NAS music file structure

Artist/album as far as structure goes. All the indexing and virtual presentation at the control point is down to tags, where you can really have some fum - or not as you choose.

Artist album is my structure. And I quite strict - to ensure that I can find my stuff even in the file structure. Has proven to already pay out multiple times, if you notices later you would like to change something.

Harry posted:

Artist/album as far as structure goes. All the indexing and virtual presentation at the control point is down to tags, where you can really have some fum - or not as you choose.

In a nutshell!

Folder hierarchy: Music / Artist (First name, Surname) / Album.

Genre is handled by Metadata tags.

Dave

I would actually leave the organisational structure to your NAS's software. This way all of the additional search options e.g. by composere / genre / performer etc should always be correct.

Generally you will probably end up with something like: Artist > Album.

Another option could be to keep CD rips and Hi Res files seperately and let the server software 'merge' the artists vietually. That is how UnitiServe operates for instance.

Composer / Album for classical, Artist / Album for the rest. Since I use tags for all my searching and organising the folder structure is pretty much irrelevant. If you are doing a lot of reorganising, J River Media Centre has very powerful facilities for renaming folders according to tags and vice-versa

I do not use a NAS but I think that a scheme for organizing musical contents should be pretty independent of the storage device used.

I mainly have classical music (and a little bit of jazz, rock and pop music) and intially I was using the scheme suggested by MIKE-B: always by composer for classical music.

Lately, I have moved to a different approach, essentially because of two reasons: 1) Filing by composer requires splitting an album if this contains works by different composers and 2) I like to have, for a given composer, one subfolder for each work and below that, a subfolder for each interpretation of that work. To achieve this in a "file by composer" scheme, I would even have to split an album that contains works by the same composer if this happens to contain different works.

Splitting an album is not a problem per se, but there are reasons why I would prefer to avoid having to do so.

The current approach is therefore as follows: whenever I buy or rip a new album, say, for concreteness, String Quartets by Takács Quartet, I first store the data according to an "artist / album" scheme. For instance:

  Takács Quartet / Janáček & Smetana | String Quartets (2014)

where "a / b" means that "b" is a subfolder of "a" and the name of the "album" subfolder always starts with the name of the composer(s). Then, I add subfolders

  Takács Quartet (2014)

with symlinks to the data to the folders

  Janáček, Leoš (1854-1928) / String Quartet No. 1 "The Kreutzer Sonata"

  Janáček, Leoš (1854-1928) / String Quartet No. 2 "Intimate letters"

  Smetana, Bedřich (1824-1884) / String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor 'From My Life'

Creating symlinks takes just a few seconds and virtually no space. This scheme allows me to preserve the integrity of albums. At the same, it supports browsing different interpretations of a given work according to the natural "by composer" scheme.

After data and symlinks are in place, I usually refine / finalize tagging and backup the new data.

As MIKE-B pointed out, searching and browsing according to multiple criteria is not a problem. Thus, if your data is tagged decently and your client or control application have decent search and browsing engines, you will be able to find all the interpretation of, say Bach's Magnificat conducted by Gardiner where ... played ... etc. no matter how your data is organized.

From this point of view, the way you organize your data does not really matter. But I have found that some discipline in data organization is useful not only for data management but also for implementing suitable tagging schemes. 

So long as you have a decent upnp server, you can keep the folder structure really simple - artist then album.

In the case of the Janacek and Smetana, I just have it under the Takacs Quartet as artist. Using Minimserver I can drill down to the separate composers, so long as the tracks are tagged properly. 

I do 90% of searching by genre. So I keep my vocal jazz separate from the non-vocal Jazz, so if I fancy listening to a jazz singer I can find them more easily. Minim works on a tree structure - if you go into jazz you can then go straight to albums (or tracks) or alternatively go to artist to see just their stuff. 

I strongly advise deciding on your tagging structure from day 1. One thing I did, because I really like ECM's albums and a lot of them are cross genre, was to set a genre called ECM and another called ECM New Series, so that I could find what I want easily.

You'll always find a few albums that are hard to classify - such as albums of Vivaldi cantatas and concertos. I gave it under classical rather than vocal classical, and these you may take longer to find if you forget.

For classical music I always try to put the composer first in the album title. So if I go into chamber music, all my Bach is together when I go into album view. You need to watch out because some albums are tagged Antonio Vivaldi for example, so you need to get rid of the Antonio before storing it on the nas. 

I'm sure this scheme could be more sophisticated but it works for me. The main message is not to worry too much about how they are organised in the nas, but make a real effort to get the metadata right.

Although I use UPnP media tagging I still structure my files like many here so I can easily manually find on the file system if I need to. I use Artist / Album.. I group all my compilations under Various Artists / Album.

So yes get the meta data tagging right - but also keep the file system simple and structured from the start so you can edit / adjust / manually find your files as appropriate - in valuable if you have a multi thousand track collection.

I do the same as S-i-S . . . but I'm a bit inconsistent on artists beginning with 'The'. So I have The Rolling Stones under T and The Smiths under S. At some point I must sort that out, but I haven't been bothered so far.

Solid Air posted:

I do the same as S-i-S . . . but I'm a bit inconsistent on artists beginning with 'The'. So I have The Rolling Stones under T and The Smiths under S. At some point I must sort that out, but I haven't been bothered so far.

 

Thankfully I don't have any Smiths,  can't be doing with the depression  ..........   

Qnap TS 121

Music folder

Then 6 folders, Studio Master Downloads, CD Rips, DSD Downloads, DVD Rips (Music), Blue Ray Rips (Music), MP3.

Then each folder has Rock, Classical, Electronica, etc.

Artist/Album.

Is this a little OTT?

Edward

I think so, yes. All you need is artist/album, and tagging can rake care of the rest. It really doesn't matter how the music was acquired. 

So if i understand right when i get my new nas after the new year "Qnap HS-251+" in poll position, i should create one folder named "Music" then create two folders "Artist" and "Album" and leave every thing else to metadata.

Edward 

ted_p posted:

So if i understand right when i get my new nas after the new year "Qnap HS-251+" in poll position, i should create one folder named "Music" then create two folders "Artist" and "Album" and leave every thing else to metadata.

Edward 

Not quite: create a Music folder, within that a folder for each artist, and then within those folders separate folders for each album by that artist.

However, that's purely for orderliness and ease of use when uploading, etc, or if you want to search/play by 'folder view'.

Provided your music is correctly tagged with artist, album artist, album title, and track title and number, most of which will happen automatically when ripping or will usually be there on downloaded albums, the Naim players/app will find that data and let you find content by artist, album, etc..

For example, within my music folder I have various subfolders containing, say, music I have to review for HFN or stuff I have to listen to for a particular issue of Gramophone, but unless I am looking in 'folder view' on the Naim app, those folders are completely invisible to the player, and it just 'sees' artists/albums/etc.

As above. It's the tags that do all the work as far as indexing and presentation is concerned.

I don't use any search functions on my SBT, preferring to use folder view. My music is arranged as follows:

Bob Dylan - then folders for each year, official releases, compilations etc

Classical - then  folders for label collections (e.g. RCA Living Stereo box set), multi composer collections, artist specific collections (e.g Oistrakh EMI Recordings), Composer (then depending on number of albums this could be further subdivided e.g Mahler has Solti Symphonies, Tennsredt Symphonies and Symphonies other).

Non-classical - artisit folders and compilations

A bit complex and long winded perhaps but it works for me.

BN

Harry posted:

As above. It's the tags that do all the work as far as indexing and presentation is concerned.

This is certainly true. On the other hand, the strength of tagging-based indexing is also its weakness: off-the-shelf schemes are often lacking when it comes to searching and browsing classical music, let apart more specific genres.

Even trivial searches, say, you want to access all interpretations of the second movement of Sibelius' third in your music collection, are likely to yield incomplete results if you have not taken care of enforcing consistency of title tags.

Ensuring tag consistency can require a lot of manual work because the tagging schemes adopted by different providers (even by very careful ones: Hyperion, Prestoclassical, etc.) are often diverse and inconsistent.

And if you happen to be interested in a more specific musical genre, off-the-shelf tagging schemes and search engines can easily turn out to be useless.

In these cases, a careful organization of your data and, as argued in my previous post, the systematic usage of symbolic links, can be a very valuable complement to tagging. But, as pointed out by HH, this does by no means imply that you should neglect proper tagging!

Proper tagging and a suitable (not too deep, among others!) hierarchy of folders, subfolders and symbolic links are complementary approaches for organizing your music collections (and, more generally, your collections of data whatever these might be) and should not be regarded as being mutually exclusive!

I also would advise that, if you plan to have a large music collection, you make yourself comfortable with the command line, if you are not already. 

Managing a large collection of files of the same "kind" (again, no matter whether these represent musical contents, photographs or others) can be very painful if your actions are limited to mouse clicking, dragging and dropping and selecting items from pop-up menues.

But if you are comfortable the basics of searching, filtering and listing from the command line, you will be able to perform standard backup and maintenance tasks in a breeze. From this perspective, I would like to suggest that you take a look at two great tools: 'rsync' and 'lltag'.

Thanks for all the replies, i always rip or download i to my computer hard drive first then i use Dbpoweramp or mp3tag to edit the tags, only when i am sure all the metadata is correct will i copy it to my nas.

One of the fist and best lesson i learned from this website when i first got into streaming was the importance of correct metadata and all the pain it can cause you if you ignore correct tagging.

Edward

It took me a few swipes to get good enough at tagging and find good enough software, but now it is very satisfying to be in full control of exactly how my collection is displayed. 

I generally follow a Artist / Album or Composer / Album format. However I also split my CD Rips from downloads (including keeping downloads per source). I also (this last year) within the CD Rips have a "new in 2015" folder which I find convenient and likely I will follow up with one for 2016...

Eloise posted:

I generally follow a Artist / Album or Composer / Album format. However I also split my CD Rips from downloads (including keeping downloads per source). I also (this last year) within the CD Rips have a "new in 2015" folder which I find convenient and likely I will follow up with one for 2016...

Eloise, I also mainly follow a Artist / Album scheme but I find Composer / Work more natural than Composer / Album, see my previous posts. Best, nbpf