I am looking for some advice on what the best music organizer to use on my Unraid server?

I have thousands of CD's streamed by Logitech Media Server to Squeezeboxes all over the house.

 

I have found there is only one good organiser and that is ME!

 

I prefer to navigate the Music Folder from my Squeezeboxes.  I haven't tried putting LMS on one of my unRAID systems (yet), last time I put it on a server, it was a Thecus NAS box about 6 years ago and the facility to navigate by music folder was missing then, I don't know about today.  Currently LMS runs on one of my HTPC's that stays powered on all the time.

 

My top level directory is enclosed.

I have found there is only one good organiser and that is ME!

 

LOL, That's how I do it too, folder by folder.

 

Although I do use mp3tag allot and setup macros to move music to specific folders via Actions functionality.

I can move, rename, extract art to a Folder file, etc, etc. Works nice and easy for me.

I'll usually make a filelist.txt via find so I can do a quick search via grep.

Yet I also use media monkey for the search/playlist building and importing to ipod.

For Android I use drag-n-drop.

 

I even organize my dj drives by hand with folders.

Some of DJ friends my arragement makes it easy to navigate when looking for crowd oriented music.

 

Major Genre (or class of music) > Artist > Album

                                > Various Artists > Album

 

Some of DJ friends my arragement makes it easy to navigate when looking for crowd oriented music.

I also have other folder specifics such as

 

_Crowd Pleasers > Mobile Beat Top 100

                > Old School

                > Other chart listings.

 

BillBoard > (each years hits) >

Greatest Hits > Artists > Album

 

I also have other folder specifics such as

In Each folder itself I use

 

## Artist - Title

Where ## is tracknumber or position in the charts for the year or week of playing.

a folder.jpg

 

Possibly, but not always the a playlist, .cue sheet, scanned images of artwork.

 

I also have

 

Favorites > Genre or drag and drop folder for playlist.

          > Artists > Album

          > Various Artists > Album

 

usually the Favorites get synced to my phone.

I use folders instead of playlists with files all over so I can cut/paste/rsync between them and devices.

My collection is so massive that many upnp or media organizers fall over or take hours to index/reindex.

So I have a small Favorites and a large Greatest Hits folder for those media players

 

I know some of the tracks are duplicated from Mainstream > Artists > Album into the Greatest Hits, but there are times when I need to take along a small subset of hits which is the impetus for folder based organization.

 

I thought about using the Years in the Album names, but I don't really care about that. Plus it's usually in the mp3tag.

of which mp3tag allows very fast batch editing in comparison to media monkey.

 

I'm sure there are other great tools out there for organizing and presenting, but my collection is so large I think it would be counter productive to try and index it all.  It takes almost an hour just to do a find down the directory try and print the name of each file. 

 

That all being said, Media Monkey allows you to search directory trees and do rules based renaming / organizing.

I'm too paranoid (anal?) to use it.

I did have an Old School folder too, then I realised I didn't know what it was!  I think I skipped that generation ;-)

I'm in the process of organizing my collection, and i'm using Yate from http://2manyrobots.com for tagging and organizing.

 

Yate is truly powerful and once you get to know the strength of it's "actions" it makes tagging and organizing quick and easy. The developer is very helpful and devoted.

 

I'm creating symlinks to files and folders based on the tags. In that way I can access my music in a lot of ways depending on my needs, and without moving and reorganizing the files in itself.

 

Yate is OSX only.

http://beets.radbox.org/

http://beets.radbox.org/

 

 

This looks nice!

I thought you might like it

 

It is a cut above the rest... well thought out bit of kit.

I prefer Foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/) with the Masstagger plug-in (http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_masstag). It's Windows only.

 

Foobar is a Swiss army knife of functionality (player, tagger, organizer, converter, etc.). It works well for everything except embedded album art. For that I prefer mp3tag mentioned earlier.

For me I find MediaMonkey is the best tool as it's easy for adding mp3 tags, albumart, etc.  It fixed my music order/sorting issue on my Blackberry too - I used it to combine album discs into single folders, list them by track number (tag) then add the track number as a filename prefix on each track, fixing the list issue.

This thread is pretty long-running, but I thought I'd throw in another recommendation for MediaMonkey, and its really powerful Auto-Organize feature.

 

It lets you set up a staging area that it monitors for incoming music. From there, it will create a folder structure and rename the music files to any destination you want, based on a custom criteria you set up. You define the folders and name structure of the files.  If you need to re-tag the metadata and clean up filenames, you can use its built-in tagging functionality, and as soon as you update the files, it auto-organizes them again. It's a nice way to not only tag the metadata, but it keeps your folders and filenames nice and clean.

I have been using MediaMonkey for just over 9 years. It's lived on lots of different PCs during that time. My music lives on unRAID now but I still use MediaMonkey to access it.