Music library management

Don't use the genre of your music as a basis to organise your music files. Genre is inherently wholly, ambiguous and subject to change. As such, it does not make a good candidate for organising music files and directories.

I can see why some digital music lovers include genre information in their music file structures. Genre is interesting, it's a way of categorising music that makes sense for choosing playlists. To this end, music playing software and hardware allows you to browse your music library by genre. So why shouldn't you organise files by genre too?

The trouble is that file and directory structures don't lend themselves to structures where the names may change. Genre, because it's inherently wholly and ambiguous is one of the more frequently altered aspect of music meta-data. Music players often identify music by the file path of the music. Changing the file path when you decide to change the genre may reset information about the music stored in the music player, such as play counts, ratings and more.

It's important that meta-data communicated in your file and directory structures are the same as the data within your embedded music tags, give or take file system limitations. This means that when the genre for your music changes it should change both the tags and anywhere else the genre is communicated. If genre is in your file structure, this means changing your file structure too.

You may also wish to assign multiple genres to tracks and albums in your music library. This is perfectly possible and a valid thing to do using tags within the music files. However, because file structures are hierarchical, you can only pick one genre to organise by. Remembering why your chose the one-you-did is difficult, and leaves the potential for further problems at a later date.

So how should music files be organised? I think some level of categorisation is important, because music file organisation is often needed as a fallback when performing some administration tasks and also for music players that are incompatible with your music tags. We need to choose music meta-data that is better suited to use in file structures. This is meta-data that is less subject to change.

I choose to organise files within artist/album directory structures. These data, specifically the ALBUM_ARTIST and ALBUM_NAME tags, generally do not chage and the structure is layered enough to be sortable and navigable. All other meta-data such as genre, year, style and mood are stored within the music files themselves so that I can use them inside my music players.

And that is why you shouldn't use genre in your music file/directory structures.

Thanks to feverblue for the image used at the top of this blog post

Here's a sample of the genres currently reported in my music library:

Alt. Rock Alternative Alternative Pop Alternative & Punk Alternative Rap Ambient Ambient Pop, Space Rock Art Rock Avantgarde Ballet Blues Brasileira Britpop Childrens

Dance Dance & DJ Dance Hall Disco Drum & Bass Easy Listening Electro Electronic Electronica & Dance Electropop Folk Funk General General Jazz

Hopefully it's clear that genres here are, well, a mess. If I want to browse my collection of electronica I not only need to view the albums in the 'Electronic' genre but also those in 'Electronica & Dance', 'Electropop', 'Electro' and more... and that's ignoring 'General'!

Poorly categorised genres make it more difficult to select the music you want to play.

There are many reasons why the list above makes life difficult.

The 'I give up' and 'just plain wrong' problems

These are albums and tracks that are just incorrectly tagged, or tagged so generally as to make the tag meaningless. This can occur when the tags are looked up from a public database with incorrect data.

It is common for community created music databases to have incorrect genre information, and these mistakes end up in your music library.

There isn't much of an excuse for this; the genre, simply, should at least vaguely describe the style of music.

The 'hip hop' or 'acid-dubstep-revival' problems

Genres often appear at wildly varying levels of detail. Most music genres have sub genres, sub-sub genres and... you get the picture.

Now this isn't 'wrong' per se, but it does make your music collection more difficult to browse and it does look plain ugly.

Genres populated from community databases have inconsistent levels of detail.

Typically I find myself wanting different levels of granularity at different times; it entirely depends on what I want to listen to. Thus, while having very general genres such as 'rock', 'pop', 'classical' and so on may look tidier, they don't provide the detail you sometimes need.

A further improvement rarely found in automatically tagged music is to specify multiple genres. The approach to this depends on your music player of choice and the underlying file formats being used to store the music. When a piece of music is tagged both with a general and a specific genre it means you can both browse for general and specific styles.

Using rules to gain control over genres

To gain a correct and consistent view of your music collection it is important to use both an authoritative source and to specify a consistent level of detail to be applied across your collection.

Authoritative, reviewed sources are available such as allmusic and MusicBrainz, both of which have more accurate data than the other commonly used databases such as CDDB and FreeDB. Furthermore, allmusic offers a comprehensive genre tree which, ideally, one could adopt to categorise their library.

Once you have decided how you want genres to appear, its time to put this into action. This is where you realise you have 10,000 tracks to tag, and you better get each one right. Best put the coffee on, it's going to be a long night!

Using authoritative sources for music information should be enforced via rules over your entire library, because editing the music directly is both tiresome and prone to mistakes.