One of my pet projects before I started working on Civil Protection was to try and organize my music using a more intuitive system. I've had several ideas on this, but nothing that's been fully satisfactory. In general I don't want to have to think about music when I want to play it, just select a general style or mood and have everything that plays be similar.

I came up with the idea of having custom genre tags for the rock/metal/industrial spectrum of music that I listened to that worked out well. The basic idea was I came up with different categories of music I thought sounded well together based on a general theme. I was going to try something similar for electronic music, but for something like soundtracks, there's so much diversity, it might lead to way too many categories to be practical.

I've had some other ideas regarding soundtrack organization like having some sort of tree graph or music “map” where I could just pick a “region” of music and have it work from there, but haven't found much software to accommodate that.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to try and get any insight from other music freaks who want to better organize their music besides just clumping them together by soundtrack or composer. If you have any good ideas or know of good software for this task, post it here. I'll be making this a sticky thread since this is an ongoing pursuit of mine.

you could always use itunes it has its genius mode which groups music together, but its more of a playlist.

If you want to group it by mood, I'd just go for having folders called things like 'eerie', 'desperate action', 'dramatic escape', 'small joke' and 'peaceful forest'. Things like that. Then whenever you've got a specific mood for a scene, you just navigate to the folder that best describes the mood. Obviously you'd need a large library of music for all this or you'd just have an army of empty folders...

You could try organizing them according to the type of game they belong or by the type of music they have, that way when you are looking for an specific type of music you'll find all of your similar albums together.

I doubt, that organizing folders according to mood is a good option - at least I organize my music by artist\year - album\, and have separate folder for soundtracks, where games and movies are separated by titles. Knowing, that same soundtrack\album may, and will contain music with different moods, separating music into different folders by mood makes more mess, than helps.

Actually, I've been using one very handy application, called MusicIP Mixer. It analyzes your music with some sort of algorithms. Then you can pick a particular song (or group of songs), and make a mix with similar music from your collection. I must admit, I like it very much. The criteria for "similarity" is also configurable (style preference, variety, artist preference, decade lock, etc.), so if you're not happy with results of mixes, you can tweak it.

Of course, it doesn't actually help you to organize, but still, is a very good tool, when you are seeking for a particular mood in music (heck, you can even save "moods" ). I call it my own radio (since I have loads of music, and am not familiar with all of it).

Having said that, there are sad news - officially this program is no longer supported (still, it's nice, that they provide the download link). I'm running Windows XP 32bit, and have no problems, but people with Win7 or/and 64bits might be unable to use it ;/

EDIT: urls aren't coloured differently, so I'm pulling the link out of BBCode: http://www.amplifindmusicservices.com/w ... nloads.php (Ross, this needs to be fixed ;])

My 2 cents - mood is a good way of compiling music - but perhaps the artist could give you their intended mood or screen action.
Also I think tempo and key would be also handy - matching key and tempo does help transition between scenes.

Maybe when you are asking for music to be submitted for your work you can specify key and tempo. Generally when I've written music for a scene I had the scene provided to me with a rough edit and dialogue.

Just a though.

+1 Great post, I was also gonna suggest Itunes' Genius but this is way better.

Qwk: I've tried this software in the past before. It was a step in the right direction, though not a cure-all method. I think I could organize a lot of my own music, but a less rigid system than folders is more preferable, I agree. My end goal is still just to select a general mood or style and not have to put any thought into it after that.

what i like doing is useing the zune marketplace. its really easy to use and organize and is just got a good feel to it. try it out if you like.. http://www.zune.net/en-US/

Ok I've used this very briefly, and I like it. It does exactly what you are looking for. The only downside is that it organizes them into very basic mood categories, 10 to be exact, using colors to denote a happier or sadder mood. This link is only a demo, but i think its 10 dollars on the developer's website. Tell me what you think.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/37199/chromatunes

Well I don't use a mac, itunes, a lot of my music is custom stuff from games that is unlikely to be indexed, and I think moods may be a little more complex than a happy or sad spectrum.

All i usually do to organize music is folders (according to genre/artist)
Like Rock>Queen>Don't stop me now

I just copy paste and cram everything into my Music folder. No organization, though I'm sure that'd help me in the long run.

Winamp provides you with a automatic Genre distinction. As to decide which track is the most fitting for a scene/series whatever, you still have to judge for yourself. I don`t think there is a functioning program out there which can do that. And I`m glad there isn`t. Think of the Terminator movies ! Protect Sarah Connor!!!


Btw.: www.lastfm.de -> nice tool to find "new" music