How is your music organized?

[ChildofGallifrey]

I'm really meticulous about mine. The song, artist, and album need to be correct, and it needs to have proper album art. I cringe when I look at some friends ipods that have no artist, album, and the song title is little more than a random jumble of letters. Unless I'm in the mood for a specific song or band, I usually just throw it on shuffle and flip though until something catches me. I never make playlists.

 

[LJJ]

First it's divided into four major categories: General, Jazz, Classical and Film. From there it's simply artist-album.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Alpha by Artist. Considering the list of music I have takes up most of a 500gb HDD, I find it amazing I remember lyrics to even 60% of those songs. Esp. when something I haven't heard in 5+ years gets queued on random.

 

[Cerrax]

I have playlists that I use for different games. My most played playlists right now are:

Split/Second - Lots of epic movie scores and heavy metal
Marvel vs Capcom 3 - Kind of dancy stuff and some hip-hop and rap
Smash Bros. - Some heavy metal and orchestral, as well as Nintendo music and lots of dance music
Batman: Arkham Asylum - This is just every Batman soundtrack I own mashed into one playlist
Sports Champions - A mix of sports arena anthem-ish tunes, epic orchestra, and some hip-hop
Fallout - Just about every popular artist from 1920 to 1950.

 

[Rad Party God]

I just let iTunes do all the job, I'm ok with iTunes organizing my music by "Artists" in alphabetic order. If I want a particular bunch of songs, mostly when I'm playing something in multiplayer, then I do a playlist of wich songs I want to hear while gaming and then play them in random order. Nothing beats playing Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory or Quake Live while hearing Led Zeppelin.

 

[Loonyyy]

I'm very anal about making sure I have artist and Album sorting for files, and then combine them into playlists, usually by theme, and shift through tone through the list. So my gaming stuff might start with some lighter rock or similar, and then tend towards heavier rock, hardcore and metal.

 

[Naeo]

I've got mine all organizes by artist. Which is good for me because there are only a dozen or so artists out of about 150 that I have less than two albums by. And only a few that I've only got a few songs by. So it saves me the most visual space and organization, and I think in terms of artist -> album anyways, for the most part. Also, sorting by 156 artists > sorting by 352 albums > sorting by 3775 songs. Makes it easier for me.

Captcha: Ghayvillo archniss. What?

 

[DirgeNovak]

My MP3 player auto-sorts it by artist, album, genre, etc. So just one big old folder.

 

[PatSilverFox]

Year.
And top 100 for that year.

 

[Zaverexus]

I always select music from the "artists" menu, and listen to whatever band I feel like.

My MP3's "genre" categorization is terrible, combined with the fact that I listen to strange music, it's pretty much useless.

 

[OmniscientOstrich]

WMP automatically lists everything in alphabetical order which for me is the easiest way to find something. As for CD's I've only recently come back home for summer break from Uni so they are currently sitting in random order on my windowsill until I sort it.

 

[SckizoBoy]

My CD's are organised as follows:

1. Format: audio-books vs albums with bonus discs vs vanilla albums
2. Genre: (baroque/classical/romantic) vs (Christian/jazz/metal/pop/rock)
3. Artist/composer
4. Release date/title (whichever seems appropriate)

While on my iPod, I just make a series of playlists of music I like at any given time (split by genre).

 

[xochiquetzal]

by the emotion it evokes

 

[epialesofaergia]

I'm obsessed with the organization/ID tags of my music.

What makes it difficult to begin with is I have three separate partitions containing music, mostly because I'm on a loaner computer since my last motherboard took a shit. I installed my old maxed-out 500GB HD with four partitions: 100GB for music, 150GB for video, 50GB for something I don't remember (OS?) but it ended up being for video, and 165GB for incoming/unsorted. Anything improperly named/tagged (e.g. missing album art or ugly filenames) gets stuck in unsorted until I get around to renaming and tagging properly. After that, it gets moved to one of three audio folders (whichever has the most free room). Each audio folder is organized into Mixes and Playlists, Spoken Word and Stand-Up, Sorted Albums, and Stray Tracks. Stray Tracks is a huge mess of single files, and is usually the place I dump the songs I like off of albums I don't really like. Mixes and Playlists are organized in folders according to the year that I made them, since I usually end up making around 10 mixes a year (and have regularly since 2003); they're all .m3u files. Sorted albums are organized by first significant letter in the artist's name (i.e. excluding The or A) with separate folders for weird characters (like µ-Ziq), numbers, and a compilation folder. In each letter folder are separate folders for each artist, and inside each artist folder are album folders, organized by year. Each track is very strictly named: Track - Title (with exceptions for long song titles, since I had a file error while renaming a track from Frank Zappa's Lumpy Gravy album around 2002 that I don't wish to repeat). I don't like to keep album art in the album folder, since I save the album art to the ID tag and it just takes up space to keep it around.

Physically, I keep the records I own in a large, five-shelf bookcase I bought at Ikea. Each shelf holds around 75 records, and I have the top shelf and half of the second shelf filled.

 

[similar.squirrel]

In alphabetical folders. I don't really buy/keep CDs these days. Much prefer to purchase mp3s online.

 

[TheDutchin]

At the moment the only playlists I have are titled "Brent Morgan + PotF + Mumford and sons", "Mellow Songs", "Epic + Angry Songs", "Apocalyptica" and "Xbox". The titles should be rather self explanatory, (Yeah thats right, theres no "happy" or "upbeat" playlists.) but I have an "Xbox" playlist because my stupid Xbox only plays 100 songs in one playlist, so I took my top 100 out of the dismal 136 that I have.

 

[EndOfDaWorld]

In playlists, by composer, and if there is a large about of random pieces, in their own playlist.

 

[SulfuricDonut]

I use iTunes and have 3 smart playlists set up which automatically add in songs, as well as 2 custom playlists.

-My "Very Top Rated" which consists of about 50 songs that I rate 5 stars. These have to be songs that I can listen to as many times as I want and never get bored.
-My "Top Rated" playlists which contains about 300 songs rated 4 or 5 stars. These are songs I like but not necessarily to the degree of 5 stars, or else 5 star songs that I have demoted to 4 star because I finally lost a bit of interest in them. It also has all 5 star songs so that I don't spend half an hour skipping through songs before I find one I like.
-My "Least Top Rated" playlist contains all of the above plus 3 star songs, which are those I can respect as 'good songs' even if I rarely feel like listening to them. There is about 900 songs in this category.

-I also have a "Newgrounds Audio" playlist which contains all of my free techno and other awesome stuff.
-Finally my "Epic Music" playlist is what I listen to while doing homework. It contains loads of sweeping orchestra music such as Globus and Immediate, as well as many awesome movie/video game soundtracks like Lord of the Rings and Halo.

All of these playlists are sorted from highest to lowest play count, so my favorite songs of all time always end up on top. It's a system that has always worked perfectly for me, as I share a computer and therefore have a ton of music I hate on my iTunes.

 

[fangclaw]

i have one playlist and it goes thus:

toonami deep space bass
toonami blackhole megamix
(about 40+ songs i like in no particular order)

if i find a song i like, then i just stick it at the bottom of the list.

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

My music folder is organised into artist and albums. On my itunes I have playlists for all music from the 60s, 70s, 80, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s (not including compilations that cross over more than one decade) as well as a top ten most played for each decade and a top 50 overall played.

I have also added the correct album art for all my albums and have added lyrics for almost all the songs in my library. Maybe I have too much free time :/