iTunes, Rhythmbox, Quodlibet, Navidrome and the iPod are all good at organising albums. But for singles, I find it pretty tedious. They add a lot of clutter to the album art view with entries that only have one song attached to them. They also clutter the artist browser with entries with just one song attached.
At the moment I use music managers like those mentioned above for albums, but for singles I just have them all in one folder on my desktop that I drag into a simple music player (reAmp, a classic Winamp clone). I find it works well for easy listening. As a result, my music manager is clutter free with albums I can choose when I want to just “press play”. But I don’t have access when I’m away from my computer.
Has anyone else struggled with this?
I edit the tags so that the Artist tag is “Singles”, the Album tag is [The Artist Name], and the Comment tag [Album Name]. (Or I discard the album name entirely.) This way I get just one “artist” entry in any app for all of my singles instead of a bunch of artists with one song each.
On my hard drive, I normally do
/artist/album, so for singles I have a “Singles” folder just as if it were an actual artist, with a ton of folders inside, one for each artist name. Inside each artist folder is the MP3s without further organization.If I have full albums from some artist plus some singles, I usually keep the artist name as-is, and put the singles into a virtual album named “Singles”.
So, like this:
/Music/Rubblebucket/Omega La La/MP3s /Music/Simon & Garfunkel/Bridge Over Troubled Water/MP3s /Music/Singles/A-Ha/MP3s /Music/Singles/Air Supply/MP3sWith tags having the same structure.
Yes, this results in the “Singles” artist having 245 albums, but that’s never been a problem to me. I never use a view in any app that shows all albums.
That’s the best idea I think I’ve heard for this problem.
Another idea I’d considered (if using a media library application) was to make compilations with several songs merged into one mp3 at a time. It doesn’t bother me in theory, but for some reason I don’t like the idea of it.