Kodi Community Forum

I'm wondering what's the best file structure for compilation albums. I've recently restructured my music library to have individual folders for each artist, and then individual folders for each album within the artist folder. For example:

E:\Music
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Right now, I still have compilation album folders within the artist's folders with just a single file located within them (so for a compilation album, it's folder can be found within the folders of every artist that's on the compilation). For example:

E:\Music
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This doesn't lend itself well for displaying these albums in XBMC, since they're located under each individual artist with their single respective song. I'm curious what methods people employ to clean this up a bit...

Thanks in advance!

Anyone? I know everyone in here with a music library has to have this problem, so there has to be a better solution...

Could someone at least point me to a thread that has an answer to this? I'd really appreciate it.

I'm assuming you are using file view for your navigation otherwise the stucture won't matter for navigation purposes. My suggestion would be to use the library view and make sure your music is properly tagged.

For my compilations I just have a folder called "Compilations" and put all them there. Each track is properly tagged to be the artist and not something like "Various Artists". Not sure your level of knowledge so sorry if this is too basic but Filenames and ID3 Tags are not the samething. Let me know if you need further information.

My structure would look like:

E:\Music\Compilations\8 Mile\01 - Eminem - Lose Yourself.mp3 [Artist is tagged as Eminem]
E:\Music\Compilations\8 Mile\02 - Obie Trice - Love Me.mp3 [Artist is tagged as Obie Trice]
E:\Music\Eminem\... his albums
E:\Music\Obie Trice\... his albums
E:\Music\ [way cooler artists than Eminem or Obie Trice]

So when I pull up Eminem using the library in XBMC I see all of his albums plus 8 Mile. When I navigate to 8 Mile I only see his one song.

Hope that helps.

No, I'm not using file view, definitely library...I realize the file structure has little to do with navigation/display. And yes, all my music is properly tagged. I just don't like my current file structure, since the compilation albums are all split up between the artists and not grouped together...makes it kinda "clunky", since all the songs on these albums are not saved within one single folder, but split up and all in different places within the music folder.

I like the idea of having a "Compilations" folder and I'd considered it, I just didn't like that I'd have to add the artist name into the file name, which wasn't consistent with the rest of my music library - I guess I was hoping for some level of consistency.

(8 Mile was probably not the best choice, I agree...it was just the first one that showed up in my album list, so I went with it...)

Yeah I use the same file naming as you do for my mp3's for albums where there is only one artist.

01 - Rap title (feat. Some other rappers).mp3

But for the compilations albums I have it as.

01 - Some Rapper - His gangsta song title (feat. all of his friends).mp3


I actually have my structure split up into genres with a compilation foldere for each. Like:

Music/Rock/Compilations
Music/Rock/Some Rocker wearing trendy clothes and mascara
Music/Hip-Hop/Compilations
Music/Hip-hop/Some Rapper
Music/Country/Compilations
Music/Country/Some Twangy Artist