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Music library folder structureWhen building a music library you could ask yourself the following questions:
In most cases you will use a music library application to navigate through your library of encoded audio files or to generate play lists. The key to search and retrieve the audio file you want is proper tagging and the availability of search and retrieval functions within your music library application. Therefore it is not necessary to know the physical location and the filename of the audio files. If you want, you can have all your audio files with meaningless file names, located in one folder without any sub folder divisions. However, we think it is recommended to structure and organize your audio files. We suggest using the following folder structure:
With this structure you always have a three-level deep file structure (quick manual file access). Do not embed too much information in the filename. The small displays of media players may not be able to display long names properly. Put all information like artist and album in the appropriate tags instead. You can always use these tags to rename the files if you want to. Adding the track number (with leading zero) is recommended for correct playback by a media player which uses the filename as sort order. How do I organize and name my files & How to find all audio files belonging to a particular CD of a multi-CD box?By organizing your files by album artist or performer (instead of composer) you always have the files belonging to a particular CD together in one directory. The Album Artist and Album Title don’t have to be the same as the corresponding tag values in the audio files. Choose the names mentioned on the CD-cover. In this way the Artist/Album/ directory reflect always the original extracted CD. Try to keep the naming consistent. Use always the same particular format e.g. always Last name,First name (Liszt, Franz) or always Last name, first letter first name (Liszt, F.) or always Band name, prefix (Beatles, the) or always prefix, band name (the Beatles).For double-CDs or CD-boxes, append the CD number to the Album Title. In this way you can always find the files that belong to the corresponding CD in the CD-box How do I organize and name files belonging to a soundtrack or compilation CD?To address this question, you may consider adding the artist to the file name and TITLE tag and use a general value for the ARTIST tag, e.g. the album title name. If you want you can still search for the specific artist if your application supports full text search within tags. How do I organize and name files belonging to a soundtrack or compilation CD?If you only want a single track or several tracks of an album you may
consider using a general subdirectory named ‘Various artists’
containing the files. The ALBUM tag of these files still contain the name
of the original album.
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