What's YOUR theory?

[johnridley]

...on music sorting?

I have a few things I'm not decided on when it comes to filing music. Maybe some of you have tried and succeeded or failed and can share.

Classical: Do you list the composer as the artist, or the performer? IOW, under W.A. Mozart, or Detroit Symphony Orchestra? I'm leaning towards the performer, because that leads to some consistency; treating them as basically "covers" of the pieces. I wouldn't file "Hurt" by Johnny Cash under Nine Inch Nails, for instance.

Genres: If you organize by directory structure, do you have genre folders, like Classical, Rock, Comedy, etc? Or do you put Bill Cosby in the same folder as Quiet Riot and Tchaikovsky? At the very least I'd want to put audiobooks in a folder to separate that, and if I do that, it'd be easier to tell Songbird to organize things this way in general. But when you get to modern music, it's difficult sometimes to assign a genre to a group, especially ones that have been around a long time and have morphed their style.

I'm sure I'll find other things to ask too.

Comments

[dark-fx.livejournal.com]

I sort all my music by md5sum. I'm gonna go listen to some 58812d46632672695fc9bd7f75e7755f.

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

First, I only sort by CD, so that's different. For classical, I sort by composer except where a CD is 'artist doing a bunch of different composers', but I think there are only two of those.

A bit by genre, which annoys icycfeetofdeath. Rock(ish), Classical, World, Soundtracks, and other. She just goes by artist and/or performer.

[bwittig.livejournal.com]

I sort my music by genre because I am usually in the mood for a type of music rather than one specific song.

However, like many categorization tasks, some things fall under multiple categories, so I would like to have symbolic links so that NIN's cover of Beethoven's 9th Symphony gets filed in the NIN artist directory as well as under Classical. (Or is this what tagging is for?)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I sort mine by color.

K.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

It's probably as good a system as any. But I don't know how to tell what color my MP3 files are.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

It's encoded in the header.

B

[forestweather.livejournal.com]

By genre --"angry" music, general folk, Jewish, Spanish, jazz, Celtic, Native American, Australian Aboriginal, Classical--orchestral, chamber, cello, violin, viola; Christmas. Within genre--by performer, or sometimes composer if classical. It's really inconsistent, but I know where everything is.

Oh, I suggest using composer as artist & performer as performer. I hate that designation of "artist," btw, but have to deal with it at work too.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I don't think performer is a standard MP3 tag, so my player and possibly the software wouldn't be able to select by it. The standard tags are title, artist, album, track number, genre, year, comment.

I wish there was a separate performer tag, that would solve this problem.

It's tempting to organize by genre, but there are so many groups that cross genres, I wouldn't know where to file them. Of course, that's part of the point of me going to software, so that I can find stuff regardless of where it's filed. Once it's in the software, it doesn't really matter that much what it's filed by on the hard drive, the software will deal with it.

I'm guessing it's going to take me most of a year to get through the MP3 files and make sure all the tags are correct. I have one particular collection, rips of old 78RPM albums, which are entirely untagged, and many are studio recordings of blues singers from the 1920s and such; it may be impossible to properly tag those.