Hello!
This question is mainly directed to people who use navidrome or similar software. How do you organize your music library in regards to files? Do you keep them all in one folder? Or folders with author names? Or folders where music belongs based on genre? I can’t get the right way to organize my music library, hence this question.
Thanks in advance for all the answers!
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reworking the whole library, I had 1.5 TB of mp3s, but they were super messy organized. Sure, I could have gone through organizing it but still mp3s suck.
So I’m starting over with a FLAC only music library. I use Navidrome on a local server and with a Subsonic client on my phone I can choose to download certain songs or playlists to use when I’m away.
CD quality FLACs are the minimum for me. They are nineties technology and still most digital music isn’t even close to that. I find it hilarious how Spotify is still serving mp3s.
Spotify serves mp3s because it uses less bandwidth and most people can’t tell the difference on their 30€ Bluetooth headset.
Spotify serves mp3s because it uses less bandwidth and most people can’t tell the difference on their 30€ Bluetooth headset.
I think this highlights a bigger issue when it comes to this discussion.
The issue isn’t the mp3 format – for the most part, the format of any lossy encoder can sound good with the right settings. The problem is that, unlike flac, all encoded lossy files are essentially untrustworthy audio formats. So when people say mp3 sounds bad, it’s only a half truth in the same way that it’s a half truth to say that people cannot tell a difference. You are putting trust in the person who encoded the audio to make the right choice and the encoder is putting trust in the idea that the person consuming the media can’t tell the difference.
When it comes to being cheap out on bandwidth since most users can’t hear it, that’s a huge cop-out being made for a company that can do better. While Apple is pretty notorious for making terrible decisions for arbitrary reasons, even they respect the user enough to allow you to opt into higher audio format quality. It’s decisions like these that cement Apple as the kings of the creative computer user.
Where do you get FLACs?
You rip your cds or buy direct from the artists (he says without suggesting you can easily find everything for free online)
soulseek
I tag metadata on everything with MusicBrainz Picard, and then store it in a
/{Album Artist}/{Album}/{Track}hierarchy.Seconded. Precisely how I organize things. I use MusicBrainz Picard to clean up metadata before adding music to my collection.
I tried both Lidarr and Beets before, but their automation tended to pick matches with a “eh, close enough” attitude, so I just decided I’d do it properly myself.
Wait, you guys are organizing your music files?
All my music rips go into the Lidarr indexer, and it handles the rest. Playback handled by Plex
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The lidarr way.
I don’t know if this will help, but I’ve been using Plex to manage my music and other audio for more than a decade. It pulls in metadata from online sources and allows me to search or apply filters. That is a lot more versatile than anything I could do directly with the files.
If you aren’t interested in running your own server, look at some of the more sophisticated player apps. Many of them can provide similar metadata features. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about how the files are physically organized.
All my music is properly tagged. Navidrome can combine artists and albums across the folder.
Then it’s just down to Deemix to grab it properly tagged. Most of my music is artist/album/song, but plenty is loose or in just artist folders.
beets is a godsend for managing the file layout. If you need to make changes down the line it makes it super easy to migrate
the amount of plugins are also amazing
convert non-lossy files automatically to aac? fetch lyrics? push updates to mpd/sonos/jellyfin?
Music folder > Artist name > Album Name > Numbered tracks.
Since all the files contain metadata, any music player I use can automatically sort my collection however I like.
Honestly, keeping the actual folder structure simple is more than enough. You aren’t playing tracks from the file manager.
I recently started organizing my music to use with Jellyfin and/or Navidrome. Since Jellyfin requires a particular folder structure, I used this, and I’ve also used MusicBrainz Picard to tag all my music so that it works better with Navidrome. I ended up just using Jellyfin as it suited my needs perfectly, and using it with a desktop client on my laptop (Feishin) and mobile client on my phone (Finamp).
The way Jellyfin requires it to be organised is the way I would’ve done it myself anyway:
Artist 1
|-- Album 1
||----Disc 1
||----Disc 2
|–Album 2
Artist 2
|-- Album 1
etc …In my experience, if you try to organize based on genres, you need to have a very defined sense of what genres everything you have is. Either you stick with very broad genres (Rock, Jazz etc.) or you get tons of subgenres that you quickly lose control over if you don’t know exactly what is what. Since the clients I use have the possibility to sort by genre, I am planning on giving it an overhaul at some point, but then I will use very broad genres.
I usually manage it by Artist/Album/ReleaseId/# - Trackname. I use Beets, because it’s the only one that seems to have a concept of release.
My music library is such fire it’s uncontainable.
I mainly use youtube and Spotify nowadays but when I was playing local music I had a music folder with artist subfolder and album subfolders inside that.
Lidarr does the management and either stores soundtracks in
/data/media/soundtrackor music under/data/media/music
Sorted by folder is per artist.
