Hello!
This question is mainly directed to people who use navidrome or similar software. How do you organize your music library in regards to files? Do you keep them all in one folder? Or folders with author names? Or folders where music belongs based on genre? I can’t get the right way to organize my music library, hence this question.
Thanks in advance for all the answers!
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Music folder > Artist name > Album Name > Numbered tracks.
Since all the files contain metadata, any music player I use can automatically sort my collection however I like.
Honestly, keeping the actual folder structure simple is more than enough. You aren’t playing tracks from the file manager.
I tag metadata on everything with MusicBrainz Picard, and then store it in a
/{Album Artist}/{Album}/{Track}hierarchy.Beets is my favorite tagger since I prefer CLI. Match making policy can be adjusted and discogs plugin can be added I recommend the folder structure /artist/album/track
Seconded. Precisely how I organize things. I use MusicBrainz Picard to clean up metadata before adding music to my collection.
I tried both Lidarr and Beets before, but their automation tended to pick matches with a “eh, close enough” attitude, so I just decided I’d do it properly myself.
Well, I can say Picard has been pretty well flawless for me. And in those few instances where it misidentifies something, you can always do a manual search and match.
Nine times out of ten my process is to load the tracks into Picard, cluster them, look them up, do a quick scan to confirm it looks good, and then save the updated metadata. For those few times it messes up, I just reload the files, cluster them, then do a manual search to find the appropriate release. It really is very good at its job.
This is a copy of an older comment of mine:
Everything is tagged and organized using Picard. I use a modified version of https://community.metabrainz.org/t/repository-for-neat-file-name-string-patterns-and-tagger-script-snippets/2786/156.
I’ve been meaning to write a guide for how it works. My current WIP script can be found here: https://gitea.baerentsen.space/FrederikBaerentsen/DataHoarder_scripts/src/branch/master/Picard.txt
My files is setup like:
~/Music/A/Artist/(YYYY) Title [Type - Format] [MusicBrainz ID]/[side] Title [length][Bandwidth].exteg:
/Music/Q/Queen/(1973) Queen [12 Inch Vinyl - FLAC] [1783da6a-9315-3602-a488-1738eb733a0f] /A1. Keep Yourself Alive [3m48s][320+ 48000KHz VBR 2ch].flac /B1. Liar [6m26s][320+ 48000KHz VBR 2ch].flac /Music/B/Bruce Springsteen/(2019) Western Stars [CD - FLAC] [a50ffce7-0532-41a7-b85b-7d02f8c7af00] /01. Hitch Hikin' [3m38s][320+ 96000KHz VBR 2ch].flac /02. The Wayfarer [4m18s][320+ 96000KHz VBR 2ch].flacif the album isn’t a studio album, theres an extra folder. eg:
/Music/B/Bruce Springsteen/Compilation/(1996) The Lost Masters I_ Alone in Colts Neck (The Complete Nebraska Session) [CD - FLAC] [8531e427-495a-443a-8fc3-0dd2ef459c93] /01. Nebraska [4m27s][320+ 44100KHz VBR 2ch].flac /Music/P/Phil Collins/Singles/(1981) In the Air Tonight [7 Inch Vinyl - FLAC] [e805dd53-9257-4c78-8bff-a95f0cdd767e] /A. In the Air Tonight [5m29s][320+ 96000KHz VBR 2ch].flacI have special categories for:
Compilations Cover Tribute Singles Live EPIf an album contains multiple disks, there’s an extra folder. Eg:
/Music/M/Michael Jackson/Compilation/(2004) The Ultimate Collection [CD - FLAC] [2d37b204-ed26-3795-9710-1514f0fd931a] /Disc 1 /01. I Want You Back [3m00s][320+ 44100KHz VBR 2ch].flacFor soundtracks it’s:
~/Music/Soundtrack/T/(YYYY) Title [Type - Format] [MusicBrainz ID]/[side] Title [length][Bandwidth].exteg.
/Music/Soundtrack/L/(2001) The Lord of the Rings_ The Fellowship of the Ring - The Complete Recordings [Digital Media - FLAC] [cad73ae7-5966-4de1-bad4-4a603891fd27] /Disk 1/01. Prologue_ One Ring To Rule Them All [7m15s][320+ 48000KHz VBR 2ch].flacBeen using this for 3+ years and it’s solid.
I’ll try and make a better write up at some point and share my script.
This setup also works flawlessly with Plex + Prism. I run Picard in a docker container and access it over web, so it can run on my headless Debian server.
Wait, you guys are organizing your music files?
I use musicbrainz Picard to sort it for me and then host it with jellyfin.
/artist initial/artist name/album name(It’s a fool’s errand trying to create a folder scheme that accounts for every classification edge case. Accept the mess!)Tagging is outsourced to the BT tracker community. Playback via cmus or Emby.
I recently started organizing my music to use with Jellyfin and/or Navidrome. Since Jellyfin requires a particular folder structure, I used this, and I’ve also used MusicBrainz Picard to tag all my music so that it works better with Navidrome. I ended up just using Jellyfin as it suited my needs perfectly, and using it with a desktop client on my laptop (Feishin) and mobile client on my phone (Finamp).
The way Jellyfin requires it to be organised is the way I would’ve done it myself anyway:
Artist 1
|-- Album 1
||----Disc 1
||----Disc 2
|–Album 2
Artist 2
|-- Album 1
etc …In my experience, if you try to organize based on genres, you need to have a very defined sense of what genres everything you have is. Either you stick with very broad genres (Rock, Jazz etc.) or you get tons of subgenres that you quickly lose control over if you don’t know exactly what is what. Since the clients I use have the possibility to sort by genre, I am planning on giving it an overhaul at some point, but then I will use very broad genres.
Lidarr does the management and either stores soundtracks in
/data/media/soundtrackor music under/data/media/music
Sorted by folder is per artist.The lidarr way.
/music/Artist_Name/Album_Name/
I have my music organized by artist and (mostly) album subfolders. My music is also tagged and that’s what really matters most to me in terms of Navidrome.
Did you know about !navidrome@discuss.tchncs.de , btw?
I used to have folders, but that meant a typo or a variation in the artist name made redundant folders and also I had to periodically run some tool that moved and renamed files and folders according to the id3 tags.
Now I prefer to have a big messy folder with 15k unorganized files
Anyway I’m listening via ampache compatibile players, so I won’t even know what’s the file name, for all I know it could be 3c31cd9b-3c9d-42b0-b873-631f1552a24f.mp3
Auto tag built into strawberry music player
I have a lot of music most of which is video game soundtracks and rips. I have tagged most of it using VGMdb years ago but most tools have poor or no support for it now. MusicBrainz is missing far too many albums and usually prioritizes translated track titles. It also lacks the huge amount of images for albums that VGMdb has
I used to manage the file hierarchy myself, but I haven’t done that for years at this point. Same goes for tagging files and such. I just download everything to a root folder called “music” and let lidarr handle everything from there.
Lidarrs default file structure is something like {Artist}/{Album}{Year}/{Track} . This can of course be changed. Then I let lidarr just tag everything for me automatically, embedding album art and such.
It’s a great setup overall, but I don’t know where Lidarr indexes it’s music library from, because some artists and albums might be missing sometimes. That’s really the only pain point.
