I didn’t think OP meant physical.

by preference of which albums and playlists go together, then within that… by alphabetical order.

When I had albums the only one I cared about organizing was the one on the end that people could see. I always made sure it was something that showed how cool I was.

I like my folders and separations. I separate the artists by the first letter of the name. I have 27 folders in my music folder. # and a-z. Then artist and album. So my music directories look like Music/R/Rob Zombie/Hellbilly Deluxe/Rob Zombie - Dragula.mp3. I know people who just drop everything into their music folder unorganized and let their player organize it. I can’t do it, personally. Holding the file requires proper placement for me.

I’ve used MediaMonkey for years and let it do most of the work. Mostly I focus on my playlists, like “Current Mindlist,” “Calm the Fuck Down,” and “You’re Gonna Get a Speeding Ticket.” I also do smart lists by artist, genre, or grouping tags. It’s worked really well for my 50k+ files on the computer side. Just need to find a good player for my iPhone so I can pass ratings back and forth along with changes to playlists made on the phone. I used Spotify for a decade or so and have enjoyed digging back into my old stuff.

this is a real problem. one of the next projects is to build a scaner that will leverage the Shazam API to identify and sort all my loose music (about 300% of my collection). afterwards I’ll be using said project to identify ripped physical media from my massive 33/45/78 collections, some of which are local presses from almost 100 years ago that nobody has heard in decades.

I have a quite large music library.

General music folder is organized by artist name, alphabetically.

Within each artist folder I organize albuns by year.

Each track is numbered in the file name itself.

Extra data goes into the file tag, readable by my music player.

Picard musicbrainz + jellyfin + feinshin + lidarr

Works a treat

How I keep my physical music files.

I assume you mean digital files. I keep them all lumped together in a folder. I only have around 1,300 songs, since I only download the specific songs I’m looking for and not entire albums.

I organize my playlist by mood or use. “Working” is high bpm and general upbeat motivating things, “Singing” is things my middle aged ass sings along with when drunk or otherwise chemically enhanced, “Sadness” is the most soul crushingly painful songs that have lyrics I directly relate to, “Sexy time” is for when your mom or anyone else here’s mom visits… the usual.

Um, do you mean discs and albums? Because that’s physical media.

Anything else is bits.

I don’t. Every album goes in the ~/Music folder. I don’t use playlists unless you count albums as playlists.

Alphabetic by artist/band name and then chronological.

Very old school, directories for albums. Filenames begin with 01-, 02-, etc so they pay in the right order. “Playlists” lol. A few shell scripts to play specific albums maybe with a volume adjustment.

My system used to always be a music folder full of album subfolders named like artistName - year - albumName. I did so much manual work to make that happen and then Spotify came along. I mostly neglected my collection for a decade, only adding to it occasionally. When Spotify aligned themselves with Nazis I cancelled my subscription and started about hosting my own collection with Plex for streaming. I had let my organization system go to shit and now I’ve got a mess.

I’m currently working on a script that will identify naming convention issues and eventually spit out a list of commands for renaming/moving folders. I also want the script to identify metadata issues, dupes, and missing tracks. I know there are a lot of tools that do a lot of this already, but I don’t like any of them I’ve found so far. I especially don’t like the idea of an opinionated tool redoing my library by making destructive writes, thousands of files/folders at a time, without me approving changes first. A lot of them work that way.