# Organizing Classical Music on a Portable Player



## DuncanW (Aug 19, 2018)

I have just acquired a Sony NW-A55 Walkman, and am interested in people's experience in storing and organizing classical music on such a device or similar. Overwhelmingly, I acquire music on CD, which I then load to iTunes - it works for me. I can then copy the various folders onto my portable devices, and now my new Walkman. The sound is fantastic, in my opinion, but the small screen presents challenges in navigating to what I want, particularly with a collection exceeding 1,000 discs. I've taken to using sub-sub genres, so I can select all recordings of Mozart Symphonies, or Haydn String Quartets, etc. Would welcome anybody else's thoughts.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

I own the Sony NW-A45 and WM-1A, so this is something I have given a lot of thought to.

I organize by Conductor/Orchestra (so the Artist listing will be something like "Colin Davis/LSO") and then by Album (so, to continue the example, "Sibelius Complete Symphonies"). I put the Composer in the Composer field, but do not organize by that (though you could). So if you look on a computer at the file structure, I have a few hundred "Artist" folders with one to several hundred subfolders, each one an album.

I rip CDs to FLAC with Exact Audio Copy and use MP3tag to clean up metadata so that it is consistent across my collection. I don't know how much control iTunes gives you. But as long as you consistently apply metadata, the Sony players make it relatively easy to sort by whatever means you like.

The Sony players do have 10 "Bookmark lists" that you can use on the fly to create groups of music (by pressing the dots next to the track or album). Personally I use this to create lists such as "all piano concertos" or "all Scandanavian."

I explain all this with photos in a prior thread on this subject.

When you rip classical music CDs what is the order in your title?


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

I just have one huge list of ripped CD's in my player. I search for stuff in the title-- for example if I want Bach's cello suites-- I search for "cell" and get a short list of tracks.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

Sony's DAPS excel at many things, but they do not have a text search function.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

DuncanW said:


> I have just acquired a Sony NW-A55 Walkman, and am interested in people's experience in storing and organizing classical music on such a device or similar. Overwhelmingly, I acquire music on CD, which I then load to iTunes - it works for me. I can then copy the various folders onto my portable devices, and now my new Walkman. The sound is fantastic, in my opinion, but the small screen presents challenges in navigating to what I want, particularly with a collection exceeding 1,000 discs. I've taken to using sub-sub genres, so I can select all recordings of Mozart Symphonies, or Haydn String Quartets, etc. Would welcome anybody else's thoughts.


It is a rather drastic approach, but since the Koechel catalogue is chronological, you will always have this problem. It's why I decided to come up with my own Mozart numbering scheme and all the symphonies can be found numbered DZ 01000 onwards. A simple ordering by album name then gets you all symphonies listed together (and at the top of the list!)

Your Haydn should already follow such a 'DZ' approach, in the sense that every string quartet already has a Hoboken number that should group them together in lists -though I'm afraid Mr. Hoboken's propensity to use Roman numerals means digital devices don't respond as well to his numbering scheme as might have been hoped! V will always come after C, for example!

Given that I doubt you are up for renaming everything, however, I think the more fundamental issue is: do you _only_ listen to music via this mobile device, or do you listen to on your PC, and if you do both, which is the more important source? Point being, if you get it right for the PC, I find small extracts being copied onto mobile devices tend to sort themselves out. But if you're going to use a mobile device as your main source, everything's out the window, because they have limitations you simply have to work around that don't apply on a PC.

The other thing I would bring up (but which probably doesn't apply given the mobile device you've bought): how much fidelity, really, do you expect from a mobile device via headphones. I bow to our own MatthewWeflen who seems to think the two are not incompatible, but if you're listening to music on the go whilst vacuuming, commuting, flying (post-pandemic, I assume!) and so on... do you really care if you're getting 58 trazillion bits sampled at 678 quadrillion hertz? I would suggest not, in which case, a simple mobile phone that is able to connect to your own media streaming server (i.e., one running Emby or Plex) would be able to have access to your entire PC music collection without needing to copy it -or parts of it- to SD cards or similar in the first place. There are issues with internet accessibility and data plan costs in such a scheme, of course, and your profile doesn't say where you're from, so I can't speak to those in any detail. But I can travel anywhere in the world (post-pandemic, obviously!) and have access to my entire 1.5TB of music at the touch of a play button on my Android phone -and with zero concerns about audio quality, which is always more than acceptable, given the playing circumstances I'm in at the time.

Horses for courses, naturally: you've chosen a particular hardware direction I wouldn't have, but that's fine. You now either need to re-tag things to make your mobile device work; have two collections, so your iTunes works as well as your mobile device, independently of each other; or you come up with a compromise tagging scheme that means both are sub-optimal, but work sufficiently for your purposes, wherever you need them.

My approach would be to catalogue "correctly" (i.e., use basic information theory to determine the formal metadata requirements to identify the 'correct' primary key for recorded music) and organise you collection around that fundamental. If your personal media player of choice then doesn't work well with that organisational approach... well, personally, I'd ditch it for one that does. But I guess we might be a bit late for that approach...


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