Organising music on your HD.

[Ali Tait]

Having become the proud owner of a Drobo,I now need to use it properly! I can convert my cd's to FLAC using EAC no problem.What I would like to know is what people use to organise their music on the HD? i.e. by genre and name of band etc. Are there popular programs in use or do you just list them in folders? Any help appreciated.

Regards.

[webby]

Mac or PC?

iTunes on both of course.

[Ali Tait]

Pc.

[twelvebears]

Having become the proud owner of a Drobo,I now need to use it properly! I can convert my cd's to FLAC using EAC no problem.What I would like to know is what people use to organise their music on the HD? i.e. by genre and name of band etc. Are there popular programs in use or do you just list them in folders? Any help appreciated.

Regards.

Hi Ali, like many others here, I've spent much time and effort of getting the right/best solution for this and have both a Drobo myself, and have used both Mac and PC and selection of music management tools.

More than happy to have a 'real' conversation as it will probabaly save us both time, so will PM you my contact number.

[Ali Tait]

Great,will phone tonight if that's ok.

[NRG]

Ali, EAC will do it for you.....I'll just check my settings and add them here....

Go into EAC options (F9)

Click Filname tab

You are presented with set of variables that you can use to arrange the structure of your music automatically.

IE I use this format:

%B\%D\%C\%N - %T

So each time I perform a rip the music get placed on my HDD in this order:

FreeDB Music Type; Artist; CD Title; Track Number; Track Title

Simples!

[Ali Tait]

Cheers for that.I've not had the laptop connected to the net for ages,just bought some anti-virus to put on it.Will have a go tonight.

[Ali Tait]

Just wanted to say a big thanks to Steve for taking the time to chat and explain a few things.Most enlightening.Cheers Steve!

[twelvebears]

Just wanted to say a big thanks to Steve for taking the time to chat and explain a few things.Most enlightening.Cheers Steve!

A pleasure. Sorry I had to rush a bit, the lad needed feeding post-footie and it was getting a bit late, plus I didn't want to burn it!

[Beechwoods]

I'm with Neal on this. And Compilations under an 'artist' folder called 'Compilations'. It's extremely satisfying to have everything organised in that way - anything more complicated and you'll find yourself worrying about whether the genre's are right etc!

[The Grand Wazoo]

Hi Guys,
Sorry to butt in as I'm an almost stranger to computer music (I've got EAC, but haven't a clue how to use it!), but there's been a parallel discussion about filing methods of physical formats in the spinning today thread.

I've asked Marcus to whip that out of there & stick it in a new thread for us. Though he hasn't done yet, he's promised to do it sometime today) I planned to let the discussion run it's course, so that someone might compile some sort of digest of ideas for the Library area.

This discussion is almost exactly the same, but with an importantly different flavour. Also of interest might be systems that don't work to some as systems that do? Any hints & tips for smoother running etc would be good too.

Maybe there should be two library articles (physical & virtual filing systems) - so if anyone wants to volunteer for the job..............or one of the jobs.............

Cheers

[Tony Moore]

I tend to use AutoFlac now. (with EAC)

It takes a bit of setting up to get your tags and paths/filenames as you want but it saves a lot of time once it's configured:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Other-AUDIO-Tools/AutoFLAC.shtml

Drop in your CD, start Autoflac, wait for EAC to start and get the track titles and then click OK on Autoflac and it'll rip and convert to FLAC for you. :smoking:

I was then using AlbumArtAggregator to go and grab the artwork jpeg from Amazon but for some reason that has stopped working, I assume Amazon have changed something that has broken it. Now I grab the artwork manually. :doh:

Cheers,
Tony

[Ali Tait]

Sounds interesting Tony,I'll have a look.Thanks.

[Stratmangler]

Hi Guys,
Sorry to butt in as I'm an almost stranger to computer music (I've got EAC, but haven't a clue how to use it!), but there's been a parallel discussion about filing methods of physical formats in the spinning today thread.

I've asked Marcus to whip that out of there & stick it in a new thread for us. Though he hasn't done yet, he's promised to do it sometime today) I planned to let the discussion run it's course, so that someone might compile some sort of digest of ideas for the Library area.

This discussion is almost exactly the same, but with an importantly different flavour. Also of interest might be systems that don't work to some as systems that do? Any hints & tips for smoother running etc would be good too.

Maybe there should be two library articles (physical & virtual filing systems) - so if anyone wants to volunteer for the job..............or one of the jobs.............

Cheers

Best thing to do is get to grips with EAC, rip all the CD's, then throw all the discs into a box (or boxes) and lose them somewhere.

Chris:lolsign:

[DaveK]

I tend to use AutoFlac now. (with EAC)

It takes a bit of setting up to get your tags and paths/filenames as you want but it saves a lot of time once it's configured:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Other-AUDIO-Tools/AutoFLAC.shtml

Drop in your CD, start Autoflac, wait for EAC to start and get the track titles and then click OK on Autoflac and it'll rip and convert to FLAC for you. :smoking:

Cheers,
Tony
HI Tony,
I have followed your advice above and it works great, IMO. However it has given me another problem which I wonder if you could advise on?
I prefer to play my FLAC files on foobar but, whilst foorbar correctly identifies the CD and track information (RH column in Playlist window), the Artist etc. information (in the LH column) consists only of ? - ? Any ideas as to how I can correct this please?
Thanks in anticipation.
Cheers,

[Tony Moore]

Hi Dave,

It sounds like your tagging strings are not correct in AutoFlac or EAC or they don't match up. I've just loaded fooboo to try out my music and I can see the Album/Artist ok for my music.

As an example my settings are:

AutoFlac:

Name:%A\%C\%A - %T - %C - %N
Image: %A\%C\%A - %T - %C - %N

EAC:

Filename: %A\%C\%A - %T - %C - %N

Compression Options:

Additional commandline options: --best -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" %s

There are loads of other settings in EAC but as far as I can remember I just set them to whatever the guide document said.

Cheers,
Tony

[DaveK]

Hi Tony,
Thanks very much for that - I appreciate you taking the time to take a look. I'll revisit my settings and see where I differ from you. I'm not really interested in track no. so I may leave that bit of code out.
BTW can I ask what is the significance/effect of the --best in the Additional Commandline Options ?
Thanks again,
Dave.

[Stratmangler]

Thanks for the input regarding AutoFLAC Tony - I've been messing about with my settings in EAC as a result, and now have the program automatically setting up filepaths now. Before this I used to set up the filepaths manually. So I'm a happy bunny :)

DaveK - I'd leave the track number bit in - some albums don't work musically if the running order is not correct.

Chris:)

[Ali Tait]

Chris,what do you mean by filepath and what was it you were doing manually that is now automatic?

[Ali Tait]

And another question! I was ripping some classical cd's to flac last night.The disc comes up on eac with 0-9 track numbers,but when played it's just one track for the whole album.Can I convert it back to 9 separate tracks again?

[Stratmangler]

Chris,what do you mean by filepath and what was it you were doing manually that is now automatic?

Weelllll.....

My file system consists of an artist folder, with a subfolder for each album. All of the file structuring has been done manually to date.

By adjustng a few settings in EAC I have managed to get EAC to 1- go to the net and look for a CD in the freebd database 2- create the artist folder, and album subfolders if necessary.

So not exactly mind blowing stuff, but it does mean there is one less job to do.

Chris:)

[Stratmangler]

And another question! I was ripping some classical cd's to flac last night.The disc comes up on eac with 0-9 track numbers,but when played it's just one track for the whole album.Can I convert it back to 9 separate tracks again?

The dreaded track 0 raises its' head. Track 0 is a virtual track. Without seeing what you see on screen I'm stumped.

Chris:)

[Ali Tait]

Weelllll.....

My file system consists of an artist folder, with a subfolder for each album. All of the file structuring has been done manually to date.

By adjustng a few settings in EAC I have managed to get EAC to 1- go to the net and look for a CD in the freebd database 2- create the artist folder, and album subfolders if necessary.

So not exactly mind blowing stuff, but it does mean there is one less job to do.

Chris:)

Well I guess I just got lucky,but my EAC does that already! :confused:

[Ali Tait]

The dreaded track 0 raises its' head. Track 0 is a virtual track. Without seeing what you see on screen I'm stumped.

Chris:)

What I mean is this-take for instance Morrisey-You are the quarry.This is a 2 cd album with tracks 1 to 6 on one cd,and 7 to 12 on the other.I've just put the first cd in to rip,and it's come up on EAC as track 1,with a 24 minute length,and a filesize of 136mb.Given when I play the cd,I can skip to any track,why does it come up with the whole cd on one track when I try to rip it? If I copy it like this,I won't be able to select a particular track from it,just listen to the whole thing from start to end,not so?

[Stratmangler]

What I mean is this-take for instance Morrisey-You are the quarry.This is a 2 cd album with tracks 1 to 6 on one cd,and 7 to 12 on the other.I've just put the first cd in to rip,and it's come up on EAC as track 1,with a 24 minute length,and a filesize of 136mb.Given when I play the cd,I can skip to any track,why does it come up with the whole cd on one track when I try to rip it? If I copy it like this,I won't be able to select a particular track from it,just listen to the whole thing from start to end,not so?

Sounds as though something is wrong somewhere in the program settings. Call me and we'll talk it through.

Chris:)

[Carson]

Personally, I use TagScanner (Click Me (http://www.xdlab.ru/en/)). Its a nice piece of software to editing tags, filenames, album art, etc and it will do thousands of songs in one go.
It will even create and move files into a folder structure you specify.

[Peter Galbavy]

I use dbPoweramp and use the following naming pattern when ripping CDs:

[IFCOMP][IFVALUE]album artist,Artists\[album artist],Compilations[]\[album]\[IFMULTI]Disc [disc] - [][track] - [artist] - [title][][IF!COMP]Artists\[IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[artist][]\[album]\[IFMULTI]Disc [disc] - [][track] - [title][]

This basically puts VA/Compilations in a seperate directory with album names and an Artists directory with artist name and album name. I only put the artist name in the file name (along with disc/track number and track title) for compilations.

I am still not settled on what to do with "classical" music. At the moment I tend to rip them like any other single-artist CD but then manually move the album directory into another top level directory called Classical and sort by composer then orchestra/choir etc. Suggestions here welcomed!

Oh, I rip in FLAC only and then set the ARTIST tag to whatever I want *displayed* on my Squeezeboxen and the ALBUM ARTIST tag to the correct name for sorting in a display list - primary diff is ARTIST has "Firstname Lastname" for non band artists but ALBUM ARTIST is "Lastname, Firstname". I eventually intend to work through Compilation manually and institute a "Lastname, Firstname" scheme for track artists - that way I can search cleaner for all tracks by non-band artists.