How to Organize Your Digital Music Collection
November 12th, 2007 by Scott Johnson
Organizing your digital music collection can be a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to be. I’m going to walk you through the steps I’ve taken to organize my digital music collection, and I’ll show you how easy it is to do.
There are many steps involved in organizing your digital music collection:**
1. Creating a logical folder structure**
2. Tagging your songs**
3. Uploading your music to an MP3 player**
The first step is creating a logical folder structure for your music collection. You need to decide where you’re going to keep all of your files. Many people choose their Documents library as the main folder for their music collection. I prefer to keep my files on my external hard drive because it has plenty of space for my ever growing collection of music, movies, and photos. Here’s what my folder structure looks like:
If your music collection is a mess right now, don’t feel like you’re alone. A lot of people have large music collections that are just kind of dumped into one folder. It can be frustrating to search through songs and try to find something that you want to listen to.
A lot of people also have songs that are not labeled correctly. Song titles might be missing, artists might be wrong, and genres might be incorrect.
A good song organization system can make your music collection easier to search. It will also make it more likely for you to actually enjoy your music collection, because when you can quickly find the songs that you want, it will encourage you to listen to them.
This post will show how I organize my digital music collection and give some advice on how to do the same for your own music!
A few years ago I was lucky enough to get my hands on a very large collection of music from a friend and as I began downloading it onto my computer I realized that my personal collection was in serious need of organization. This prompted me to look into the best ways to organize my collection and I came upon several different methods. Below is the method that works the best for me, which combines several different ideas that I found while researching the subject.
Whether you’re a collector of rare vinyl, a DJ with a thousand promo CDs, or an obsessive downloader, at some point you’re going to have to figure out how to organize your digital music collection.
Organizing your music collection is the first step in creating a personal jukebox and discovering new music. It’s also essential if you want to carry your music on the go.
For this post, we’re assuming that you have all your media stored on your computer (as opposed to burning it onto discs). The good news is that many audio formats are supported by most MP3 players, including Apple’s iPod and Microsoft’s Zune. The bad news is that there are literally dozens of programs which claim to be able to help you organize your library.
To make things easy on ourselves, we’ve focused only on programs that are available for both Mac and PC without paying extra. We’ve also focused only on programs that can play back audio files for those of you who don’t already use iTunes or Windows Media Player.
So, you have a digital music collection which is currently living in a folder on your hard drive. You would like to organize it in such a way that the music files play nicely with iTunes, and you would also like to be able to listen to your music collection on your iPod or iPhone. You’d also like for all of this to happen without unexpected consequences or weird side effects.
You have come to the right place! This guide will take you through everything you need to know about organizing your music files in preparation for importing them into iTunes. We’ll start with basic concepts and then quickly get into the specifics of what makes sense for different types of collections.
What Your Files Need
Before we go any further, let’s make sure that your music files are properly identified by iTunes so that they are easy for iTunes to find, download album artwork for, and play back the way you want them to.
A properly formatted filename looks something like this:
Artist – Album – Title.mp3
In this example, “Artist” is the name of the artist, “Album” is the name of an album by that artist, and “Title” is the name of a song from that album. If you were looking at this file in Windows Explorer or
One of the main reasons I started organizing my music collection was because I was having trouble finding songs. If you are like me, you probably add a new song to your collection every now and then, but don’t necessarily delete it from your computer or portable device after you listen to it a few times. Sure, your collection is getting bigger, but you have so many songs that you can’t even find what to listen to.
Here are some things I did to organize my music collection:
1) Add Artist and Album information
First of all, make sure that all songs in your music collection have at least the Artist and Album information filled out. You will be amazed how much easier it is to find what to listen to when you have Artists organized by Albums.
2) Rate the Songs
All songs are not created equal. Some of your songs are probably better than others, so why should they all have the same rating? One way to do this is to use iTunes “Stars” rating system as follows:
★☆☆☆☆ (one star): The majority of the music stored on your hard drive. When you add a new song, it is automatically given a rating of one star in iTunes. When adding new albums/songs,
Zune software is a digital media jukebox that puts your favorite music, videos, and pictures at your fingertips. Use Zune software to find great music on Zune Music & Video Marketplace and to sync everything in your digital media library to your Zune and Windows Phone devices.
Zune software is a digital media jukebox that puts your favorite music, videos, and pictures at your fingertips. Use Zune software to find great music on Zune Music & Video Marketplace and to sync everything in your digital media library to your Zune and Windows Phone devices.
Zune software is a digital media jukebox that puts your favorite music, videos, and pictures at your fingertips. Use Zune software to find great music on Zune Music & Video Marketplace and to sync everything in your digital media library to your Zune and Windows Phone devices.
Zune software is a digital media jukebox that puts your favorite music, videos, and pictures at your fingertips. Use Zune software to find great music on Zune Music & Video Marketplace and to sync everything in your digital media library to your Zune and Windows Phone devices.