I have about a gig of music and its always hard for me to find the song I want to here, I've been using windows media player 10, does winamp make it easyer to find your music or something? its really been getting on my nerves, it take me forever to find the song I want to here, anyway just wanted to know what you think.

I'm a fan of iTunes. Sorting can be done not only by filename, but by various ID3 headers.

Media Monkey is excellent for organizing massive amounts of files. You can sort files using any of the id tags in any order, or by filename. It's built off winamp 2 so the playback quality is good

Itunes. you start typing anything, and it narrows it down as you type

Organize is the key!! If you sort you folder by Artist then Album you can find anything! Alternative you can always make playlist, but if you move your music around alot then that won't help much.

For explame here is my music organized:

I like Winamp. I keep all my music in one main folder (with a series of subfolders) and then in the Winamp playlist I add the entire folder (including subdirectories).
Then when I want to listen to a specific song, I press J on the keyboard, and then type in part of the name of the song I want to listen to and once it comes up, press enter and then its playing

yeah i'm gonna recommend you spend some time and organise your stuff into properly named and tagged files in an intuitive folder structure. i have, hell, too much music and i never lose anything.

I just found the search thing in winamp

@Gabe: By search thing, do you mean the Jump functionality in Winamp? 'cause that thing does work great and will go off any part of the filename and/or ID tag.

Its the search up at the top of the media libary window, so say you start to type in pi it will come up with the stuff that starts with pi, such as 50 cent p.i.m.p.

You do know that WMP 9 and 10 will automatically tag and organize all your files if you tell it to, right?

Yeah, mediamonkey (i'm not trying to sell it), wmp9 + 10 can auto organize your collection.

For example, i once had a really messed up music collection, with essentially all files being chucked into my music. I added it to my jukebox, checked for missing tags, then exported to my mp3 player in a neat file tree. I then deleted my music folder and copied the mp3 player's on. The results were this:



IMHO the best way to organize music files is

Main Artist\Album\Songs

@Quactaur, WOOO! for organize!!!

@Gabe, just spend about 30mins sorting out your music collection. I personally hate anything like WMP library.

Yeah i put my songs in artist folders... really not that hard..

Ahh I hate all library type things. Including the one built into Winamp. I just use old school playlist with all my music added.

All my music in D:\Music, sorted by artist.
If multiple albums, in the format Artist - Album - Track - Name.mp3

example:
D:\Music\Metallica\Metallica - And Justice for All - 06 - Harvester Of Sorrow.mp3

Nah mine go by:

My Music\Artist Name\Album Name\Track Name.mp3/wma

Ah, you're referring to Winamp 5's Library functionality. Never used that, but it sounds similar to Jump, but probably, without automatically switching tracks.

Should be sorted like this, of course. By date.



And use the Jump (press "J") with Winamp, as already some told you to.

my dear god - that's the most hard to read music collection ever

It's law, and it's easy.

Mines like neXioz's. Gotta keep those scene rips clean.

I've got 18 gigs of music and iTunes keeps it all nice and neat and easy to find. without itunes, i'd be lost. the actual folders itunes is taking the music from are a bit confusing sometimes though. thats why i love iTunes. no matter how confusing the source for the music files, the library always looks nice and neat!

there are a couple buttons in itunes that i think might organize my files but i'm afraid to push them.....anyone know what "Advanced>Consolidate Library" does? or how the "Edit>Preferences>Advanced>keep itunes folder organized" thing works?
right know i know where its all at (most of the time) but with 18 gigs i dont want it to freak anything out cause it'd be a pain to fix.

Of course. And dated. You miss one day- you're out of the game.