I suppose we're all music collectors here so I thought it'd be nice to share some thoughts and ways of organizing a collection. So, how is yours organized? By genre (movie soundtracks, the ones from video games etc.), simply by title, perhaps by composer's name? Do you manage your collection by yourselves or use some kind of program to deal with that? And bitrate - does it matter for you at all or can you live with it as long as the track sounds good enough for your ears?

As for me, I tend to keep things rather simple: two big folders, one for movie soundtracks and one for video games music, then separate folder for each entry. If it's a series, then a general folder (for example "The Godfather") and another few inside for each part ("The Godfather, Part I", "The Godfather, Part II" and so on, same with the games). All sorted alphabetically, by title. As for bitrate, I always prefer a 320 MP3 since it takes less space than FLAC, but as long as the track is good to listen to, I'm okay if it's lower than that. Unless it's really low, that is, by which I mean less than, say, 128 or 192.

What about you, fellow Shriners?

If a thread like that already exists, I'm sorry, I couldn't find anything quite like that.

My music is organized alphabetically, since that's the Foobar option that works best for me. Wish I could customize is totally to my liking, though...


As for bitrate, I always prefer a 320 MP3 since it takes less space than FLAC, but as long as the track is good to listen to, I'm okay if it's lower than that.

If you want to save even more space, in the future I suggest that, when converting to MP3, you convert to VBR-0 instead of 320k. Exact same quality, except it takes up less space.

Since i listen exclusively to Videogame Music, for me it's 1 Folder containing all the Albums each in its own Folder.

Collect and store Music in Flac, convert it to VBR0 for listening Purposes.

Media Player of Choice is good old Winamp, Let the Media Library scan and identify all the songs, then everything in one Playlist on Shuffe.

At the moment i am at around 39.000 Tracks, which is about 1620 hours of Music, or 2 months and a week roughly. Thanks again to everyone.

Convert to VBR-0 instead of 320k. Exact same quality, except it takes up less space.

Absolutely, abandon 320kbps... but it is NOT "exactly" the same quality. It's pretty much the same - in a handful of cases it's a little better, in a handful of cases it's a little worse, but basically you won't notice the difference... but you WILL invariably notice the disc space you save, making it the preferred choice overall. Different techniques of compression (hitting a target BITRATE with 320kbps, hitting a target level of quality deviation from the original with -V0) are at work here and they each have their own pros and cons.

As for my music collection... It's very, VERY disorganised at the moment. I have CDs (about 1,000), cassettes (500), LPs (250-ish), shellac (200-ish), and open reel tapes (about 20) vying for physical space as well as about 10TB of digital music in a variety of formats. My plan of organisation for the digital music is pretty pedestrian - stick everything in folders named for the artist (or composer, for film, game, and classical albums) and then each album in a folder within that structure.

Foobar2000 is my music player of choice and it I will eventually use its music library when I have sorted everything out. (A project that could, frankly, take YEARS at the current rate...)

I have everything in one folder, organized in a rather crappy+somewhat inconsistent way:

[Movie-Soundtrack]/[TV-Series]/[Game-Rip]/[Anime]~Respective products' titles - Self-explanatory. In the case of movies which spawned sequels, each sequel gets its own folder.

[Drama] - For releases such as this (http://vgmdb.net/album/3111).

[OST] - Every official video game-related music album release, doesn't matter if it is the actual soundtrack or an arrangement from the "company's" artists.

[Collection] - A few folders for my favourite game franchises, including official albums, fan-arrangements and in the case of Final Fantasy Ⅶ, Resident Evil and Metal Gear also official game(s) guides, comics, hentai doujinshi, artbooks, personal photos of other kind of merchandise I've purchased throughout the years.


As far as bitrate goes, I'm really not picky: I collect and rip stuff in lossless (APE, TAK, FLAC), MP3 - have quite a few personal rips encoded at 320 kbps and I'm too lazy to grab the CD again for a VBR change, difference in quality is hardly noticeable for me and the music's filesize never was a serious problem.
In regards to bitrate and illegal+free of charge downloads: I couldn't care less about the quality "you" throw at me. With that I mean you aren't likely to see me bitch at you because of your share's quality, you're taking a risk by uploading copyrighted material and who ends up with the chance to sample an album? A John Doe like me; in the case I'm not satisfied with someone's share, I simply keep my mouth shut out of respect and go about tracking a copy of the CD for myself. I can take 96/128/192 and I'd give a heartfelt "Thank you" in each case… I'm just glad I get stuff for free.
I swear, sometimes I feel nowadays' average downloaders forget which kind of risks one may "face" by sharing music.

I use iTunes. I sort all of my music alphabetically by album. But I also have every bit of information filled out as well, if I ever want to sort by something other than album. Artist, title, composer, track number, disc number, BPM, you name it.

As far as quality goes, I try to have the highest possible. I won't sync it to any of my iOS devices just so I can save space, but I still garb hq stuff when I can. I guess I'm ok with the bitrate of any song, as long as it doesn't sound like shit. I have bad hearing, so I can't tell the difference anyway. Sometimes I think it's all in someone's head, the difference between let's say...a 24-bit/192kHz FLAC copy of one song vs a 16-bit/44.1kHz mp3 copy of the same song.

iTunes, alphabetically by album, same as DAK. Except I usually do sync most of my music to my 32GB iPod touch 5G. But I badly need a 64GB one. Time to start saving...

Again, quality-wise, same as DAK. If someone uploads something I want, I don't care if it's low-spectrum MP3. Heck, the sessions to my all-time favourite score are only 128k and I'm happy with that. Obviously if a lossless version turns up at some point I'll grab it. But until then, I'm content, and my ears really don't notice that much difference.

I have everything on a 1TB external hard drive; music, TV shows, films... and as such I sort the music into a sub-folder of the main show/film and if there's enough music from the show/film I will always try to put it into yet another sub-folder for series and then another folder for the particular episode/film in series. For example, I sort my Doctor Who music as such: Doctor Who/Music/New Series/Series/Individual episode folders - Doctor Who/Music/Classic Series/Individual episode folders and for films, such as Star Wars: Star Wars/Music/Individual film folders. I then sort the music into episode/film order. I use VLC as my media player and always download the highest quality copy of whatever music I'm after, usually Flac.

I just wanted to drop by and thank all of you for your contribution here, I'm glad this thread didn't turn out to be some kind of misfire (spoken too soon?).

My collection is not organized whatsoever, spread across three computers and a decent number of unripped CDs, and is ultimately a nightmare to try to locate something.

My collection is on two external drives, one contains all of my soundtracks & scores (by Composer) and the other contains my multi-genre music (by Artist) .
I use Collectorz Music Collector (http://www.collectorz.com/music/) as my database of choice.

my collection is distributed among 34 dvds, and the few actual cds i have.... i dont know where they are.

All my collection is on itunes so I can easily sort it by Album, Artist etc. I'm also considering trying to sort by studio (Marvel, DC, Warner Bros, Disney etc). I have several CDs. Not too many. About 30. I don't buy CDs that often due to being a poor student, if I have the option I'd rather buy food and put money to one side to buy a new game than buy a CD. I usually only buy CDs of scores I really love or guaranteed to love. So Doctor Who, Disney musicals and Hans Zimmer Superhero scores are the ones I "must" buy.

I am the same i buy my cds for stuff i really love. The most exspensive (single cd i bought ) where my once upon a time ones. But use itunes for my sorting aswell as folder (ie disney, disney parks ect....)

When I'm at home I work on Apple's latest black trashcan, if I'm not then I'm on one of those MacBook Pro thingies so for me it's almost iTunes by default. Though, in my opinion, its updates have, for some time now, been consistently regressive in terms of user interface, it's still the most complete software for whoever works on a Mac platform.

On iTunes I sort all of my music, regardless of genre, alphabetically by album artist compressed from lossless to AAC (nowadays MP3 no longer has any real reason to exist). I rarely store full albums on my iTunes. With regards to pieces of which I've only been able to download lower constant-bitrate versions, I actually don't. I hate this kind of OCD and I really wish I could work around it to have the ATLA and LOK soundtracks on my iTunes but I can't. I get the feeling that most won't agree but I just stream them from YouTube or Soundcloud if I want to hear them.

My archives, on the other hand, consist of the full albums catalogued first by artist and then by year. I have a separate archive for classical music (including contemporary) that follows the often thematic grouping adopted by existing numbering systems for composers - it gets tricky because I have at least three different recordings per work though five on average and in rare (extreme) cases even nine. Both archives are APE lossless. Most of my classical music exists on vinyl along with several other records I occasionally hunt down (Brel, Piaf, Trenet) though I rarely waste my time trying to get modern compositions on vinyl. The turntable is sacred!

I only keep Flac. All of my music is tagged including artwork. I keep it in a folder called "Lossless Collection" and inside that folder is folders with the names of each album that I have (and they hold the music), arranged alphabetically. My music players of choice are MediaMonkey and Audacity (Audacity for music I haven't been bothered to tag yet). In MediaMonkey I sort everything alphabetically by Album. I also keep my entire collection on my phone. (Galaxy Note 4 -- 128GB w/ 128GB MCSD = 256GB). I add metadata with mp3tag.

My collection: 88.5GB, 261 hours 50 minutes 40 seconds, 6044 songs. But I also have much, MUCH more I haven't tagged and sorted yet, so they remain unaccounted for at this time. I also keep 2 backups of my collection on 2 separate external hard drives, so that means I have 4 copies at all times.