Tips for Organizing Your Music Files
Tips for Organizing Your Music Files
You may be like many other computer savvy music fans with hundreds of music files jammed onto one hard drive. These files can come from a number of places – perhaps you’ve downloaded songs, got some from a friend or ripped them from a CD. What if these music files are in a variety of places on your computer? Ever have trouble finding a specific song you wanted to listen to? You need to organize your music files and create your own music library. You’ll not only be able to find your song of choice easily, but you’ll be able to streamline your music collection.
Here some tips for organizing your music files. Depending on your collection it could take you a couple of hours or half the day to sort through the madness.
Use a large hard drive. What’s the point in having all that great music on your hard drive if it’s not large enough to handle the load? Make sure you have a large enough hard drive depending on your music collection. If you have a massive collection, consider a separate hard drive just for your music. A large hard drive will come in handy if you anticipate downloading more music in the future.
Create separate folders. If you have a lot of music by a certain artist or group, you can create a special folder just for those files. Create subfolders to group a variety of songs within one genre such as country, classical, R&B and alternative music. For a few miscellaneous songs, create a random folder. As you download or receive a new song, place the file in the appropriate folder. Don’t let the files pile up on your desktop or in inappropriate folders. You’ll have to go through the tedious process of weeding out misplaced files.
Weed out old files. There may be a few music files you no longer listen to or didn’t like in the first place. Why take up unnecessary space on your hard drive? Delete these files. This frees up room for future downloads.
Sort music by file type. After you’ve placed all the music in their proper files, sort them by file type. You’ll want all of your music to be in one format so convert accordingly.
Tag your files. This step will take the longest in your organization process. MP3 files have a tag that shows the title, album, artist and year of the song. You can download a tagging utility and go through each file.
Purchase music management software. There is a variety of software you can use to manage your music files. Some include music players, CD burning features and tag renaming.
Make your playlists. After you’ve gotten your music files in the appropriate folders, create several good playlists. Your lists can be based on each genre or you can mix it up. It’s up to you. The more playlists you create the easier it will be for you to find the music you love. You can create a playlist in programs such as Windows, iTunes, Creative Labs MP3 player and Creative MediaSource.
Gee, Brandon. This is really one of the more useless and, if one was to follow your instructions, tedious, articles I have read in a long time.
“you’ll want all of your music to be in one format so convert accordingly”? Please!!
“download a tagging utility and go through each file”?!?!
“Purchase music management software”?!?
Why don’t you just tell people to go to Apple.com and download the FREE iTunes software and manage your music files that way. All MP3 files, in addition to many other file formats, are compatible with iTunes. Yes, make playlists. iTunes will automatically consolidate all of your music files in an “iTunes Music” folder, listed by artist, alphabetically, and in each folder is a list of the albums, and in each album, a list of songs. It doesn’t get any easier. Your article is for the poor slobs who, on their PCs, abhor anything Apple.
I love seeing Apple software on PCs. (and aren’t there other free music management applications for PCs? Music Choice comes to mind.)
Hi Jeff,
They are just suggestions, I know once I orginized all my music and files on my PC, it’s a lot easier to find what I’m looking for.. This allows me more time to do the things I really enjoy, which searching for music isn’t one of them.
Brandon,
I think the point Jeff was making was that if you download iTunes for free, it organizes all you’re music for you. It is way easier and faster than what you’re suggesting. If someone just used iTunes (and you don’t need to buy an ipod) it would organize their music so THEY could be spending their time doing things they really enjoy. If you don’t enjoy searching for music, you must have really hated the hours spent manually organizing your files. When iTunes organizes your music, it puts it all into one folder labeled “iTunes Music.” Then within that folder are subfolders with the names of the group/artist. Within the group/artist folder are more subfolders based on the specific album. Within each album folder are the actual music files. That couldn’t be more organized and it only takes a few clicks in iTunes.
Hi Brandon,
I think Jeff’s nuts. Although some of his points, and George’s, are valid, I think he’s a little bit of a zealot (relax man!… )… I appreciate your article. It was NOT useless. I have tons of MP3′s, many which are not tagged correctly and a huge MISC folder with random songs… I just wanted to read what other people are doing to organize their MP3′s. It was great to get your perspective on the topic.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Art
Even Itunes is sucks at organizing cause it leaves tracees of little files everywhere. THis article is for the ones who ENJOY/WANT to do it themselves.
um, even if you enjoy/want to do all these steps, its still a pretty unhelpful article.
doesn’t mentions any utilities, apps or software. Gives no idea of tricks on how to do any of the things that it says one must do.
i mean, really.
ok. so i have like 2000 songs on my ipod and itunes categorized my songs into useless and over specific categories (over 200 of them) so i would have to spend probably 10 hours manually assigning music categories and changing them. who has time for that crap!?? it’s been like 2 years and im still @ square 1 any suggestions????????
Hi Brandon,
I think Jeff's nuts. Although some of his points, and George's, are valid, I think he's a little bit of a zealot (relax man!… )… I appreciate your article. It was NOT useless. I have tons of MP3's, many which are not tagged correctly and a huge MISC folder with random songs… I just wanted to read what other people are doing to organize their MP3's. It was great to get your perspective on the topic.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Art
To reply to everyone comments.
My articles have improved since this one, I've been adding more links to resources and cutting out any work from the reader.
When I put this one up, I assumed users could google the software we spoke of.
I know itunes will do pretty much everything I spoke of, but I had also found freeware a year ago that did as well.
Anyways.. diggin up an old article, but just wanted to say thank you for the constructive criticism
Okay, that was an inspiration to me. I am thinking of my own website