A question about file structure.

Alobar

Addicted Member
Since I got my new Seagate NAS I managed after a few failed attempts to get my entire library moved onto it from my C: drive and have all the tags and playlists intact. I had to do this through JRiver and not windows file manager in order to keep the playlists.

JRiver did something unexpected. It dumped all the files into one folder "music". It seems to work fine, it doesn't seem to care if each group and album isn't under the 2 level file structure.

My question is, as I add music, hopefully a LOT of music, will having all the files in just one folder slow anything down?

I know JRiver uses tags in order to locate music, and when I look for music within JRiver it shows all the albums, tracks, artists etc just like before. It is only when I look at the files from within windows file manager does it look like a disaster.
 
Probably makes it faster actually. I do have a rigid file structure for my CD rips, but that's because I play with it in several different ways, and I like to keep things organized.

I wouldn't like your situation just from a going forward management perspective. If nothing else, whenever I rip a new CD, I have to check several other peoples' libraries (girlfriend, etc.) to make sure they don't have a .mp3 or iTunes version of one or two of the tracks I just ripped, that messes everything up. Quite often there is some overlap in musical taste so I end up deleting some lossy files pretty much any time I upload new FLACs.
 
Probably makes it faster actually. I do have a rigid file structure for my CD rips, but that's because I play with it in several different ways, and I like to keep things organized.

I wouldn't like your situation just from a going forward management perspective. If nothing else, whenever I rip a new CD, I have to check several other peoples' libraries (girlfriend, etc.) to make sure they don't have a .mp3 or iTunes version of one or two of the tracks I just ripped, that messes everything up. Quite often there is some overlap in musical taste so I end up deleting some lossy files pretty much any time I upload new FLACs.
I always maintained a 2 level folder structure before, and I liked to keep the MP3's out of there as well but I still have a few loose ones in there from the Itunes 99 cent download days. What I do when I am just playing music from my drive without anything specific in mind is I select from a simple smartlist that only filters out anything with a bitrate under 400. That way everything is lossless. Still I have in the past ended up with duplicates (flac/mp3) and I think it was from loading up the phone with mp3's for a road trip and somehow I or JRiver failed to keep them separate. One easy way to check from within the Media player is to bring up a list of everything and sort by bitrate. Then nab all of them and either move them to another folder or delete.
 
So after posing the question on the JRiver forum, I got the specific info I needed to recreate my 2 level folder structure and I cleaned up the file names as well so they are all consistent. It was really quite easy and I could have made the structure anyway I wanted but since I am not that into classical I kept things simple. This was all accomplished automatically by JRiver using the metadata in each file to create the folders and sub folders. Now I have confirmed all my tags and playlists are working as they should..

Now, as I add more cd's to the library it will automatically keep this file structure for those too. This is much better to me than the file dump that was there before! Actually that was my fault by not telling it to do the file structure..
 
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