If you’re a big fan of mp3’s and digital music, you almost certainly have had difficulties organizing your music file collection.
I know what it is like, as I used to have hundreds of mp3’s all crammed into one folder on my hard drive. So I am all too painfully aware of of the time and effort involved in ploughing through to find one specific tune to listen to.
Organizing your music files is absolutely crucial. Once your mp3’s are nicely sorted out, you’ll be able to locate the songs you need simply and quickly. So please take a couple of moments to read through the following tips I’ve come up with.
1. Build Subfolders
The single most important suggestion for organizing your files is to generate genre-specific subfolders on your hard drive. Don’t lump all of your MP3 files in one huge folder called C:My Music. Create subfolders for specific music types like C:My MusicClassical, C:My MusicPop and C:My MusicSoundtracks, or maybeeven for particular artists, like C:BobDylan.
2. Make Sure Your ID3 Tags Are Correct
ID3 tags are used to retain vital information about your MP3 files. Such things like the song title, artist, and album are all kept by these tags, and will be displayed by your MP3 player. Make sure that you properly edit these tags – many downloaded MP3 files have the ID3 tag details recorded completely incorrectly. A good free software program for editing ID3 tags is TagScanner.
3. Spend Some Money on Good Music Management Software
There are several great software programs out there for managing music files. Two good ones that immediately spring to mind are MediaMonkey and MusicMatch Jukebox. Both programs offer tremendous music management features like an integrated music player, CD burning features and ID3 tag renaming.
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4. Download Your Music Files from Legal Sources
If you’ve been getting your music using P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing programs like KaZaa, you will very probably have lots of mp3’s which have weird nonsensical names like 56_HeyjAck.mp3. et your files from properly authorized sources like online music services iTunes or Napster and you will not have this problem any more.
5. Build Good Playlists
Most music player software (e.g. Winamp) permits you to create playlists. So, if you are in the mood for classical music, you can create a folder called C:Classical and create a playlist in that folder. Save the playlist after you’ve built it, and When you next feel like listening to those melodies again, all you need to do is load that playlist instead of spending hours ploughing through your hard drive and folders.
6. Get A Big Hard Drive!
In my experience, there is no doubt that one of the biggest hinderances to organizing your mp3 collection properly is running out of disk space. This will ruin your well-organized music collection, no question!. Make sure you have enough hard disk space to store your music files, and that everything fits on one drive. You do not want half your songs on your C drive and the other half on the D, as this is a very bad idea. Very messy, and inevitable it will make it difficult to create the playlist you want. It’s better to store them all in one hard disk, so get your hands on the biggest hard drive you can find.
Conclusion
I hope this article helps you to organize your mp3 collection a little better. I know it takes both time and a little work, but once your collection is properly catalogued, listening to your mp3’s will be a much more pleasant experience.
So don’t hesitate – get organized now!
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Tags: mp3 download, mp3 file, mp3 organize, music management, playlist
