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Folder Structure


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A lot of people seem to appreciate browsing their collection through a folder structure. I used to think it was a little "old school", but I have come to realize that a digital collection is not easy to make sense of by browsing an album grid, even if you search it, sort it, etc.. The typical "album grid" just does not provide the quick "overview" that one can have with a folder structure. 

 

So I am curious to get some feedback on this - what works for you ?

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My "tagging" is thorough :)

I use a custom system, with a lot of information, which is great to search for things, but i was referring more to the overall organization of your albums. If you ask record collectors how they organize their shelves, you will get answers like:

- one shelf for this favorite artist

- one shelf for a miscalleneous sub-category

- one shelf for new stuff 

- one shelf for stuff i rarely listen to

... 

 

How do you get that flexible with tags? 

 

Or you can think about it like having a bookshelf in which you organize your books. You take one look at it and you know where to go.  And you can easily rearrange things if needed. That's what I miss... Maybe i'm just slowing down with age 🙁

 

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@bodiebill I have found there is no "best" way of organizing a music collection, and what you are doing looks like it is exactly tailored to your needs. It also has the elegance of simplicity. 

 

Its great to see how creative people can be with all these different tools at our disposal. 

 

I have been designing my own solution, working on it for the past two years, and  in that process experimenting and testing  different features and technologies. Its just a hobby... 

 

In my app, which is basically an album grid with some search, sorting, and filtering, I miss having a folder structure.

 

I would like to group albums together using some finer groupings than the basic music "genres", allowing for these groupings to change over time and be as flexible as possible. 

 

One idea I have is to create a freely defined "folder" tree, and drag and drop albums or artists in the different "folders" (with potentially the same album included in different trees/folders). I'd like to find an existing software to play around with this idea (with actual files) and then see if it the concept is relevant for a music collection. 

 

If I find a software demo that corresponds to what I have in mind I'll link to it here. 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I don't know if anyone has read the article I linked above. It highlights some of the pros and cons of tagging and folders. The conclusion is interesting:

 

Better support for information organization may need to go well beyond folders and tags or their artful combination.  As revealed in participants’ sketches, people think of their information in ways that go well beyond the representational ability of either folders or tags. Participants appeared to organize information internally, for example, with respect to time and the steps of a workflow. These internal organizations evolve over time. How can our tools better support us so that corresponding external representations can stay in synch? What if, for example, people could use a digital “sketch pad” to create, expand, and refine the organization of an information collection over time? The ultimate model of information organization may be neither “place this” nor “label this”, but instead, “this is how I see things”.

 

I feel this applies to music and to the mental "models" that we construct, consciously or not, to map out and make sense of our collection. 

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