Organize Music Files
It is easy to organize music files if you use a software like iTunes and buy music online through iTunes. Most of the work is done automatically. But if you have your own digital music collection and want to organize the files, you can try the following suggestions.
The aim here is to organize your song collection so that you can quickly find what you want. So keep this goal in mind when you organize. A good way to organize music files is a tiered folder structure.
Use the first tier (level) folders to separate genres. You could go to a site like Amazon who sells music to get an idea of genres you can divide your music files into.
Once you set up the first level, create sub folders for each. For example, you could create two folders under each genre for instrumental and vocal. Name the files “instrumental” and “vocal”. This is your second level of folders.
For each folder in the second level, you can create the third level of folders. These folders will be for each artist. Name the folder with the name of the artist.
Now the albums. Under each artist, create as many folders as needed. Each folder is for one album. Name the folder with the name of the album. You don’t know the albums for some of the songs? Just create a separate folder for those songs. Call that folder “Miscellaneous” or “Misc”.
Once you have set up the folder structure, you can move your songs to appropriate folders. This folder structure will give you easy search capabilities as well. Type in the artist name in the search window in your operating system to get to the folder for that artist. You could bring up the folder for a particular genre by searching for that genre.
A few things to remember - First, when you get a new piece of music, move it to appropriate location. Create a new folder if needed. Organizing as you go is the most efficient way to maintain the structure you created. Second, backup. I cannot emphasize this enough. You don’t want to lose all your music collection. Finally, respect copyright laws.