[RainDawg]

Originally Posted by Reflection

I'm just looking to get some feedback and ideas on how others organize their bootlegs and other tunes on their computer.

I had a pretty good system going, but now that I have started downloading a lot more bootlegs(resulting in multiple file formats: flac,shn,wma) and started playing around with foobar2000 I think I need to get a new system in place .

Just looking for suggestions and ideas, particularly if you use foobar2000.

First, once I am done seeding a show, I meta-tag the files with foobar2000 and put them into a "to listen" folder. This is a revolving collection of unchecked shows that range from 5GB to 40 or 50GB, depending on how much downloading I've done. Most of the times, the FLACs from here get put right onto my Rio Karma for listening in the car or at work.

Once it's listened to, if it's a really nice one that I'll want to listen to regularly, I use foobar2000 to compress it to OGG and keep it on a media only hard drive. I then backup the original files to DVD for trading and clear them from the hard drive.

Since the files have all been properly tagged, it doesn't even matter how they are arranged on the hard drive. I just use the foobar2000 (are you starting to see that I use this software a LOT ) album list to browse.

Now, for the fun part....every file gets an %artist% tag, which is the main artist for the album. But it also gets something I've called %albumartist% where I put in every artist I want the album to show up under in the Album List. So now, when I go to John Coltrane, I get both the albums released under his name, but also the ones where he's a backup man for Monk or Miles. Similarly, dual-artist albums (common in jazz) will show up under both.

I use a custom sorting script for the foobar2000 album list window that arranges things, primarily by albumartist. I also have a few other lists for organizing by genre, date, and a few other things. I also include a tag for designating "bootleg" or "official" so I can easily turn off viewing one or the other with different viewing scripts.

As long as your files are tagged nicely, you can write scripts for sorting anyway you want....and easily switch between one view and another. PM me if you want some help getting this setup...it's simply the best way to organize huge collections (I've got about 600-700 albums on my hard drive right now).