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!
Wait, you guys are organizing your music files?
I use musicbrainz Picard to sort it for me and then host it with jellyfin.
/artist initial/artist name/album name
(It’s a fool’s errand trying to create a folder scheme that accounts for every classification edge case. Accept the mess!)Tagging is outsourced to the BT tracker community. Playback via cmus or Emby.
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.
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 have my music organized by artist and (mostly) album subfolders. My music is also tagged and that’s what really matters most to me in terms of Navidrome.
Did you know about !navidrome@discuss.tchncs.de , btw?
I tag metadata on everything with MusicBrainz Picard, and then store it in a
/{Album Artist}/{Album}/{Track}
hierarchy.