I just put all my files into folders by language. Everything else is done with the music player with any playlists exported to m3u.

How I keep my physical music files.

I didn’t think OP meant physical.

I assume you mean digital files. I keep them all lumped together in a folder. I only have around 1,300 songs, since I only download the specific songs I’m looking for and not entire albums.

I organize my playlist by mood or use. “Working” is high bpm and general upbeat motivating things, “Singing” is things my middle aged ass sings along with when drunk or otherwise chemically enhanced, “Sadness” is the most soul crushingly painful songs that have lyrics I directly relate to, “Sexy time” is for when your mom or anyone else here’s mom visits… the usual.

I have a quite large music library.

General music folder is organized by artist name, alphabetically.

Within each artist folder I organize albuns by year.

Each track is numbered in the file name itself.

Extra data goes into the file tag, readable by my music player.

Picard musicbrainz + jellyfin + feinshin + lidarr

Works a treat

When I had albums the only one I cared about organizing was the one on the end that people could see. I always made sure it was something that showed how cool I was.

I’ve used MediaMonkey for years and let it do most of the work. Mostly I focus on my playlists, like “Current Mindlist,” “Calm the Fuck Down,” and “You’re Gonna Get a Speeding Ticket.” I also do smart lists by artist, genre, or grouping tags. It’s worked really well for my 50k+ files on the computer side. Just need to find a good player for my iPhone so I can pass ratings back and forth along with changes to playlists made on the phone. I used Spotify for a decade or so and have enjoyed digging back into my old stuff.

My system used to always be a music folder full of album subfolders named like artistName - year - albumName. I did so much manual work to make that happen and then Spotify came along. I mostly neglected my collection for a decade, only adding to it occasionally. When Spotify aligned themselves with Nazis I cancelled my subscription and started about hosting my own collection with Plex for streaming. I had let my organization system go to shit and now I’ve got a mess.

I’m currently working on a script that will identify naming convention issues and eventually spit out a list of commands for renaming/moving folders. I also want the script to identify metadata issues, dupes, and missing tracks. I know there are a lot of tools that do a lot of this already, but I don’t like any of them I’ve found so far. I especially don’t like the idea of an opinionated tool redoing my library by making destructive writes, thousands of files/folders at a time, without me approving changes first. A lot of them work that way.

I use beets: https://beets.io/

The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.

this is a real problem. one of the next projects is to build a scaner that will leverage the Shazam API to identify and sort all my loose music (about 300% of my collection). afterwards I’ll be using said project to identify ripped physical media from my massive 33/45/78 collections, some of which are local presses from almost 100 years ago that nobody has heard in decades.

Software organizes the library into artist/album folders automatically. Then I organize every track into playlists based on mood/genre. I’ll generally pick a certain playlist to listen to and put it on shuffle.

My files are either in folders by album or, for singles, by alphabetical folders using the artist’s name.

No playlists needed.

For normal albums: Artist/Year - Album [release ID if necessary for ambiguity for various versions of an album]/Disc-track - title.extension . Compilations (soundtracks, promo mixes from shows, etc.) get “Various Artist” as the album artist and sorted under “Various Artists” of the top level of my albums directory. Stuff from other sources would sometimes get their own special directory at the top level outside “albums”.

Tags are everything, that’s where the in-depth data is. album folders hold extra art, inserts, metadata, etc.

I don’t really make manual playlists using relatively pathed m3u anymore because support is inconsistent across the apps I’ve used to listen to my library. These days Plex, jellyfin, ncmpcpp (tui front-end for mpd) all handle their own playlists. Those are mostly just spontaneous groupings or automated shuffles I don’t really keep track of.

Back in the day I made mixtapes on actual cassettes, recorded from the radio, my CDs, and later tracks I found on Napster and soulseek. Later I moved on to making tons of playlists in foobar2000. Some of those playlists probably still litter my hard drive (now dead text because the files having long since been reorganized and moved). For the really good tight playlists I made of that era, I’d make physical mix CDs that I would master with sound forge. Had a few people that would trade these around. Make a mix, master, make many copies, distribute. Those CDs often died in cars and turned into coasters, so I’d keep the bin and cue files of the masters to make replacements. Those tracks would ultimately get turned back into mp3 or flac depending on quality and tagged with my own title, cover art, etc. and get filed away in the Various Artist folder. Then I got an mp3 player and it’s been either full album listening or dynamic playlists for me ever since.

I still make yearly playlists in Spotify as I discover new stuff or rediscover old stuff, like a musical diary. Those playlists inspire library additions via the artist directly, Bandcamp flac files, or other means.