Ask HN: How do you handle your music collection?

I exclusively stream music on demand from the Internet these days, primarily from Spotify.

i use rhythmbox; neat, easy to use and familiar [since it's inspired by Apple iTunes]

quality: if you want to take your music to the next level, i recommend getting a good set of headphones AND using flac format instead of mp3

I use iTunes Match so that my music collection is available on all my devices without taking up any disk space.

The good, old-fashioned way: I store my music on my hard drive (lots of gigs), and using MusicBee for playback and management. Awesome audio player! I am a huge music enthusiast and if a release doesn't come with album art, I download the picture from the net and put it in the metadata.

One day I got a cheap-ish NAS then used beets [1] to organise and copy all the music on my computer to it, listening to it with Banshee[2] over the network.

Then I got Spotify and don't bother much with it anymore...

[1] http://beets.radbox.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banshee_%28media_player%29

Album art is an image file which goes in the folder for the album. Then I sort my files into Genre\Album folder structure. I play it with Winamp. I also put it all in Winamp's Music Library.

I store my music as flac files when available. I don't claim to be able to hear the difference between that and a good quality mp3 file. It is mostly to give me options in the future.

I'm an album person, not a singles person, so I manage things by folder: Genre\Artist\Album. I then tag appropriately. To play an album, I just browse to the folder and play the folder. I keep a folder called "New Music" that I put all incoming/new albums in (so that it is New Music\Artist\Album) - about once a quarter or so, I'll move things out of that folder into the appropriate Genre folder. I'd hate it to be more complex than this.

I don't need my music to be "instantly available on all devices" - I have probably 2,500 albums that I've bought/digitized through the years. I can't listen to that much - I like listening to 1-5 albums per week on rotation/repeat.

I use Subsonic, perfect for my needs.

http://subsonic.org/

I use grooveshark for 'casual' listening. For anything I want to keep and put on the phone or play in the car:

Music is stored on a samba file server on the network as: Music/Artist/Album/file.mp3, or Music/Artist/file.mp3

Played over the network using foobar2000. Most music is mp3 format, I get flac when possible for future purposes. I can't tell the difference between a high bitrate mp3 and flac.

Music is only backed up to a secondary drive, not to any cloud. It's so massive and replaceable that it's not justifiable for me to upload it to a cloud backup.

My workflow for importing music files is not the best and needs improvement. Currently I use foobar2000's feature of moving songs to a specific folder (samba file share) named after the artist/album. But I import music so infrequently I forget how to use it.

I have a diverse collection of classical music which doesn't fit either of the usual Artist/Album/Track entity relationships or my OCD, so I ended up writing my own music database.

The feature-set is mostly geared towards accurately storing western classical music circa 1500 to the present day. It also supports albums ("non-classical") too with correct support for multiple CDs.

Whilst it is web-based, it basically spits out XSPF (essentially a "better" M3U playlist) that point to the files themselves.

Source is https://github.com/lamby/musicdb if anyone is interested.

Stored locally, because I don't feel comfortable trusting a streaming site with my music collection. I use doubletwist to sync it to my Nexus 5 and listen using the Shuttle+ app.

I store my music beneath a common prefix, and try to file it neatly:

    /srv/music/
    /srv/music/$Artist/$album1/
    /srv/music/$Artist/$album2/

That allows me to quickly find things, although it doesn't work well for classical music, and I found that I tend to create subgroups for soundtracks which throws things off too:

     /srv/music/Soundtracks/$film1
     /srv/music/Soundtracks/$film2

For playing I use mpd as a music-server, and sonata to play it back. I also run the logitech media deamon thing to present the music to a squeezebox inside the flat.

Mainly I use spotify. Music I have bought are sorted by genre/year/[month/]album. This works for electronic music singles/EPs well. E.g.

music/drumandbass/2014/03/missing_persons_ep

Standardly sensible directory system (External/My Music/Lorde/Pure Heroine [2013]/Team.mp3), correct metadata managed by iTunes, including taking out Deluxe from album names, ripper tags from comments/composers. FLACs are in a separate folder, there's very few of them.

I don't have this accessible by the internet or anything like that, just shared on home wifi, and make up short (~1 day) playlists for my phone, or CDs for older cars.