Rebuilding My Music Library

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DJ Ricky B said:
With myself,

I kind of gave up at organizing my music library. It's a mess! I have many different folders on my desktop all with different music...
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It’s easy to get things disorganized when you do stuff in haste, expecting to go back and clean it up later. I’m sure that’s how much of the mislabel and mistagged music in my library got that way too. Then when compounded with the fact that the entire library is BLOATED with tracks I’ll never play, it’s really quite a daunting task to get it cleaned back up.[emoji4]
 
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ittigger said:
'On your desktop' is the worst place to have them.
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...But they are the easiest for me to access, or drag and drop files to when needed if they are on my desktop. I have like 20+ different music folders on there plus a few folders for cell phone pics, and dj video/pics.

My Promo Only Music was somehow automatically stored on My Drive, so those songs are not in a folder on my desk top. I think the Pool Player did that by default
 
While it may be the easiest for you to access, it's not the best place to store them. You could easily create a shortcut to a root level folder that would be better to store all of these files at.
 
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you are fine to store files on the desktop if you have them in folders, well at least on OSX. That was an issue many years ago, and the OS is not affected like that any longer. What you don't want is a whole bunch of files scattered on the desktop. That will slow you down.

Maybe b/c macs don't use NTSF as the standard-- not sure on that.

Putting the files in one folder just fine and will not alter your performance in any way you would notice. I would recommend creating a few subfolders though.

I know people who run servers who keep many thousands of files in one folder, and many post production houses who store files on desktop (although in one folder). They can't sacrifice a loss in performance, so you are just fine. Mp3s are small enough files individually not to cause any issues.
 
DJ Ricky B said:
...But they are the easiest for me to access, or drag and drop files to when needed if they are on my desktop. I have like 20+ different music folders on there plus a few folders for cell phone pics, and dj video/pics.

My Promo Only Music was somehow automatically stored on My Drive, so those songs are not in a folder on my desk top. I think the Pool Player did that by default
Click to expand...

Well, if you can't be bothered to use logical file storage habits then you should not expect your software to be any better at keeping track of things. Your attitude about key music files needed to do your job seems rather poor.

I don't know where you last left your cay keys Ricky, and software only looks to where it's been pointed. I suggest you put some hooks on the wall and develop the habit of hanging your keys in a consistent place.
 
DJ Bobcat said:
It’s easy to get things disorganized when you do stuff in haste, expecting to go back and clean it up later. I’m sure that’s how much of the mislabel and mistagged music in my library got that way too. Then when compounded with the fact that the entire library is BLOATED with tracks I’ll never play, it’s really quite a daunting task to get it cleaned back up.[emoji4]
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Not really. Just move the key files you really need over to a new folder as if you were in a record store and building a new collection for the first time. When you're satisfied delete all but one archive of the original mess. This will allow you to return at a later date should you decide to go looking for something you knew you once had.

It's also possible to sort you music files according the most recent access date - so, you can immediately identify which files you actually use and those that have never been touched since creation.
 
jaswrx said:
you are fine to store files on the desktop if you have them in folders, well at least on OSX. That was an issue many years ago, and the OS is not affected like that any longer. What you don't want is a whole bunch of files scattered on the desktop. That will slow you down.

Maybe b/c macs don't use NTSF as the standard-- not sure on that.

Putting the files in one folder just fine and will not alter your performance in any way you would notice. I would recommend creating a few subfolders though.

I know people who run servers who keep many thousands of files in one folder, and many post production houses who store files on desktop (although in one folder). They can't sacrifice a loss in performance, so you are just fine. Mp3s are small enough files individually not to cause any issues.
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You can store files on the desktop on a Windows platform. The problem becomes the 255 character limit, in addition to the location of the files. The latter part is also true with Apple platforms. Apple, Linux, Windows, etc all suffer from having to enumerate large amounts of files - so yes, this would also affect an Apple, as well as file servers. This has nothing to do with the size of the file.

Apple can use HFS, NTFS and FAT.
 
you are not going to take a performance hit that you would ever notice, period. I will try to find it, but Apple published something many years ago stating that storing files on the desktop is fine as long as it's in one folder. They admitted it used to be an issue (much older OSs), but the way files are handled are different now.
 
Depending on the amount of files, yes you would. While using DJ software, you 'may' not notice it as the index is already there. If you have a large library and have to wait for it to load, this would be called enumerating. While browsing the system directly or searching, you most certainly would see a performance hit. You may not 'hear' it because most controllers load the song into memory.

I have brought DJ software (Serato) to it's knees and also to the point you had to power off and restart simply because of enumeration (from within Serato). Everything has a limit. I have confirmed this on both Windows and Mac systems.
 
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don't notice anything here, even on my aged 2009 MBP. What should I be noticing?

How many freaking files do you own? Bringing Serato down b/c of too many files? Seriously?!?
 
ittigger said:
The problem becomes the 255 character limit, in addition to the location of the files.
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I think someone would have to completely suck at music file management to have even 1/3 that number of characters in a path. I just sought out the most deeply buried longest name music file in my collection and it's full remote path is 78 characters.
 
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Proformance said:
I think someone would have to completely suck at music file management to have even 1/3 that number of characters in a path. I just sought out the most deeply buried longest name music file in my collection and it's full remote path is 85 characters.
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That's you specifically and kudos if that's true. You might be amazed to see how people store things. I've seen it all. It's not that people suck, some just don't know and others just don't care - until they do.

It's the same with backups. Nothing is important .. until it is (and it's gone).

MS could EASILY prevent the 255 character issue from happening .. but they don't.
 
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jaswrx said:
don't notice anything here, even on my aged 2009 MBP. What should I be noticing?

How many freaking files do you own? Bringing Serato down b/c of too many files? Seriously?!?
Click to expand...

Perhaps, if he has a peculiar file naming and folder structure it is choking Serato itself rather than the OS?
 
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jaswrx said:
don't notice anything here, even on my aged 2009 MBP. What should I be noticing?

How many freaking files do you own? Bringing Serato down b/c of too many files? Seriously?!?
Click to expand...

I have an 07 MBP (Mountain Lion) and a 12 MBP (High Sierra). With enumeration, the systems will slow down or even freeze. This is also true with MS systems.

Yep, seriously. I rip every album and keep them intact. I started collecting in the mid 80's. I also belong to a few pools. My complete library is 430,867 files. My main library is a little under a hundred thousand. Serato breaks somewhere in the 180k-250k realm. iTunes will index them all - but enumeration slows everything down.

The earlier versions of iTunes had serious issues with playbacks of large libraries because the xml file had to be opened after playing each song to indicate what was played when, the data entered and then the xml file saved. This caused significant issues.

Serato aside, large amounts of files in any one location will bring systems to their knees.
 
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that sure is a lot of files in one place- no doubt. Way more than most! If Serato is crashing b/c of this, couldn't you just split the library in half (two folders) so it's not so many in one place (one folder)?
 
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Splitting it in half is not the problem. Specifically with me, within the structure, I don't have any enumeration problems as no one folder contains any more than 40 files. Within Serato, as it's one load of one large index, it breaks. There's no way to split that up.

The same with iTunes, it's one large index. You can't load more than one at a time.
 
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