So anyone have any thoughts on the best way to organize a massive MP3 collection? I'm actually just wondering if there is any really user-friendly way of organizing without use of a program, but if one has ran across a good (non-itunes) program, that might be cool too.

At the moment I just have say a folder named "country" and one named "indie" and "metal" and so on, and inside of there I will have subgenres if needed and then say "U2" or "Queensryche" which will have all of that bands music. Large collections have a folder per album, a folder for bootleg/live stuff, a folder for b-sides, etc.

But it can mean going many, many folders deep to get to some stuff. I just think there has to be a better way.

i'm a little confused. Are you using iTunes?

Yeah, iTunes does the organization for you. All music by an artist goes into one folder with that music broken out by album. Its nice and clean. And automatic, that's the best part.

I love media monkey.
oragnize by artist, album, etc as per usual.
Also by genre, mood, and a billion other things.

Here's what you do.

Rip every CD to Artist/Album/1 - Trackname.mp3. Have your ripping program automatically create a playlist for each album that deposits in the root directory of the music folder. Most should be able to do this.

Then get all your files tagged correctly with ID3. This isn't too much effort as long as you do it as you go along with ripping and use CDDB. Musicbrainz could also be your friend.

Now that all your files are in folders AND ID3 tagged, you can use whatever music program you like. I mostly use Winamp 5, which has an ID3-using library bit. OTOH, my DAP, an iaudio U2, is folder-tree only. But I never have to think about this, because I'm set both ways.

I don't let iTunes touch my folders. I started to organize my files by genre, but that's just such a pain, what with the overlapping and the subgenres. Instead, I have three top level folders: albums, singles, and compilations. Inside albums, each album has its own folder: %artist - %album. Inside singles, each artist has its own folder, with whatever miscellaneous singles I have inside.

I use musicbrainz to cleanup the tags on the files I download, and I use iTunes to organize and play. I try to keep my list of genres down to about ten, and put more specific genre and subgenre information in the grouping tag, which I can then use to build smart playlists.

Yeah, that's good advice. I stupidly burned some music with itunes and now I've got that to deal with. Otherwise my music organization is identical.

wow, it sounds complicated...but I'm lazy.
I just rip stuff in iTunes using the import CD button. If I need to change any genres or anything, I go to "get info" in the file and change it. I recently just figured out you can do this for multiple files at once. duh.
But I usually listen by artist instead of genre anyway. Also, i don't use playlists, so that may be a big difference there.

shit, i just saw your "non-itunes" request upon re-reading. i shouldn't even bother answering stuff after 4:30.

*glaze*

itunes gave me serious problems when I tried it before. i might give it another chance, perhaps on a different computer so it has less files to mess up. i'll check out the other stuff mentioned first. thanks.

speaking as someone with a way-too-large music collection: i find it helps to dump the genre folders. it's always hard to really assign some of the bands a single genre [or subgenre] anyways, and i generally know which bands play what kind of stuff even if i don't listen to them that much. i go by artist/album most of the time, and composer/performance for things like classical music. there are a few special folders as well - compilations, soundtracks, and once-offs [for singles by bands i'm otherwise uninterested in.] for albums like split albums that could be filed several places, i use shortcuts. this all means that the vast majority of my mp3s are only 2 directories deep.

when you're ripping, do as selfnoise says - you might as well make sure that incoming stuff has good id3 tags and a file name like "track# - songtitle.mp3" [or even "track# - artist - album - songtitle.mp3."] if your collection has a small number of mp3s with missing or possibly erroneous id3 tags, use musicbrainz. however, if you have a lot of stuff you'd have to go through, or you listen to obscure things which musicbrainz might not have, just make sure all of the file names are useful and use a player like winamp that'll load things according to directory or asciibetical order. itunes will balk at any unlabeled mp3s, and you'll find them in a messy clump at the bottom of your library. itunes also doesn't order things by filename, so if your current mp3 filing strategy is based on those, you'd be best served by sticking to players like winamp or xmms.

oh, weretable, were you adding folders/moving files within the iTunes folder? Cuz that'll make them unfindable in the app.

might i ask how big everyone's collection is here? I think mine's pretty big, but you guy's might be on another level.

ubersturm - what do you mean itunes doesn't order by filename? If a file is called "song.mp3" and you organize the column by song, it'll alphabetize them. Unless you're not talking about using the app.

might i ask how big everyone's collection is here?

39,000 songs.

I use exactly the same method that selfnoise does. I don't have a huge library and I can figure out which bands are what genre (and I name mix CDs/directories descriptively and with a ! preceding the name so it ends up at the top of the root folder) so it has been working out pretty well.

I have everything in one folder, with subfolders for artist, and then each album. Singles/rare tracks/b-side-type-thingies go in the artist folder. I rip everything Artist - #. Song. Artist names are a must if you ever aggregate stuff or make playlists or copy tracks to .mp3 CD or a portable mp3 player.

Genre folders are a waste of time. If you're ripping, you can put it in the ID3 tag, but I like my music without genres. They're usually inaccurate or too narrow. I know what it sounds like, don't I?

Woops, my bad on the iTunes, I didn't see it on first or second read either. Paranthesis make things invisible in my universe or something.

(fenriq is an awful person and I hate him)

might i ask how big everyone's collection is here?

14081 songs, but that's all downloads, and I guarantee I cover more territory than any one else here. Plus I got roughly 2000 CD's, 600 lp's, 300 or so cassettes, a lotta 45's and dubs & mixes uncounted.

I don't have a rigorous system, I guess. If I rip in iTunes, I let iTunes do it its way -- m4a and all. But stuff I download I don't let iTunes touch. I have iTunes under My Music, but parallel to any artist folders I set up. I finally settled on accepting that "The" is part of an artist name (it's just easier in this context, though the librarian in me wishes Windows would ignore it for alphabetization), but some do and some don't have it. Under the artist, I have a folder for each album with the year of release, e.g. Get Behind Me Satan (2005). Under that, I've been trying to fully tag files, so albums under this scheme get tagged before I import.

I use MusicBrainz to tag; recently switched to the new Picard app, though it's an ugly beta, because their regular one is TRM dependent and TRMs are going away. I might switch to something else. Anyway, this tags every file thus:
White Stripes-Get Behind Me Satan-01-My Doorbell.mp3. This is partly because I share and I hate getting partially-tagged files myself.

Now comes the tricky part, the singles. Probably a third of them come from MeCha YSIs, a third Soulseek, the rest music blogs and band sites. My habitual process is to sample the track first, which is problematic, because iTunes then puts it into the library. If I want to keep track of stats, and I do, moving and renaming the file means re-acquiring it in iTunes. Thus it goes:
* sample
* discard (uncommon, I'm a packrat)
* tag/rename file
* move file to folder !Orphan Tracks (the bang alphabetizes it at the top) OR an artist folder
* in iTunes, find track; right-click; open file dialog and relocate track
Since the iTunes GUI isn't well-adapted to Windows, this seems to be more tedious than it should be. I really wish that iTunes could just be told that an album has moved to a folder and then find the files. It's only recently that it began remembering what folder I'd been working in last. Apple ain't perfect.

I tried having separate folders for "Covers", "Earworms" (like all those Houses of the Rising Sun), and some other themes like "Doctor Who music". Too much stuff that belongs in one of those is just in Orphan Tracks.

I have a friend who thinks I'm completely daft for fighting iTunes this way. What can I say? I guess I am, and it certainly would be easier to just let iTunes organize and tag everything itself.

I've been looking as MusicMonkey, but reports of certain bugs and problems with the way it handles tags and track ratings have deterred me. I really wish there were a music manager that was better integrated into the file system, so that I could tag and rename within it, or move a track, and it would continue to keep track of the song.

I also suggest dumping the genre folders. Too many things fit into too many categories. It's a lot easier to devine a system whereby each track can be put into multiple genres. You can do this with FLAC and the newest revision of id3.

My personal method is to rip lossless to flac, and then keep a mirror of that in lossy format, for the ipod.