My Music Organisation Process

Well I've been organising and converting my music collection, which is a mixed bag of formats. I've tried tidying it up before with mixed success. It's still a bit of a task but it's coming along.

This post is just about the method I've finally settled on and what seems to be working.

The biggest problems I've previously come across are tagging correctly, unknown albums and multiple formats. I've narrowed down the tools I need to cover all possibilities I've come across and built a handy little set that seems to do the job without installing too much stuff I will never use.

These are:

Sound Converter
MusicBrainz Picard
Quod Libet
and the command line tool BinChunker

By using these four tools I have managed to overcome just about every issue I've had. The only thing I have not sorted out is album art. I've not really looked into it yet as my priority was to sort the actual music out for easy access and cataloguing and so stuff will play to my media players around the house.

My first thought was "How am I going to store the files ?". I will be storing everything on an external Hard disc connected to my PC with Mint Olivia running as its operating system. This made my choice of file system to use wide but limited as well. I did some research.

fat16 / fat32 = too old and newer file systems seemed better at dealing with faults.

exFat = This is the system designed with USB sticks (Pen drives or whatever) in mind. It looked modern and what I was looking for but it has a flaw. Linux support is not so good from what I read and the linux drivers are slow. As I will be using Linux machines mostly I don't want search delays and stuttering music. So this option was out.

ext3 and ext4 = My operating system is formatted in this so I thought, why not ? A lot of info (the bits I understand) seemed outdated saying ext4 was untested and stick to ext3. I decided to go the ext4 way.

 On settling with ext4 I started to format an external drive I had using gparted.
I hit a problem. The drive I had was a Western Digital external drive and it would not allow me to write to it after the ext4 formatting unless i was in ROOT. A little investigation showed me the drive uses WD Elements which seems to be an external piece of software held with the driver chip and not on the Hard disc itself. This is there to do various tasks that work very well on a Windows based machine but the WD forums basically leave you on your own as a Linux user. Not being able to bypass this block without spending too much time I abandoned my choice of ext4 and made a new decision.

NTFS = After my previous choice was made too difficult to proceed with I was left with just the one. I did look at a few other systems such as HFS and Reiser4 but each had their minus points that put me off. And so I was left with NTFS, which seemed to be the best option with the equipment I had.

So the external drive was formatted and ready to go. I could now write to it and all was well.

My second decision was how to organise things while I was going through the process of conversion. I decided to put a folder next to my original music folder to store the originals but after I had processed them, to make it easier to distinguish files converted between conversion sessions (we all need a break eh!). This meant at the end of each session I could just move the files over and it would be easy to see where to start again when I came back.

I then made a folder for the converted files on the external hard disc to store these files in.

I used SoundConverter next setting it up to store the converted files in the root of the external drive. I did this so I could check for errors and multiple albums before storing them in the completed folder. SoundConverter has a bulk process option which is why I chose it.

I decided to use ogg as my format to convert to, so all my files would be the same. There are various qualities and formats so I didn't think it would make too much difference and FLAC would be overkill on most. If I was unhappy with the sound quality I could always go back and re-rip the CD's from my collection although this would not be possible with my own recordings from my friends bands gigs obviously.

Any faulty TAGS were altered in Quod Libet as this has a good tag editor or updated in Picard so the file names and tags were correct.

At one point I found a Bin and Cue file which was quickly converted using BinChunker to a set of Wav files which could then be converted and tagged.

So thats how its been working so far.