organize my music collection

My hard disk died, so I couldn’t organize my collection on the computer, but I was able to update my physical collection, buying Shalom Hanoch’s “White Wedding,” Aviv Geffen’s “Nowhere,” and Erez Lev Ari’s “The Joy of Small Details”

I just bought לא יכול לישון עכשיו

It’s not that great, but I needed some Shalom Hanoch right away.

I just bought Fiona Apple’s “Tidal”.

I own some of these cds, don’t have others, and only have still others in mp3 form. I want to keep everything in cd form. I have already obtained the album art for each and will add the lyrics, when appropriate.

Have, Need to Add (or Organize):
1. Come Away With Me (make a playlist)
2. Rubber Soul (organize)
3. Yael Naim
4. המכתב
ירח מלא האוסף .5

In Process of Adding:
1. Tidal
2. אביב גפן III
3. זה רק אור הירח
ממנטו מורי .4
עכשיו מעונן .5
6. Mozart The String Quartets (Hagen Quartet) (some)
7. פחות אבל כואב

Don’t Have and Want:
1. אפר ואבק
חתונה לבנה .2
יומן מסע .3
לא יכול לישון עכשיו .4
לילות לבנים .5
שומקום .6

Might Want:
1. Donde Estan Los Ladrones
2. LIVE
3. Mozart The String Quartets (Hagen Quartet)
4. Plastic Ono Band
5. הכבש השישה עשר
חלולים .6
יחסים פתוחים .7
יחפה .8
מחוץ לתחרות .9
סוף עונת התפוזים .10
עם הזמן .11
פצעים ונשיקות .12
רק שירי אהבה .13
14. Abbey Road
15. Sgt. Pepper
16. עיננים שלי

I of course have singles (which I didn’t write down). One that I would like to have, I think, is Amir Lev’s “Funerals and Births” (לוויות ולידות)

I use Windows Media Player 11 and adding folders to the library helped a lot. Renaming files like REM – Losing my religion took most of the time, and though it didn’t help really, it has made my Music folder easier to browse and more appealing visually.

I did it a couple of weeks ago and it is totally worth it. I did it mostly for reference (to avoid buying what I already have), convenience of finding stuff on shelves and playing files through Squeezebox.

It took me about 4 hours to catalog 1315 CDs, 21 tapes, 19 collectible vinyls and 30G of FLAC and MP3 files (some purchased, some ripped from my CDs for convenience). The hardest part in my case was that some titles were present as both CDs and music files, and I wanted to avoid duplicates.

I used OrangeCD Suite and wireless Flic barcode scanner – excellent software and hardware, highly recommend both, well played together. Barcode scanner was somewhat on expensive side but I found a good deal on eBay. The alternatives to scanning barcodes are either inserting each CD in computer for recognition, or looking up titles in online database – both ways are pretty slow, so I figured the barcode scanner is worth $50.

Now, important part is to keep your database up-to-date with all new puchases. Otherwise you’ll end up in same position as before – not knowing what you have and what you don’t.

Because of all the moves I’ve made and breaking up with my fiance, I’ve lost a lot of my music. I’ve just decided to start buying cds and things like that again. Hopefully I can keep them organized from the get go again.

i’m excluding all digital media when i say “organize my music collection”. i own far too many CDs and vinyl and have yet to figure out a system of cataloguing them.

I’ve got mine down to a science.

Everything is CD or Vinyl-ripped to FLAC, with the highest compression.

I used Grip on Linux or EAC/dbpoweramp on Windows to rip the files.
I used Ex Falso on Linux to tag and rename the files.

Directories were sorted as such:
Artist/YYYY-MM-DD – Album Name/Tracknumber. Title

This way, artists are always alphabetical, albums are sorted by release date, and songs (even with duplicate names) cause no problems and are sorted by tracknumber.

By using FLAC and vorbiscomment for the tagging, I was able to solve problems such as this:

When Iggy Pop sang with At The Drive-In, I could put them both in separate tags.

artist=At The Drive-In
artist=Iggy Pop

or use performer in place of artist.

Either way, the track would then show up under both Iggy Pop and under At The Drive-In, and I get none of those ugly ‘duo’ artists in my music player.

I use Quod Libet as my music player now on Ubuntu, and I sort my collection (going on 1400 albums now) by date.

I finally settled in my heart that I was going to go ahead and use iTunes to organize all my music. I also grabbed Tag&Rename (an awesome program!) and first organized all my mp3s. I then ripped in all my CDs (did my wife’s too, for her computer) and took care of the album art as well. I then boxed up all the CDs for archive. I have a collection of 13,000 songs now!

I bought an external hard drive to back all this stuff up to (as well as other important computer files )

When I was a kid I had this fantasy of being able to put my hands on any song I wanted to here within seconds. I can almost do that now!