Next Generation of Organization: Dynamic Directory
. . . or at least I think that's what you should call it.
As I am downloading all my music on CDs I have come to a bit of a dilemma on how to categorize the music. Do you I go by genre? Artist? Era? Favorites? Tagging has resolved some of this dilemma as you can identify an article with several tags (Tagging is currently not available on Windows so that doesn't help me); however, there is no structure around it. I think that solution is limited because it looses the tree structure of a filing system or groupings. My solution: Dynamic Directory.
I, the user, would define a tree structure of how I want my folder (tag) directory should be, and through those paths, I could get to the same articles without having duplicate articles.
So, for example, at Level 1, I could have Genre, Era, Band.
Genre could then go: Genre > Band > Song or Genre > Era > Band > Song or Genre > Band, Era > [Band > Song], [Era > Song]
You get the idea. By the tagging of the article and defining my tree structure, I could navigate through my groupings as I see appropriate and still reach articles that should be within those groups (tags), even if they are in multiple groups.
This concept could be applied to any application which requires directory structures.
Addendum:
Actually, now that I think about it, as long as you define the next-to relationship and the Level 1 tags, the directory structure could create itself, rather than you defining the paths. The user could have the flexibility to define multiple next-to relationships on one tag.
Comments
I keep all my MP3s sorted by Genre->Artist->Album (When applicible)->Song. This worked out well when I moved to MP3's on my iPod because I could mass tag files based on their directory. This entry in my blog details how this was done. http://www.chrisbunk.com/archives/2005/04/100_gigs_of_unt.html
Posted by: Chris Bunk | September 19, 2005 10:13 AM
I would think that longer term we will see totally structureless filing and very clever search engines. Google Desktop Search and Gmail are the word equivalent; next could come searches based on all the indexed words in a song - surely that exists already?; then if you can find a simple way to tell your device a snippet of a tune (humming? whistling?) it could search for songs that had similar rhythm and tune.
Posted by: Guy Prall | September 20, 2005 09:57 AM
Chris Bunk is absolutely correct. We will definetly be moving towards structureless filesystems in the near future.
WinFS (Windows Future Storage) is basically NTFS on top of their SQL Server. I have already seen demo's of the cool things you will be able to do with it and what you mention is exactly what WinFS is being built for.
Vista (the next Windows release) won't include WinFS but will have better search technologies builtin and they already have something called "Virtual Folders" that are basically saved search queries where you can specify different paramaters (say for music artist, genre, year???) and no matter where that file is on the actual file system you will see it in that "special" directory.
MacOS X already has this stuff to some degree with Spotlight but is also working on virtual folder type things too.
Linux also has several competing technologies that are comparable to this.
Even now there really is no need to worry about your directory sturcture...just let you music manager application handle it. Most allow you to create dynamic playlists or do searches on meta data in the tags. I use iTunes which seems to work great for me.
Posted by: Brad Chamberlin | September 27, 2005 10:08 AM
iTunes is the way to go
Posted by: Bill Karbler | October 6, 2005 03:56 PM