Solution for integrating loose MP3s in a music collection consisting of albums

[Nyapet]

Hi MP3Tag Community,

I have learned a lot from you, so I now want to share a solution that may be helpful to some of you: how to keep your (album-based) music collection tidy, when you start adding loose MP3 tracks? My solution: group all loose MP3 tracks under one and the same ALBUM ARTIST "Various" and then create ALBUMS per year (called "Singles 1985", "Singles 1986" etc).

Works (mostly) flawlessly, on BluOS/BlueSound.

Audiophile greetings,
Nyapet from Belgium

[ohrenkino]

If you have a number or single files, I would treat them as "singles" which means they get the same ALBUMARTIST and ARTIST and the same TITLE and ALBUM.
Also, I assign these "singles" a probably correct embedded cover picture.

My suggestion does not cater for the idea to treat such files as part of a (virtual) sampler but actually as singles. It's a different approach from yours.

[Nyapet]

Thanks ohrenkino. We both like to have our metadata accurate, but we have indeed different user preferences. By the way, I can still assign individual cover art per single, even when grouped in an ALBUM. Which is nice.

[dec]

and my approach is different again ...

upto recently, i had a mix of Albums, mostly copied from the few CDs i kept with me, and another 50 or so to do, when i have a working CD playert again, and thousands of tracks copied from my YouTube Libraries

but i almost never want to play a whole album, and truth be know, most albums are of variable quality/enjoyment across the tracks

so i always LISTEN by TRACK, not Album, albeit, some 'Tracks' are actually whole albums (of favourite albums eg Dire Straits)

so recently, i took a 'policy decision' to consolidate/integrate all my separate Album Folders (that have the individual tracks in each Album folder0 into a single Tracks collection folder, albeit, as i said, that still includes some albums recorded as a single 'track', and many live performamce eg Chris Isaak, et al)

so now, after using AllDup app, i am just completing manually very tediously deleing the 'double ups' caused by the merge

so i will end up with a single unified integrated Tracks directory/folder (labelled/sorted by Track Artist btw)

[ohrenkino]

@dec

and my approach is different again

You may have noticed that I did not say anything about the organization of files in folders. In fact, that is not important for players to arrange files as long as the tag fields are filled properly. And what "properly" means was the topic of this thread.

[MotleyG]

@ohrenkino

I would treat them as "singles" which means they get the same ALBUMARTIST and ARTIST and the same TITLE and ALBUM.

In addition to this, I append the term [Single] to the end of the “Album” name to differentiate in cases where there may be both from the same AlbumArtist. And for the AlbumArtist, I use “Various Artists” if there are multiple tracks from different artists on the same release, otherwise I use the performing artist’s name.