Don’t really do playlists but i have Genres, They are then split into bands, Which are the split into albums.

I like to rifle through my music, so I just keep all my new albums on one shelf and move them to another shelf as I listen to them. Then I can choose if I want to listen to something I haven’t heard yet, or something I have, and if I have, it’s sorted naturally by last listen time, since I always put albums on the shelf in the same spot.

The only exception is that if I really don’t like an album, I’ll put it on one of the edges of the shelf so it can withstand the most pressure. I try to keep the records packed tightly enough not to tip too much, but also loosely enough not to be squished, but if I do make a mistake and end up messing up a record, I’d rather it be one I don’t plan to listen to again.

I use beets: https://beets.io/

The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.

For normal albums: Artist/Year - Album [release ID if necessary for ambiguity for various versions of an album]/Disc-track - title.extension . Compilations (soundtracks, promo mixes from shows, etc.) get “Various Artist” as the album artist and sorted under “Various Artists” of the top level of my albums directory. Stuff from other sources would sometimes get their own special directory at the top level outside “albums”.

Tags are everything, that’s where the in-depth data is. album folders hold extra art, inserts, metadata, etc.

I don’t really make manual playlists using relatively pathed m3u anymore because support is inconsistent across the apps I’ve used to listen to my library. These days Plex, jellyfin, ncmpcpp (tui front-end for mpd) all handle their own playlists. Those are mostly just spontaneous groupings or automated shuffles I don’t really keep track of.

Back in the day I made mixtapes on actual cassettes, recorded from the radio, my CDs, and later tracks I found on Napster and soulseek. Later I moved on to making tons of playlists in foobar2000. Some of those playlists probably still litter my hard drive (now dead text because the files having long since been reorganized and moved). For the really good tight playlists I made of that era, I’d make physical mix CDs that I would master with sound forge. Had a few people that would trade these around. Make a mix, master, make many copies, distribute. Those CDs often died in cars and turned into coasters, so I’d keep the bin and cue files of the masters to make replacements. Those tracks would ultimately get turned back into mp3 or flac depending on quality and tagged with my own title, cover art, etc. and get filed away in the Various Artist folder. Then I got an mp3 player and it’s been either full album listening or dynamic playlists for me ever since.

I still make yearly playlists in Spotify as I discover new stuff or rediscover old stuff, like a musical diary. Those playlists inspire library additions via the artist directly, Bandcamp flac files, or other means.

Folder called “songs” have sub folders of artists, inside which there are folders for albums and singles, inside which reside the flac files.

If there are albums which have multiple artists, there will be a different folder for that. For example there is an artist A and there is an artist B. They will have individual folders. If both of them have released an album or a single, there will a folder called “A, B”.

I use Jellyfin to stream my music. Here are their detailed guidelines.

I have a quite large music library of music.

General music folder is organized by artist name, alphabetically.

Within each artist folder I organize albuns by year.

Each track is numbered in the file name itself.

Extra data goes into the file tag, readable by my music player.

this is a real problem. one of the next projects is to build a scaner that will leverage the Shazam API to identify and sort all my loose music (about 300% of my collection). afterwards I’ll be using said project to identify ripped physical media from my massive 33/45/78 collections, some of which are local presses from almost 100 years ago that nobody has heard in decades.

Picard musicbrainz + jellyfin + feinshin + lidarr

Works a treat

I didn’t think OP meant physical.

When I had albums the only one I cared about organizing was the one on the end that people could see. I always made sure it was something that showed how cool I was.

I’ve used MediaMonkey for years and let it do most of the work. Mostly I focus on my playlists, like “Current Mindlist,” “Calm the Fuck Down,” and “You’re Gonna Get a Speeding Ticket.” I also do smart lists by artist, genre, or grouping tags. It’s worked really well for my 50k+ files on the computer side. Just need to find a good player for my iPhone so I can pass ratings back and forth along with changes to playlists made on the phone. I used Spotify for a decade or so and have enjoyed digging back into my old stuff.

Alphabetic by artist/band name and then chronological.

FYI, on Lemmy, we don’t have “subs”— we have communities aka “comms”

Files are in a Artist/Album structure, but it’s handled by a media library, so I can sort/filter/group them however I want.

I don’t. Every album goes in the ~/Music folder. I don’t use playlists unless you count albums as playlists.