I finally found a half-way decent, quick and simple system to organize my music.

Organizing music is a problem I have wrangled with essentially ever since I had my first mp3 player. This must have been when I was around 10, so a good while ago.

This journey started out at a time when CDs where still king, YouTube videos didn’t have a “quality” setting and music was mostly digitalized by pressing that buggy “Import CD into library” button in Windows Media Player. There were attempts at online mp3 stores, but using those was not the best and purchasing things on the internet was still scary. It was before the “order it online!” mentality and and the streaming wave.

Creating and updating a good music collection involves a number of elements, which I now finally found a way to handle elegantly. I’ll go through these in the following section.

Disclaimer: If you’re happily using a streaming service these techniques won’t really help you. Your music collection only exists inside the bounds of the music streaming application until you disconnect for the internet for too long, stop paying the service or the company behind the service goes bankrupt. You organization ability is of course also entirely dependent on the proprietary app and is only customizable within those bounds, too. If you however like the idea of having your own music collection, this article could give you a head start in starting one.

Storing and Naming

I differentiate between these two types of music:

Full albums: These go into Music/Artists/name_of_artist/name_of_album
Playlists: These go into Music/Playlists/PL_YEAR_title
- Example name: PL_2019_fresh_mornings

How is the playlist folder name helpful?

The PL prefix:
- This marks this folder as a Playlist folder. When I scroll through the folders on my phone music app I can easily differentiate between albums and playlists. If I feel like listening to one of my playlists I can easily scroll down to them when I sort by folder name.
The YEAR section:
- I find that certain tastes of music are connected to certain periods in my life. Once say my lifestyle changes, I’ll move on from listening to a certain set of playlists. Later I might come back to them and enjoy the memories that come along with it. The playlist I listened to when I moved into my first apartment. The playlist I listened to when I lived on the country-side with my parents. Those bring up memories and it’s nice to have the year information clearly there. There is the option to try and deduce this information from the file attributes, but I don’t find this method reliable. I enjoy knowing the amount of time I travel when I open up an old playlist, it makes me conscious of the time that has passed and maybe makes me a little nostalgic, which can be fun.
- Including the year in the title opens frees you up to come up with a unique playlist name every time. I may have a “hot_stuff” playlist for 2017 and then again one for 2019.
The title section: This is the thought, idea or the mood behind the playlist. It doesn’t have to include the genre, but it can. It may even be a random number if that is the kind of idea behind the playlist.
- Not having any constraints on the title, like including the genre or similar I free myself up to mixing genres in one playlist, which I do often.

Syncing the music:

The folder on my computer is the source of truth for my music collection. I regularly back this up to an external hard drive.
My phone obviously also holds my current selection of playlist and artist (after all phone storage is limited), but I don’t care if I lose the data on it. If I lose my phone I’ll just go through my music collection again and make a new selection.

Adding Music to the Collection

Every once and a while everybody feels like getting new music. The old stuff just isn’t doing it anymore. Inspiration to listen to a certain artist or genre just comes and it is time to update your collection.

Step 1: Remembering that good song. When I find a good song or listen to a good song on the radio / party I’ll pop out my phone and find the song on YouTube. I’ll then mark it with a “like”. Later when I take the time to add music to my library I can find it there, and I can listen to it right away, too.

Step 2: Getting the new music on my PC.

When I listen to an album for extended period of time or I just really love the artist I usually head to amazon to purchase the mp3 version. Downloading / storing / copying these mp3 files is straightforward and convenient.
For songs I that don’t feel like buying or for artists which don’t have a convenient way to purchase their albums, I’ll head to YouTube. For YouTube there are a million of download-clients which will spam you with ads. That’s bad. Luckily there is an open-source tool which is ad-free and even works from the command line: youtube-dl. So what I’ll do is I’ll head to my “Videos I like” playlist on YouTube, go through the list and open all of them which I want to download in a new tab. Also I’ll check my phone for tabs with recently listened songs. One by one I’ll then pop open a command line and use youtube-dl to download it. I have the following shortcut (called alias in the Linux world) configured, so it also converts it to mp3.
```
# the shortcut setup in my terminal config
alias youtube-dl="youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --prefer-ffmpeg "
# me downloading some song
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/...
```
Often the song is downloaded and dealt with within 10 seconds.

Listening to Music

Last but not least comes the app. I use the “Pi Music Player” on my android phone. These are the features which stand out to me:

a decent search
a “folder” tab which treats folders as albums or playlists
a YouTube function which allows the user to listen to YouTube songs on auto-repeat while effectively locking the phone.

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