Organising Your Auralys Library: Songs, Albums and Folders

A library you cannot browse is just storage, and the Auralys app gives you three doors into the same music: songs, albums and folders. Knowing which door suits which collection is the whole art of organising.

This note matches library styles to browsing styles, and covers the small tagging habits that make album view behave.

Three doors into the same music

Song view is for searchers: one long list, a quick filter, done. Album view is for listeners who think in records and want the artwork and running order as the artist left them. Folder view respects the structure you built yourself over years, which for many collectors is the real catalogue.

None of the three changes your files. They are lenses, and switching costs nothing, so let different moods use different doors.

Tags shape the album view

Album and artist browsing read the tags inside your files. A folder of perfectly named files with empty tags will look lost in album view and perfectly at home in folder view. If you care about album view, the fix is tags, added gradually: correct the artist and album fields for the records you play most, and let the long tail wait. formats and their tags explains which formats carry which tags.

Keep a big collection calm

Pin your working set in playlists and favourites, and let the full library be the archive behind them. Most listening days touch a few dozen tracks; the other thousands only need to be findable, and search handles that. A calm library is one where the daily path is short, not one where every file is perfectly filed.

That is the shape of it. The rest is listening: put a familiar record on, apply one idea from this note at a time, and let the player prove itself in the sessions you actually have. If you want to keep going, search and folder browsing in depth is the natural next read.