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An organizational scheme is very important whether you are dealing with family photos, baseball cards, or in this case, your
digital music collection. The following scheme has been successfully used to categorize thousands of CDs for use with JukeANator.
File Naming and Folder Hierarchy Convention
Here are the steps you would take to organize your music for
.
-
First, you would first convert your personal audio CDs using a ripper such as
Exact Audio Copy
, or otherwise acquire digital music directly from a legal source such as follows:
It is
best
if the songs are named using the following convention:
Artist Name - XX - Song Name.YYY
where
XXis the track number and
YYYis the file format such as .MP3, .WMA or .M4P (a.k.a. .AAC)
-
Next, you will want to scan the CD cover art, or otherwise acquire it from an online source such as
http://www.amazon.com
. The cover art should be named
"cover.jpg"
and should be sized to 250x250 pixels.
-
Finally, you need to place the contents of this digitized CD into a suitable folder hiearchy
on disk. Let
's say that you have a hard drive, F:, where you want to store your music collection
and we use the Billy Idol CD as example. We are going to categorize it as
"80s"
music. Thus, we
create an
"80s"
folder, then underneath that, we create a
"Billy Idol"
folder. Any Billy Idol CDs
we have we would create a folder underneath and then place the contents (songs, cover art and metadata)
there. Thus, we might expect to see something like the following screenshot in Windows Explorer:
Compilation CDs
Under each genre folder of music, whenever you have a compilation CD, the solution is to create
a
"Compilations"
artist folder and then put your compilation CDs there. Normally, when a CD
is by a single artist, only the track number and song name is shown in the CD Panel (as the artist
name is redundant), but for compilation CDs, the artist name for the song is needed, as the artist
for the CD will be
"Compilations"
. The two CD panels below highlight this difference:
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Single Artist CD Panel
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Compilation CD Panel
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Movie Soundtracks
Movie soundtracks are handled very similarly to compilation CDs with the only exception being if
you name the genre folder to be
"Soundtracks"
, there is no need to create a
"Compilation"
artist
folder, you can put the Soundtrack CDs directly under the
"Soundtracks"
folder and JukeANator
will be able to handle this. The reason being is that Soundtrack CDs tend to be inherently
compilation-based.
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Example Layout
The following diagram gives a more comprehensive example of how to organize your music:
D:\
|
Genre One\
| |
| Compilations\
| | |
| | CD Title One
| | .
| | .
| | .
| | CD Title n
| |
| Artist One\
| | |
| | CD Title One
| | .
| | .
| | .
| | CD Title n
. .
. .
. .
| Artist n\
| |
| CD Title One
| .
| .
| .
| CD Title n
|
Genre n\
| |
| Compilations\
| | |
| | CD Title One
| | .
| | .
| | .
| | CD Title n
| |
| Artist One\
| | |
| | CD Title One
| | .
| | .
| | .
| | CD Title n
| .
| .
| .
| Artist n\
| |
| CD Title One
| .
| .
| .
| CD Title n
|
Soundtracks\
|
CD Title One
.
.
.
CD Title n
|
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