Hi

I was wondering what methods are popular for organising and storing music collections on Hard Drives?

i.e Do you use just one directory with all your tunes in that location or do you store them in folders according to Genre, Artist etc.?
Any other methods?

Cheers

Paul

Hi Paul

Welcome to the forum, if you get chance drop a post on the Introduce yourself area and tell us all what you do etc.

Re organising music, i organise my hdd to mirror my cd crates. I start with the 40's to the 00's with a folder for each decade etc then by genre, a folder for eachagain. All my now cd's are together in order in a folder and my second cd crate is a-z by artist

best wishes

Dave

Mine is am absolute mess they are all over the place. I didnt organise them properly when I first got the hard drive,

I put them in folders according to my CD'd i.e. singles, albums ... Ithen have new stuff for 2009/2010 then 60's 70's etc etc ...unfortunately I am reluctant to change it as I know where everything is.

I have about 15 folders in all, 60's 70's 80's 90's 00's, chart most popular, chart (general), chart albums, indie, Irish Music, Dance Music, Rap Hip Hop, Ska, Rock, Christmas, Wedding favourites, Disco. I also have a seperate folder for all my karaoke trax, this is probably overkill, but it's great for browsing, for example if I'm playing 80's I can just browse through the 80's folder for ideas, rather than having to search by track or search through an enormous folder of songs, works for me anyway.

I use a similar system. Mine's pretty well sorted but not really comprehensive, believe me I have seen some DJ's drives that are organised to the point of obsession.
I have ID3 tagged all the tracks in each particular folder so that the genre tag has the same name as the folder. As I use VDJ I find this makes using the genre search much neater and easier for me.
Around half of my collection was ripped from CD and it has been a long drawn out and mainly extremely boring procedure to rip and tag them correctly but ultimately it's been very worthwhile.

I have main folders:

50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, Kids Party, Mastermix Classic Cuts, MM Jock In A Box, Mastermix Grandmaster, Mastermix Professional, Slowies, Xmas/New Year

Then each main folder is split into subfolders i.e. 80s contains
80s electronic, 80s hiphop, 80s megamaixes, 80s mod/punk/new wave, 80s party, 80s pop, 80s rock, 80s ska/reggae, MM 80s theme nights

My 2000s folder contains more subfolders than the others simply as I have many more tracks from this decade and tried to make it slightly easier to find them. I have also split them into 5 year segments so I have 00-05 and 06-10

Using 06-10 as an example I have
06-10 Dance (split into further subfolders of house, trance etc) 06-10 pop, 06-10 R&B, 06-10 rock, 06-10 mastermix monthly, 06-10 Now thats what i call music, 06-10 bassline, 06-10 dubstep, 06-10 mashups/bootlegs, 06-10 pop, 06-10 rock
and then finally a "10 chart" folder which I try to maintain regularly. Current chart releases go in here then as they leave the charts they then get archived into their respective folder.