How To: Media Organization

I would just like to welcome you to the first of my How To series. I have decided to start with something simple, yet at the same time can make all the difference in the world. I know that we all have videos, music, and photos all over our hard drive(s). Windows 7 does a pretty damn good job by default organizing all these different libraries that we accumulate throughout the years. Now, I will tell you something that you may not want to hear: not every computer is ideal for media storage/usage. Here is a cold fact about it: Media content takes up a lot of storage. This screenshot of the Windows File Manager tells us a lot of things that are important: The movie "No Strings Attached" takes up 1.25GB of space. It tells us to where and from where I am moving the file. For moving a large amount of files, the time remaining and progress bar will be more useful; but for me, when I see the 112 MB/second speed, that is all I need to know. That is the transfer speed from my 1TB drive to my 2TB drive. That is pretty fast for mechanical storage, on a SATA 3 Gb/s port. This next image to the left is just a quick screenshot of my entire desktop. This is what was filing my monitor and what I was seeing at the time. The window on the right is the My Computer window. This gives us access to all of my hard drives, libraries, and many other things. Naming your hard drives (if you have multiples) will help keep everything organized and easier to access at a glance. Let's break down my hard drive situation: I have my C:\Windows drive which is just for my Windows installation, and my programs. I also have my D:\Storage drive, which is just a mostly empty 1TB hard drive, which will soon house all my Steam games (Cause those take up a lot of space). Finally, I have my F:\Media drive, which is a 2TB drive that houses my media on this computer. Once I open my Media folder, you see the screen on the left. I have subfolders for Documents, Movies, Music, Photos, Television, Unsorted, and Video on Demand. Each contains what it is titled. The Unsorted is a temporary home folder to video files before I am able to sort and properly name the files. This keeps them in one place and easy to find and organize. In case you were wondering, I have unsorted video files due to the fact that I encode all my video files on this computer due to the speediness of my Core i5-760. It takes about 20 minutes for a movie, even less for a television show. Then I will upload them to the HTPC, which also has a 2TB hard drive waiting to be filed to the brim of breaking. Now let's explore the main folders that reside on my Media drive. First up: Movies.

Above is a screenshot of my Movies folder. Each movie gets its own sub-folder. This makes for a large amount of folders, but makes it easier to organize. This is especially important if you are using a media center program such as XBMC which allows for additional content. Media Managers such as Ember Media Manager "scrape" your movies and then match them up with detailed information from online databases; such as imdb.com. Then it will store information for each movie within its folder. This information can contain plot details, ratings, actors, production crew, summaries, genres, etc.. Windows 7 comes with Windows Media Center, which when set up correctly, can be a powerful Media Center program. Unfortunately, it does not support the files and information found during a scrape. So it all depends on your choice of media center program. I would recommend Windows Media Center to beginners due to the fact that on first run, it helps you set up the program. Also, it taps directly into your Libraries, so assuming you have them pointing to your media content, you will be set to go. If you do not have the Windows 7 incarnation of Windows Media Center, then XBMC is your best option. It is free, lightweight, and highly customizable. It is simple to use yet powerful. It supports all the information files, movie stills, and fanart. This is great if you like to be able to choose how the content is presented, and you can see a summary of the movie or television show. To the right is a screenshot of the inside of the Transformers movie folder. As you can see, it is empty except for the movie file itself, which is fine by me. I would rather have a large amount of folders within folders because I feel it is a lot cleaner and more organized. Next up is the television folder. Once again, opening this folder reveals more folders. Each sub0folder here contains a single television show. This helps separate video files so if you want to watch just a certain season of Show X, you can be sure that you are only getting those episodes.
And before you ask, yes there are separate folders for each season of the television show within their main folder. Now this is not as important to have, it is just something I like to do. This also holds much more weight when you are using XMBC and media scraper to add extra curricular information to your content. In all reality, you can have all the information and more than you would find on TV guide or the Guide program on DishNetwork or DirectTV. If you so happen to record television shows onto your computer, you might as well have all the information that you would be able to find from a guide program on your television. Now once again, this file system can differ from person to person. I am just showing you how I organize all my media content. The next screenshot shows the Season 3 folder of the show The Big Bang Theory. As you can see, I have a uniform naming scheme in this folder. Note: this is my old naming scheme. I am working on updating all the file names to be homogeneous throughout my media, especially the television folder. You can also see that in the list of episodes, there is a change in the icon about 2/3 of the way down. This is because I have two different file formats in this folder. I am working on converting all the videos to .m4v files. This is the iTunes, Zune, Windows Media Center, and Android friendly file format for visual media. The .mkv file format is an open source file format, but it is not supported by Windows Media Center, iTunes and Zune. This makes it kind of a strange fight: Open source software and formats are much better in theory, but I also want the formats that are widely supported. Once again, we fall back to the Law of Averages. The next screenshot shows how a final and more polished folder will look once finished. This season of The Big Bang Theory has my new naming scheme, all the files are homogeneous, and this makes for a better looking and more organized file system. I chose to use extra large thumbnails so that we can actually see the preview thumbnail. This makes it a little more visually interesting, in my opinion.

Music is the final folder I want to discuss. But I am not going to provide a detailed structure here due to the fact that which ever program you use to rip your audio CDs will make the structure for you. A basic structure goes like this: Artist>Albums>Songs. Everyone names their files differently. You don't need to have the artist and album in the song file name due to its tagging and metadata. These will provide all the information needed to properly organize the music in their respective programs. One thing I would suggest to anyone is to use a Lossless codec when ripping their audio. The files will take up more space, but will have a higher audio quality. This is if you have the space to do so, like an external hard drive, or a separate drive in your computer just for music. If not, then the standard MP3 format will do just fine. I say this because you probably do not have a high end sound system or pair of headphones that you use with your computer. Not many do. Music files are also heading the way of the Dodo due to new programs and services such as Pandora and Spotify. Google Music is also a great way to offload your music collection so you can free up some hard drive space. The options are endless, and now is the time to buy in and try everything.

Well, I hope that you enjoyed my little tour/How To. This is a test run, so this may continue, and it may not. It all depends upon you, the reader. Let me know what you are interested in seeing in the comments.