Hey guys,

 

This isn't entirely unRAID related, but more towards people who have large pools of media

 

I recently inherited a bunch of media (11TB) and have it organized as follows:

 

5800 episodes of various TV shows, 2.5TB

- sorted into folders by TV show, and then either all episodes in a single folder, or episodes separated by season.

- Files generally look like "better.off.ted.s02e04.720p.hdtv.x264-ctu.mkv"

 

2500 movies, 6.5TB

- no sorting, but file names are "A Good Day To Die Hard (2013) Bluray 1080p x264 DTS-HD MA DUS.mkv"

 

100,000 songs

- sorted into folders by artist name

- all songs in each folder are labeled as follows: 3 Doors Down - Better Life - By My Side - 444.mp3 with the last number being a random number

 

My question is how I can better organize and browse these files? As of now I just navigate to the shares through SMB, and have an FTP/HTTP server pointed at the shares.

 

However, I'd love to find a utility that could better label the files, store metadata and cover art, etc. Is that all done on the back end before the browsing and stored with the files, or is it done in real time using a browsing utility with an internet connection(plex, XBMC, etc)? I'd prefer pre-caching, if possible.

 

So my question basically is, how should I organize the files, and is there a way to automatically organize and/or fetch data to store with the files?

You have a number of different options.

 

When I was first getting organized, I preferred a more hands-on approach, so I was manually organizing files in the filesystem over SMB and then renaming them with theRenamer (http://www.therenamer.com/) to a convention that would be acceptable both for human readibility and for parsing by front-ends like XBMC and Plex. Based on your examples, your files may already be acceptably named for parsing by your front-ends, but you may decide (like I did) that you want all the filenames to look the same, use the exact same naming convention, and not include information like resolution and encoder in the filename. I use SageTV and Plex as my front-ends and with the appropriate SageTV plugins both will parse my library and pull metadata and fanart etc with little-to-no effort on my part. The web interface for Plex Media Server is pretty fantastic.

 

There are also a few good file organization and metadata retrieval applications that are slightly more front-end agnostic. Media Center Master (http://www.mediacentermaster.com/), Ember Media Manager (http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=165012), and Media Companion (http://mediacompanion.codeplex.com/) can do organization, renaming, and downloading of metadata and fanart/posters/banners/etc using conventions that are understood by a number of different front ends. These may be the closest you come to an all-in-one solution.

After a certain number of files a directory structure for organization becomes somewhat unusable.  ie, a long list is only good if you have the patience to browse through it.  This is where something that will index it comes into play such as Plex as it can aggregate multiple locations into one presentation layer.

You have a number of different options.

 

When I was first getting organized, I preferred a more hands-on approach, so I was manually organizing files in the filesystem over SMB and then renaming them with theRenamer (http://www.therenamer.com/) to a convention that would be acceptable both for human readibility and for parsing by front-ends like XBMC and Plex. Based on your examples, your files may already be acceptably named for parsing by your front-ends, but you may decide (like I did) that you want all the filenames to look the same, use the exact same naming convention, and not include information like resolution and encoder in the filename. I use SageTV and Plex as my front-ends and with the appropriate SageTV plugins both will parse my library and pull metadata and fanart etc with little-to-no effort on my part. The web interface for Plex Media Server is pretty fantastic.

 

There are also a few good file organization and metadata retrieval applications that are slightly more front-end agnostic. Media Center Master (http://www.mediacentermaster.com/), Ember Media Manager (http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=165012), and Media Companion (http://mediacompanion.codeplex.com/) can do organization, renaming, and downloading of metadata and fanart/posters/banners/etc using conventions that are understood by a number of different front ends. These may be the closest you come to an all-in-one solution.

 

Great, these are exactly the types of things that I was looking for. Thanks for you help! 

"I recently inherited a bunch of media (11TB) and have it organized as follows:"

 

Three of my four grandparent have passed away, and to date I've inherited zero bytes of useable modern compressed media. (mp3/mp4) To be fair, I did get a few books on tape and a stack of Readers Digest. Guess I have to go visit grandpa and bring him up to date on how to use Handbrake. "What like in the car? You know I don't drive anymore!"

"I recently inherited a bunch of media (11TB) and have it organized as follows:"

 

Three of my four grandparent have passed away, and to date I've inherited zero bytes of useable modern compressed media. (mp3/mp4) To be fair, I did get a few books on tape and a stack of Readers Digest. Guess I have to go visit grandpa and bring him up to date on how to use Handbrake. "What like in the car? You know I don't drive anymore!"

 

Haha, I feel you completely. It was extremely tedious to convert 35mm slides to digital, and hundreds of old LPs to mp3s. It did eventually get done, though!

 

 

Another vote for Media Center Master.

I have always been a fan of MCM as others have pointed out, but wad recently turned on to therenamer, which I definitely like more.

For DVDs, I like DVD Profiler.

 

... although some of the newer media packages have very nice tablet interfaces that let you manage all your media via an Adroid tablet or I-Mac.    Haven't picked one yet, but there are definitely some nice possibilities.

 

if you have a Mac, use Identify (http://identify2.arrmihardies.com/) to tag all your mp4/m4v video files. It's awesomely easy.

Musicbrainz Picard for tagging music

Plex media server. Couch potato and sickbeard to do the renaming and organizing, and plex media server to serve it all up in a tasty package for any number of clients around your home.

 

Http://plexapp.com