So my big ass mp3 player arrived yesterday. Its all charged up and I'm going to start transferring music to it over the weekend.

I realized I haven't put any thought into organization at a higher level than artist/album which I should probably do before doing any transferring.

I've rejected organizing by year and know I want to keep all of an artist's albums together even if one or two would be best labeled another style. I guess I will be doing some sort of organization by genre with high level folders for rock & pop, country, blues, soul, funk, jazz, etc, and then make a bunch of subfolders for subgenres underneath. But I'm still undecided where to put my country rock subfolder, should it be under rock or country...and world music presents a big problem too...I started organizing by country with sub folders for styles but what about stuff like brazilian soul...why shouldn't that just be in the soul folder... and what do I do with artists that don't really fit one narrow description well (John Cale for example) and where do you put your Joni Mitchells and Van Morrisons of the world...they aren't really rock or folk and singer/songwriter seems overly broad.

And why do I really care to be that organized? Help, I don't want to have to put a lot of thought into this.

I go strictly by artist..

on hard-drive:

mp3/[artist]/[album]/[songs]

exceptions:

mp3/[artist]/[double-album]/[disc#]/songs
mp3/Various Artists/[category]/[album]/songs

Egads man, you're thinking too much.
Artist/Album/Song will suffice and let you enjoy the hell out of it.
Have fun!

Autobiographically.

I organize my folders by genre. There would be WAY too many folders if I chose to organize by artist.

Artist/Album/Track Number - Song name.mp3

If you use itunes, it'll reorganize your music for you according to a standard system, which is kind of nice unless you're a serious control freak. But whatever program you use to organize/put music onto your device should have the capability for internal organization as well.

Did you get that enormous generic one from ebay?

Genre/Artist - Year - Album/Track Number - Song Title.mp3

This way all of the records for the same artist are listed in chronological order.

That is the way I used to do it, changed just recently though. I got sick of trying to decide "well, XTC started out Post-Punk, but then in the mid 80s they really got more alternative pop, so where do they go?" Just made it easier for me to put everything in a #-z folder, then Artist - Year - Album/Track Number - Song Title

I didn't order it from ebay, but yep...that's the one I got...so far its pretty great although its going to take forever to rip everything to mp3.

Fractal, did you date one of the same women as my eighth grade history teacher? Otherwise, how'd you get that picture for your avatar?