Hi All:
I am in the process of building a home and will be using a Sonos Connect to pull music from the external harddrive to play on a wired home audio system.
From others experience, what is the best format to use for sub-folder and file names?
I would ideally like to sort my music by artist, then by album. What is the solution if you have soundtracks from movies or compilations?
Appreciate any help/guidance.
Thanks
Can’t really help you re: Sonos, but I made separate folders for soundtracks & comps and placed them along with all my artist folders. I put a “#” or a “-” in front to sort them first, so it looks like this:
#Audio Books
#Compilations
#Soundtracks
?Breaking Bad
?Fight Club
?Snatch
(hep) p.e.
2 Live Crew
2Pac
… and so on
And yeah, I think \\artist\album\trackname.ext is the most universal setup, especially if you want/need artwork or NFO files for each album.
apologies if this is something you already know, but folder and file names are not really very relevant in Sonos (or similar player systems for that matter.
Sonos scans all your music files and builds indices based on the tags for album, (or album artist, selectable in prefs), artist, genre, title, and so on. when you search and select stuff for playback in Sonos, you use these indices.
Sonos keeps track internally which files and folders are pointed to by the indices, but the actual folders and file names can be anything, even gibberish, as normally using Sonos you won’t look at them.
If you want or need to, it is also possible in the Sonos controller to search by folder/filename instead of searching by tags, but the whole point of tags is to make more logical, powerful searching.
That said, having folders and filenames which follow a logical system will make it MUCH easier to manage your collection, using tools like Jaikoz.
There are several folder and filenaming conventions that people commonly use, and the Jaikoz defaults will be a good starting point. I think most people get their tags sorted first, then rebuild folder/filenames based on tags according to some scheme or other.
Again, using Sonos you should really care more about your tags, less about your file structure.
I completely agree. Folder structure is mainly for “stupid” humans.
I use XBMC which also relies heavily on tags (doesn’t everything these days), but my collection doesn’t go through just one device so it’s all shared out via SMB. I might grab something for the car USB, or the wife’s S3, or my tablet, or Winamp in the garage, or (ugh) burn a disc. XBMC also downloads a lot of bonus artwork that must go into the album folders (coverart, cdart, see fanart.tv) so I was already setup when I started scanning things in.
Keep future-proofing in mind though. Are you going to be using the Sonos in 5 years? 10 years? Surely you don’t want to reorganize just for the new device.
Something I really wish I did a long time ago: I was putting multi-disc albums in one folder. Windows sorts these horribly and it was difficult to grab one disc in track-order, so now I’m making “Disc 1” and “Disc 2” folders.