I started a project over the Christmas break because I was a bit frustrated about how I was storing my music on my hard drive. Over the last few months, I have been slowly re-organizing some of my music. Originally I stored my music sorted by genres, which is a bit unconventional. I think typically the folder structure is Artist/Album/ but I put multiple artists & albums into one genre folder (i.e., Electronic, Pop, Ethnic, etc). I decided to follow this method because I thought it was unnecessary to have a huge amount of folders, especially since I sometimes only rip a couple of songs from an album.

That worked for many years. But recently because I have been buying my music online instead of ripping CDs, I ended up with a couple of new folders based on where I got the music (Google, Amazon, Promo/SoundCloud/Free Downloads, etc). Those were sorted separately AND was not sorted by genre. So now my mp3 organization was a hydra, but it actually wasn’t a big deal because who really cares how the music is stored on the file system when you access it through a UI?

Now last year, I started uploading my music to the cloud. The interface seems suited to the more conventional Artist/Album format so I started duplicating my MP3s and converting some of the albums I liked and storing them as albums for upload purposes. Pretty soon I had a couple GB of duplicate MP3s, and I realized that I would just have more and more as music listening started moving “to the cloud”.

So I started a project of extracting all my albums from my genre folders. I thought about scripting the work, which you can do with VB on Windows, but I figured the work wouldn’t take long enough for it to be worth it – debugging and figuring out how to do things in VB would probably just take as long (and require more thinking).

Hopefully after this, I will be able to backup and duplicate my music collection on the cloud instead of having to do it on my web hosting.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: cloud, music, obsessivecompulsive