I know this seems like a stupid question, but it's become a somewhat real problem for me now that my collection has grown to 12gigs.. and it's even worse now that I've just gotten an iPod, mainly because of how the songs are organized on it.

My question is, do you organize your music into its respective albums with a folder of its own, or do you just dump it all into one big music directory? I actually have a third of my music in their own folders in D:\music and two thirds of it scattered as individual tracks or grouped tracks in D:\music itself.

Sometimes I only enjoy one song out of an album of fourteen, so I only keep that one track. But that becomes quite horrible on the iPod, when it organizes its tracks according to album, composer, artist, or just lists all the songs. With alot of spare "scattered" tracks, the "album" folder becomes incredibly large (although a selected "album" might have only one track) and quite a hassle to go through.

It'd be nice to hear how you guys, in particular any of you with iPods, organize your music both on the PC and for transfer into the iPod. Thanks : )

My Mac has an 80 GB HD on it, and I had about 30 of that filled with MP3s. I used to use iTunes to rip at 192kbps .AAC, so the files were a little large (maybe 6 MB per 4 minute song). I had one "main" folder for all of my music and had everything tree down from that. Some stuff was labeled with the soundtrack as the artist, some as the composer, some as the arranger. It was neat but equally messy once you looked at all the files. And nevermind the typos. I remember labeling "internal section" as "interanal". Oops.

I kept all of the tracks on CDs except for SE tracks, voice collections, useless jingles and songs I just couldn't bear to listen to. Other than that I kept everything on my computer and iPod.

I've had lots of trouble organizing music on the iPod, especially when many albums (game music specifically) comes up with Japanese characters when you look for the album info. I tried valiantly to organize all my albums in very accurate genres, but then I changed and decided to put them in the general categories like Game (for game music), Rock, Electronica, Japanese Pop, General Christian, which is how my iPod is set up currently. There were albums like Guilty Gear where I placed in the rock genre, but with as much as 42 Gigs of music as well as albums being swapped constantly on the iPod (since my iPod only has a 20 gig capacity), I tend to forget where I placed them. So I put everything in a general category, like stated above: Rock/Christian/Electronica, etc.

But I definitely understand the problematic sequence of getting all the music organized. I'm all about organization, and the last thing I hate is when an album is not found, I have to manually submit the CD info. Or if the info is available, it's all in Japanese characters. Also, taking all the time to change the artist, album, and track info in iTunes does not change it in whichever folder the music is located on your harddrive.

Currently, on the computer, I place everything in their respective genres that is not game music. Since 2/3 of my music is game music, I have just one big folder that says "ALL Game Music," then the other main folder I have is named "Other Music" for all the mainstream/American music, which contains subfolders with the specific genres. I think it's just over time and repetition that it became a habit for me to involuntarily place everything in their most ideal location. Everything in my iTunes library is nearly identical to what it looks like on my harddrive. I don't know if any of this helps, but this is just how I do my thing.

Word. I turned off the ability to look up information in iTunes and keyed everything in by hand. Sometimes you just have to feed the OCD monkey and give it what it wants.

The timing of this thread is scary...I just bought an iPod on Wednesday. Figured it was long overdue, as I'd been looking at mp3 players for awhile and I decided the iPod basically had everything I wanted for a good price (the "wheel" grew on me at the store and I finally decided on a 30 GB instead of a 60 GB, since I figured less clutter would be important for a portable device and make it easier to get to the important stuff...the ability to have photos and videos is a cool extra, aside from the main use).

But I do feel the pain you described in the first post. My files are reasonably organized, but could use some cleaning up (Sound Team JDK and Sound Team J.D.K. show up seperately on the iPod under Artist, among others) and I've had the "individual track" issue you described. For the most part, I'm going to get my individual albums tagged how I want them. I'm mostly planning on abusing the hell out of the playlist feature, as opposed to going for mass neatness.

I'm just being conscious when I rip now to keep the tags simple (Konami Kukeiha Club/Sound Team JDK and the like, as opposed to most individual credits that wouldn't have more than a few entries under "Artists"). The biggest problem is albums with similar backgrounds, but different tagging...They're first on my hitlist. Them, and track titles that are too long. It's a nice longterm project, where I could probably not alter anything now (aside from ripping) and still be good, but the more I fix, the better overall. Nice project to work on, during the Olympics.

Strangest part is doing everything through iTunes. I'm surprised there isn't the ability to delete a track straight from the iPod (just remove it from the iTunes library). I'll get more used to it once I come to grips with the flexibility it offers.

Timt99's approach of using generalized genres like game STs, pop, hip hop, classical, etc. probably works best when it comes to accessing your music on iPod.  Another thing you could consider is leaving the Artist field blank on all your soundtracks.  That way you can search your "regular" pop music and the such through the iPod's Artist menu, and access your soundtracks through the Composer one.  And if you don't care for searching for your STs by composer, you could put the series name or the like in that field instead.

One of the best things I've done with my music since MP3'ifying it all several years ago is making it a point to rate all my music.  It took a *long* time to go through and rate it all, but now I can easily fit all my favorite tracks on my 20 gig iPod (just my favorites comes out to 12 gig).  Plus it makes navigation easier on the go as I don't have to sort through the bad and mediocre tracks to find the ones I like.

Another tip: check out J. River Media Center.  At $40 it ain't cheap, but the multitude of options it offers for sorting and categorizing music can be a huge convenience for people with large music collections.  After using the various versions of it for several years, I find it difficult to imagine using iTunes.

All of my music is in one main folder, which weighs in at 411 gigabytes. It is subdivided into companies, such as SNK, CAPCOM, KOEI etc. Approximately 20 gigabytes of the 411 is not video game music.

Everything is in stored in ape, except for the stuff I get from vgmix, overclocked, and slightlydark.

My hard drive is 500 GB, of which, 463 GB are available. I'm going to need an additional hard drive soon, since I don't just store music on it.

Music folder on Desktop
Companies under that (Konami, Falcom, Nintendo, etc.)
Series under that (Legend of Heroes, Gradius, Guilty Gear, etc.)
Individual discs under that (Perfect Collection Ys Disc 1, Wangan Midnight 2 Maximum Tune OST Disc 2, etc.).

I have a flash MP3 player uses a folder-based hierarchy (Cowon iAudio G3), which I like a lot.  I just copy the folders that I want and drop them into the player.

Honestly, I want to rip everything in APE like Jodo Kast does, but I need to get a bigger HD first.  100 GB just doesn't cut it.

As an iPod user, I've generally gotten used to just creating a whole new playlist folder for every new album that I might dump onto it.  For instance, I'd just gotten the Wangan Midnight 2 MT OST, so I created two individual playlists labeled WANGAN MIDNIGHT 2 OST D1 and WANGAN MIDNIGHT 2 OST D2.  Any scattered favorites I may have ultimately ends up in three distinct separate playlists, and they're as follows:

>>GAME MUSIC
>>MISC
>>DANCE

The GAME MUSIC playlist is self-explanatory, while the likes of DANCE has my favorite dance tracks, and MISC contains any other genre, from pop, country, and movie score tracks.  On certain occasions, I might have a certain artist or group that has a lot of scattered favorites, so I just create a separate playlist, like, say, WEIRD AL, BEST OF.

One thing that irritates me with iTunes is how everything must be deleted from the Library; you can't just delete from any of the other source folders, like Recently Added, or the playlist itself.  For a while, it made it extremely frustrating that all of my albums which I had ID tagged with a number first would all lump up and alphabetize together.  So, for instance, The Black Mages album would have 01 Battle Scene put squarely before Ace Combat 4's 01 Shattered Skies -- this made it a pain in the ass to delete certain albums that I no longer desired on the iPod, since I had to go and sift through the entire library and delete each track manually. 

To get around this, I had to go back and add a specific title header before the numbers, like "TBM" for all The Black Mages tracks.  I am using iTunes 4.7 1.30, though, so maybe things have improved since then?  Or maybe I'm just inadvertently doing things the hard way....

At home, the albums I listen to most are ripped into 320 kbps mp3s, and rests on my 160 GB hard drive.  They're organized in very much the same manner as my iPod, except the playlists are folders.

I have a similar mp3 player type too. (creative)
It works as a mass-class storage device.  Basically drag and drop the folder as you would a harddrive and it'll play by folder. 
I'm not sure an IPOD is the same format. 
I think IPod are library-based; this is why I wasn't inclined to get one.
I put everything into directories by series: One big final fantasy folder and then all the final fantasy music inside to make it easier.
I rip everything in 320 mp3s.  My ears really can't tell the difference though.

I also have a external HDD 250Gb which is almost full now.  I decided to put all my tv shows i have onto a Data-disc and get some more space.

My stuff is actually organized by the letters of the alphabets.  It makes it easier on me that way.

I have a creative MP3 player and it can select by Album name, artist name or genre - the only real pain I find with it is that you have to put all that information onto your mp3s before you send them to the mp3 player, but its normally not that hard as when ripping from a cd for example you can normally insert all that in one go for the entire album

I have a 40 gig creatve and its about half full, I dont normally keep mp3s on my PC

I had the same "album" issue, where if you go under "albums" there's no way to tell whether it's a full album, or just a single. So for all of my full albums, I append a special character to the beginning of the album name, so that all the full albums will show up first in the list, and then all the partial albums or singles show up in the second half of the list. I use the characters "[] " at the beginning. I found them to be non-distracting, since they form their own little box. It works well for me.

That's a great idea!