Filing Classical Music

Depends on you really. How do you think about your collection? You should be able to search by any piece of metadata stored with the track, but folder structure is quite personal. It's a bit like organising the CD's themselves. How would you arrange them on a set of shelves?

first folder: Period (baroque, Classical, modern, Contemporary)  then folder: Composer's name/first name - folder: Symphonies or Sonatas etc...

Ex: with Romantic

folder:

Dear Greenarch,

What are you using as a "store" for your music?

If it's iTunes then the issue is simple enough, I let the music run in Artist Alphabetic. This makes no sense if you are going to scroll through, but iTunes has an effective search facility, which is how I almost always hunt things out, and there is music from about 550 CDs in my computer - nearly 7000 individual tracks.

When I had LPs and CDs on shelves, I used composer alphabetic, with a consistent division as such: Orchestral, Concerti, Opera, Choral, Chamber, Soloist Instrumental, Misc.

But going to the trouble of ordering music in a computer like that would be an immense work of re-tagging.

I find the iTunes search engine allows me to revisit the dustiest corners in seconds! For example if I insert 565, then three different performances of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV come up, which I can further refine by inserting one of the performers' name - just for example, or I might put in Eroica, for Beethoven's Third Symphone and again a number of recordings show, which can equally be narrowed to one performance by inserting performer names.

Sometimes it is nice to search by inserting a composer name, and then you can get a really nice selection of different music, which comes in Artist Alphabetic order, and can lead to some fascinating juxtapositions.

Hope that helps a little bit!

ATB from George