The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/spicy_placenta on 2025-02-02 02:31:27.

This could be a bit of a niche question, and may be a question for another subreddit. But I thought I would try here first as the data is substantially bigger than your common music collector, and you guys might have experience.

I have a pretty big music collection. Many, many terabytes. Many thousands of bands. I have been collecting over 15 years. Initially, my folder structure was:

Music / Band Name / Year - Album Name / Songs

This was my preferred layout as I could easily find the band I am looking for, and would prevent duplicates. However, when the collection grew, loading the Music folder became slower and slower, taking up to 20 seconds or more to load.

I then re-did the layout to create smaller sub-folders based on genre. This resolved the load time issues, but it has quickly become convoluted.

Music / Genre / Sub Genre / Band Name / Compressed or Lossless / Year - Album / Songs

I tried to keep this as basic as possible. An example.

Music / Metal / Thrash Metal / Band Name…

But then had to further break down sub genres as some singular genres still had many thousands of bands in the one folder. It wasn’t as bad as before, but would still cause a considerable lag. Using Metal Archives and other sources as a guide. Now most parent sub genre’s sit alongside sub-sub genres. Technical Thrash, Progressive Thrash, Death Thrash, Black Thrash etc. These sub-sub genres are sitting along side the parent genre.

A bi-product of this layout is many bands change genres over their career. I have sorted their placement based on their latest album genre. It can make it tricky though as if I was a fan of their earlier work when they were one genre, but then they changed, that band will end up in a different subgenre or sub-subgenre. I need to remember or go hunting. It also means I can have duplicated bands in different genres if I think I am missing their albums. I have maintained this as best I can, and it will be pretty clean, but it’s almost a certainty I have duplicated whole discographies.

There are also some genres that are difficult to subdivide. Broad, general genres such as Rock or Pop. I have made an effort to try and intelligently divide these up so artists avoid these massive genre folders, such as subdividing by Indie Rock, Alternative Rock, Post Grunge. But still many bands and artists still fall into this generic genres.

I don’t think the genre system is working, or maintainable long term.

Further to this, in each band folder, I have a compressed and lossless folder. Compressed with mp3, and Lossless being FLAC. This means I can’t use programs or tools like Lidarr to sort as they insist on changing this folder structure. And with the obscurity of many bands, Lidarr often incorrectly recognises bands or albums and starts moving data.

I need a manual system to simplify this somehow. Does anyone have any ideas?