them in many disorganized formats for years. About a year ago i decide to organize all of it. Hopefully by boot. I had to go in and correct tracking numbers and names. Sometimes convert to .mp3's as well (keeping the flac files of course) then hunting for good artwork. This became an obsession over 2017. I think it has paid huge dividends. Well over 1000 sets and then the studio releases and videos. I have now also copied the master hard drive on to 8 seperate SSD's. I wasn't paranoid enough to back the files I had collected years ago. Once they were lost I had to recover what I could then expand.

Nothing fancy, looks like this:

Inside the folders look like this:

If I want to find a song to listen to I just search for it. I guess I'm not very fancy

djdaffy1227 said:

Nothing fancy, looks like this:

Inside the folders look like this:

If I want to find a song to listen to I just search for it. I guess I'm not very fancy

You have the photobucket dial of death images. You need to change all your over Photobucket images over to imgur as Photobucket thought they would start charging $400 a year to display your images on 3rd party platforms like forum boards,

Adorecream said:

djdaffy1227 said:

Nothing fancy, looks like this:

Inside the folders look like this:

If I want to find a song to listen to I just search for it. I guess I'm not very fancy

You have the photobucket dial of death images. You need to change all your over Photobucket images over to imgur as Photobucket thought they would start charging $400 a year to display your images on 3rd party platforms like forum boards,

Very strange, last night, when I posted this, it showed up for me. Photobucket sucks

Organize?

It's really just a mess, but because Prince is my favourite artist I can rather easily remember where to look for specific tracks.

A new-ish problem has been posed by all the "remastered" outtake tracks as it's hard to sometimes tell if the new leaks are actually an improvement over what we've had before. I used to have just one "outtake" folder where I kept what I thought were the best versions available, but the new leaks would require so much A/B'ing that I've just given up on it and let things get messy.