jstn:

marco:

My advice regarding library organization is always unpopular and always ignored, but hear me out here: delete most of your music.

It’s a convincing argument — especially the external hard drive option.

I hate it when reasonable questions get answered like this. Q: “What’s the best way to keep my fingernails trim?” A: “Cut off your hands!”

I have the exact opposite philosophy: I never delete music, unless it’s something I especially loathe. I’m the kind of person who, when something pops into my head that I haven’t heard in ten years, I want to listen to it immediately. Since we live in the future and storage is cheap, I can actually do this, and I fucking love it.

BTW: Esoteric formats, even if they’re super OMG high fidelity, are usually a terrible choice for long-term storage of any kind of data. MP3s are about as universal as it gets, and they support ID3 tags, which is an organizational godsend that FLAC and OGG lack.

I was reminded of something Alex Payne wrote a little while ago, albeit in a different context: “If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out the filesystem.” That’s how I do it. I’ve only got ~50GB in my iTunes library at any given time, but I keep everything else in a simple hierarchy on an external RAID. A folder for each artist with a folder inside for each album (or loose tracks). That’s it. iTunes starts to choke after a few thousand songs, but the total filesystem limit on a Mac is in the billions. You’ll never hit the ceiling.

Does it take time and effort to organize? Of course, but I loves my musics and I think it’s time well spent. The trick is to organize as you go. New downloads go into an “unsorted” folder, and every couple weeks I spend half an hour making sure everything is tagged properly and dropping them into the right folders.

I agree with jstn, but i edited his text to make it read better. i think i’ve maintained all of his message, i think he would agree, but i’m not sure.