How anal are you about your music collection

[Scruffy The Janitor]

I try to organize my digital music files once a month.I usually have it genre-artist-albums , but with all the different sub genre's I'm thinking of scrapping that method.

My dvds are arranged my genre on a shelf and below them my ps2 games are organized my genre as well

[Chris the Human]

I wish I could get my collection that organised. I seem to have a thousand genres, and I'm constantly changing which artists fit where. To name a few:

Altern Rock

Adult Alternative

Adult Contemporary

Pop

Pop Rock

Punk

Emo

Rock

Hard Rock

Nu Metal

Rap

Hip Hop/R&B

R&B

Comedy

Soundtrack

Acoustic

Gothic Rock

Classic Rock

Oldies

Retro

Disco

Dance

Techno

House

Trance

Ambience

World Music

Chamber Metal

Aussie Rock

Acid Jazz

Jazz

And the list continues. If I could get a list of genuine genres, I'd so use it. My own seems to invent its own genres for certain artists.

[RPS]

Pretty anal.

Everything has to be spelt and labelled correctly. I hate when a band name is not spelt right OR if a song name is wrong OR if the artist name is in the song title. Genres and such doesn't really bother me.

I have three things to listen to music with. I use Winamp if I want to listen to something on random, Media Player for playlists and I Tunes if I want to listen to something in particular or my friends music.

Don't get me started on my vinyl. I organize them meticlously and it changes. Sometimes by album title, sometimes by original release date, but mostly by band name. My CDs aren't that bad, since I gave most of them away.

[Fanku Kaibutsu]

Up until a couple months ago, I had all the music I ripped sorted by artist, then album, but all the music I DLed in a giant unorganized pile. Then I went through and more-or-less properly tagged all of them(a lot don't have album info since I can't be bothered to look it up), then made folders for every artist I had more than 1 song for. I don't bother with genre labeling, though I have made playlists for specific genres(specifically "\m/" for metal and metalish music, "Vaguely Punkish Alterna-grunge Skacore", for pretty much everything else, and 'sleep', for music to help me fall asleep.)

[AJ]

I don't have a lot of music on my computer so it's quite easy to keep it tidy. All the songs are correctly named.

Then in iTunes every song has the correct artist, title, album, artwork and genre. Even if the songs don't belong to an album by the artist I'll find one that it does belong to like Floorfillers vol.14 or whatever. (last.fm is good for that).

Messy music annoys me too, one of the latest things is when I ripped my clubland CD's they're all labelled like:

Artist - Song (feat. other artist).

The other artist featured needs to be before the song >_<

[ADG]

I'm anal in a way but not like some of you where everything has to be perfect. Basically if I have one song from a guy I have to have the whole album, otherwise it looks like crap on iTunes and WMP with full album-full album-full-album-one song-full album. That's really it though.

[Benji]

At the moment I'm making sure I have album art, artist, album, song (plus who else it features), genre and ratings. After those are done I'm moving on to sorting years and the original composers.

[Liam]

Cos I use Last.fm, something AJ mentioned pisses me off a little, and that is when artists are listed with the featured artists on the track. I know it's more "correct", but I prefer for Last.fm to be able to actually list the artist along with the other times I've listened to them, not with a seperate thing just for that song.

[Chris the Human]

I've got to get started on finding album art. Might take a while. My collection's a little eclectic.

[Docpepper]

I just found this great freeware app called Audio Shell it basically gives you the power to right click your mp3 file(while in your music folder) click properties and edit the tags and album art from there. Using that and allmusic.com I'm going through now and making sure I get all the genres sorted out , then I'll rename the files based on tags and then get album art then I'll finally sort them into the right folders

[lari]

My apartment is a mess, but my CDs are always in perfect order. I have a combination of different kinds of CD trays to keep them that way. I change the order a lot though, actually almost always when I buy a new CD, but it still makes sense to me at least.

EDIT: as for digital media - I don't really have any mp3s. If I'm sampling something, I download it to the desktop where I can find it. Once I've done listening to it, or maybe after a day or two, it goes to the trash bin. I don't really bother storing mp3s.

Edited January 11, 2007 by lari

[Scruffy The Janitor]

Cos I use Last.fm, something AJ mentioned pisses me off a little, and that is when artists are listed with the featured artists on the track. I know it's more "correct", but I prefer for Last.fm to be able to actually list the artist along with the other times I've listened to them, not with a seperate thing just for that song.

[sirdavinator]

I simply sort out my songs by their respective bands if I have at least one album by them and a few more songs maybe. Otherwise they go into their respective genre folder, consisting of Death Metal, Metal, Melodic Metal and...Long Songs. Yes I like all my long songs together.

[Gene Kiniski]

I'm much the same way.

I even have a special folder where all my downloaded stuff goes...and then it gets screened and listened to, fixed up if mis-labeled, and then sent off to my main folder, where it finds its' proper home in that particular artist's folder.

Everyone laughs that I go through so much trouble to do all that... but when people come over looking to listen to something... it's easy as fuck to find.

[Jayzon]

I keep my CD's in alphabetical order according to the artist/band, and every artists/band's albums are kept in chronological order.

With my mp3's, I keep them in a neat order in the <artistname>/<albumname>/"artist - xx - songname.mp3" format, with xx being the track number (01, 02, 03 etc). And I always check and clean up the messed up tags. God it infuriates me to see people not keep their files in proper shape!