What software / workflows do you use to tag your electronic music?

Mine looks like this:

- Collect some new stuff
- Drop it into KeyFinder(http://www.ibrahimshaath.co.uk/keyfinder/), which stores the musical key in the files
- Perform a Discogs-search within Yate of every release manually (Actions -> Discogs Wizard)
- Move the files into my tagged-releases-folder with a template like this: Album_Artist/Album_Artist-Year-Album-[CATALOGNUMBER]/Tracknumber_Artist-Title
- I then create relative symbolic links to the album-folders, based on Genre, Import-Date, Year and Label. This makes is possible to browse the music in different ways without using another software like iTunes (I don’t use iTunes at all). For that the Actions are very handy. I am using relative links to be free to move my whole collection around. If I was using absolute links, changing the drive name or moving my collection to a subdirectory would make the links invalid, not so with relative links. So I can be sure that I will be able to browse my music collection in different ways on Mac and Linux without the need of additional software (which will be outdated sometime). I am just using symlinks for everything what were static playlists before. It’s not so convenient, but future-save.

For me it’s really important
- to browse music by label, which is not possible in most music managing application on Mac. On Windows there are a few (Music Monkey) e.g.
- to have access to my music without additional software
- that my music files have catalognumber, label and year tags set

For playback I’m currently using Enqueue (http://www.enqueueapp.com/).

I am thinking about how to organize my music collection for many years now… using Yate actions and symlinks really is the first time I think it’s a good way 🙂

Looking forward to hear how you manage your collection!

Hi Lappen,

I’m still using the system. I am constantly changing small things. There will always be things which can be enhanced. E.g. I would like to create symlinks to artist alias, e.g. when browsing /Aphex Twin/ there should be a subfolder /Aliases/ which contains symlinks to all the aliases in my collection, e.g. /AFX/. Not sure what’s the best way to do that, in general I would like to browse my music as convenient as I browse releases on Discogs.

Are you creating multiple symlinks in one level or multiple levels

Not sure if I got you correctly, but I’m currently creating symlinks in one level, to make it more clear, here are the symlinks currently created, folder with {} are symlinked folders:

/Music/Releases/3dtorus/3dtorus-Favourite_Delusion_EP-[Mbsspn005]-(2014)/ (actual folder)
/Music/Releases/By_Import_Date/Single_EP/2014-11-23/{3dtorus-Favourite_Delusion_EP-[Mbsspn005]-(2014)}/ (symlink)
/Music/By_Label/Mobius_Spin/{[Mbsspn005]-3dtorus-Favourite_Delusion_EP-(2014)}/ (symlink)
...

About the date: Yate has a build in variable for it: «\D» – so using the function «Set Variable 2 to '\D'» I can access the date in the symlink function as folder-component.

When I have more time and everything is a bit more clean, I can share the actions on github, maybe you want to contribute and we can improve it together!?

Cheers,
Tim