# How do you organize your sound effects and music?



## Death Wraith (Mar 23, 2006)

After 15 years of collecting music files, 10 years of collecting sound effects, multiple computer crashes and back-ups, plus a teen that loves itunes and his dad that uses WMP as well, my audio collection is a mess. How do you guys organize your music and sound effects? How do you coordinate between itunes and non-itunes libraries and players?

I've tried MediaMonkey but not very successfully. There are so many options! It would be nice to have one software program that can sync with both mp3 players and Ipods and be able to load separate libraries as needed, one of sound effects and one of music.

Does anybody have any suggestions?


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## stagehand1975 (Feb 22, 2010)

I have tried. I get halfway there and usually have the computer crash. I now keep everything on an external hard drive as a backup. But it is just a raw collection of files. I try to organize it and it takes more time than I have to do it. I have a pro dj media player that recognizes them better with less organization. What I mean is it won't recognize file folders within file folders.


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## camsauce (Oct 16, 2009)

I just keep a separate folder for Halloween with subfolders for Music, SFX, Finals/Masters. I arrange all the audio in Adobe Premiere (GarageBand would work good too). It's tedious but it also helps to prefix the filename with something useful, eg. SFX-Graveyard* followed by whatever the sound is.


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## fontgeek (Jul 24, 2006)

I create folders much like camsauce does, I label the files when they are created, and I keep information on the files in a text document or DTP program, and also copy and paste the information into the file's comments. I work primarily on Macs, so doing that step is easy. Just select the file go to "get info" and there is a spot for the information right there. I keep an eye on the folder size, when it approaches a CD capacity, I burn it to a disk and file it, I put the disk name and number in my text document to show where those files are stored.
It's not that hard or time consuming to do if you do it at the time of the creation or downloading of the file rather than waiting 'til you get a ton of them you have to work through at once.


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## kprimm (Mar 14, 2009)

I have a seperate external hard drive that is used for Halloween, I have all my sound files in mp3 format and in folders according to sound effect type or Party music. Then they are broken down into individual albums. I also have a ll my prop info, pictures, animation files and anything else halloween on this drive. Everything on this drive is also backed up on burned cd's, wich are also backed up.


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## Rich B (Oct 6, 2005)

My music collection (almost 1TB) is sorted by genre, i.e. audiobooks, blues, jazz, pop, rock, urban, world, classical etc..... and then by artist and then by album. My halloween collection is sorted by 6 categories, scary songs (nox arcana, midnight syndicate etc), fun songs (monster mash, addams family etc), sound effects, atmospheric (the typical hour long tracks with music and sound effects), movie soundtracks and scary tales. That's the master library, I then created a "working library" that changes each year as I copy new songs from the master library into it and remove stuff from that, the sound effects categories for the working library are broken down by weather, voices, animals, chants, bucky files, screams, and a couple others I can't recall at the moment. makes it easy to find files on the fly. I keep all my files on an internal hard drive on my computer, then a backup on a portable hard drive, and then another backup on another hard drive I keep in a fireproof safe. Have I had crashes before? You bet, but with double reduntant backups I've always been able to recover files as needed.


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