Recommended file structure for audio files?

[Mr Natural]

I keep all audio stuff,  music audiobooks and playlists,  in one folder on the sd card.  I make my own playlists with mp3 tag and a text editor and it just keeps things simple.  Anyway I've heard it said here that can cause performance issues.  But why?  I would think if there are a given number of files the easiest and fastest way to find them would be if they are all in one place instead of scattered around.  In any event,  is there a preferred file/folder structure?

[flyingdutchman]

@Mr Natural to organise your music, users generally use a structure such as a root folder (MyMusic), then folder denoting bands and within these folders their albums. Within albums folders you would have the tracks

Edited May 3 by flyingdutchman

[andrewilley]

Putting too many files into any one flat storage structure can indeed have performance implications, as finding and fetching an item within a 20,000-item index is clearly going to take longer to process than fetching a 15-file subfolder's directory list. Also, it's hard to actually find anything when scrolling manually through such a long list - either within a player app, or trying to find a particular file in a file explorer. You need some sort of granularity to make a collection manageable.

To put this into a real-world context, imagine going into a bookstore where all the books were just piled up together in no order - you'd never be able to find anything. What you would expect is to find the store arranged into multiple categories first (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Biographies, Geography, Photography, Music, Medical, etc) and then broken down by author, then by series (if appropriate), and finally by title.

What ordering to choose varies from individual collection to collection, and might be different for a classical music collector versus a rap fan. For example I have a lot of Film & TV music, and quite a bit of spoken-word material, so within my overall master 'Audio' folder, the first level of sorting is by overall category - such as Films, TV, Music, Ambient Moods, Podcasts, Radio, Drama, etc. Then within those overall folders I'll create organisational subfolders as needed. So 'TV' would contain subfolders for each show plus a 'catch-all' folder for various one-off material, while Music would contain subfolders for each artist and then further nested subfolders for their individual albums (plus again a catch-all subfolder for one-off Singles). I mostly navigate my collection using the folder structure, as although all of my own music is neatly tagged it's still easier to find something like a Podcast by clicking on 'Podcasts' than it would by trying to wade through 1,000 mixed-up artist names.

Andre

[Mr Natural]

Ok I understand that having the files sorted in sub-folders in some way would make them easier to find for you or me.  But what about the software?  That presumes it knows to look for things in certain places,  which as you say varies with the user.  For example you or I would know to look for Elvis files in the Elvis folder,  or classical tunes in the Classical folder,  but how does Poweramp know that?  Seems like if you had 20k files it would be easier to find one in a single folder rather than the same 20k files scattered about in 137 different sub-folders.  UNLESS the software knows how those sub-folders are structured,  like you or I would.

But the real purpose of my question is how important is this and is it worth changing?  Right now I have about 8k audio files,  a mix of music and audiobooks.  And about 300 playlists.  So it would take a lot of work to reorganize them and then would have to change all the paths on the playlists too. The reason I keep them all together in one directory is simplicity,  easy to make playlists and easy to update.  I synch the "Audio" folder on the sd-card with the same on the PC.  And using a file manager (Directory Opus) I can sort by various tags or synch easily,  very simple.  So far Poweramp handles it well but I do wonder if I'm headed for trouble as the library (folder) gets bigger.

[MotleyG]

16 hours ago, Mr Natural said:

Ok I understand that having the files sorted in sub-folders in some way would make them easier to find for you or me.  But what about the software?

Same idea. If the engine can access the data quickly without a huge index to comb through, it will speed up your access.