The music classifying nightmare

I can see few issues with this that wouldn't work with me:

1) How do you deal with songs that have multiple genres?

It is a standard part of the TCON (content type / genre tag) to separate multiple values through either coma, slash.

For example this allows you to select songs that are tagged as both 'Ambient' and 'Rock'.

2) how do you deal with album that has songs of varying styles?

For example: "Prodigy - Music for Jilted Generation" has a dance track like "Voodoo People", and a chillout track "3 Kilos"

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Prodigy/_/Voodoo+People/+tags

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Prodigy/_/The+Narcotic+Suite:+3...

3) Compilations

Let's say we have a compilation made by a group called 'Air'. This compilation is called 'Deck Safari'. Do you use Album Artist instead of artist if it is a compilations (aka: if TCMP flag exists, use TPE2 instead of TPE1?)

Checkout the album:

http://www.discogs.com/AIR-Deck-Safari-Part-1/release/215068

4) I don't understand how you handle singles.

Let's say you have a single ""Wamdue Project ‎– King Of My Castle"" released in 1999 by Urban (563 891-2). Your formatting doesn't store album at all?

http://www.discogs.com/Wamdue-Project-King-Of-My-Castle/rele...

And then, how do you combine it with the fact that a year later was a different mix released by Avex Asia Ltd. (AVTCDS-235) with different set of songs?

http://www.discogs.com/Wamdue-Project-King-Of-My-Castle/rele...

To me it looks like your singles folder is intended for random songs, not to handle actual CDS/CDM style singles.

Blue Oyster Cult are one of my favorite bands. I have many of their "greatest hits" albums because they release one every few years, and frequently there will be a few previously unreleased tracks that are worth having.

This means that in my iTunes library I currently have seven copies of Don't Fear the Reaper. Three of these are copies of the studio version. Incidentally, I hate this song, and though I think you're right and I should have two copies of the song, I can't help but react with mild revulsion whenever I realize I'm going to be hosting yet another copy of it.

Again, I think you're right, and it's not particularly meaningful to worry about the extra ~100 MB of space they're taking up (ALAC format), but it's an annoyance.

1) How do you deal with songs that have multiple genres?

In "Singles" I sometimes copy individual MP3's into both Rock and Metal. It comes up less often than you'd think.

2) how do you deal with album that has songs of varying styles?

I just pick the one genre that makes the most sense. As long as I know, or can quickly find which genre an artist is in, that's what matters. How long does it really take to check if I put an AC/DC album in Rock, or Metal?

3) Compilations

I either place it in /Albums/Soundtracks (if it's a soundtrack), or make a "Various Artists" directory in /Albums/Electronic or whichever genre makes sense. Almost all of my compilations are dance or electronic music.

4) I don't understand how you handle singles.... To me it looks like your singles folder is intended for random songs, not to handle actual CDS/CDM style singles

I actually removed most of the EP's and CDS rips from my MP3 collection because I found I never listened to them. I would take the individual MP3's that I really liked and placed those into my /Singles/ directories. Otherwise I could treat them just like I do my Albums.

That's nice, thanks for sharing. I used exfalso, for which mutagen was written, to build a similar directory structure for my music. Mine was "Audio/[ALBUM_ARTIST]else[ARTIST]/[ALBUM]/[TRACK 00]. - [TITLE].mp3" The one thing it did that your script doesn't is it will enter TPE2 if present and backtrack to TPE1. And similar considerations can be entered for adding a disc prefix for multi disc albums. (Since that anachronism is still relevant.) The only problem was I needed to go back through and delete a bunch of empty directories.

There seems to be confusion between the filesystem and the metadata.

The filesystem is for storage... it's only important to be able to group tracks together in small batches (releases - albums/singles/EPs) to be able to manage the files

The metadata is for searching, grouping and locating in your music player.

With that in mind, a lot of the problems he's cited vanish.

I have ~84,000 tracks from over 6,000 albums. The result of a 5 year ripping spree after a decade worked in the music industry.

Every track, with no exception, has been scanned by MusicBrainz Picard, had it's PUID generated and meta data normalised.

I've allowed my definition of genre be influenced by general opinion... I simply learned how the mass tag things.

The result is that I can find everything in my interface (Squeezebox) within seconds.

The file storage I only need to care about for management of the files, and copying to my portable player or deleting old releases (which I do rarely, but it does happen).

The file storage starts with file type:

MP3|FLAC|FLAC_9624

Below those are folders for high level type of content:

Artists|Classical|Spoken Word|Compilations|Soundtracks

Within Artists I used

Artist/Release Name[ - Catalogue Number]/[Volume/][Media/]Track Number - Track Name

I only fill in catalogue number if I have two versions of the same titled release... i.e. Quadrophenia by The Who I have a couple of versions of.

I only fill out Volume if this is a multi-volume release.

I only fill out Media if this is a release that spans multiple CDs or DVDs.

So the short version of that might be:

FLAC/Artists/The Who/A Quick One/02 - Boris the Spider.flac

And a long version might look like:

FLAC/Artists/The Who/Quadrophenia - Polydor 2777840/CD2/01 - 5.15.flac

I have no problem at all storing and finding tracks, and I've no problem at all searching for tracks.

One of the good things about Squeezebox is that when you search it searches all metadata and the full file path. So a search for "quadro poly" would turn up the Polydor version of Quadrophenia.