Import Music file structure?

Midway

New member
Aug 17, 2025
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King County, WA
I burned most of my CDs directly to the M.2 SSD installed in my Stream1. There are 25 or 30 albums where CDs were damaged or lost but I had ripped them in ALAC some time ago and converted the ALAC files to FLAC using MediaHuman Audio Converter.

The FLAC Album Structure in my Innuos Backup has a structure of an Artist Folder with the Artists Album Folder inside and the songs within that album folder.

I converted my ALAC files to FLAC using a similar Album structure. When importing, do I import the same folder structure of the Artist Folder, with the album folder inside it, or just the album folder that Sense will place in the appropriate Artist folder?

Assuming I just need to import the Album Folder and Sense will know to put it in an Artist Folder that has other Albums in it, if I import an Album from an Artist that doesn't have an Artist Folder yet, Sense will create an Artist Folder for that album?

Does Sense search for Album Cover Art for these imported Albums?

Separate issue I plan to research; iTunes and MediaHuman have a confusing folder structure for compilations, I'm not sure how I'm going to organize those albums.

Thank you.
 
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Hi @Midway , you are free to structure the folders however you wish - Sense will not rearrange or reorganise them at all so it does not matter how you structure this, so would say it's best to do it in a way that works for you. Sense looks at the metadata of the files themselves to compile the library, not the folder naming or structure. As long as the metadata on the files themselves are in good order, then the library should be fine.
Sense won't automatically go looking for new artwork for files upon artwork, but if there is a jpeg in the folder of songs then that will be used assuming that the artwork is not embedded into the tracks themselves. There is a very easy process under Edit Album in Sense to search online for new artwork.

As for compilations, again I'd say there is no hard and fast rule here. How innuOS has treated it in the past is to have a 'Various Artists' folder that sits in amongst all the other Artist folders, and within that Various Artists folder is then all the Album folders. Songs that belong to a compilation to need a specific marker enabled that identifies it as a compilation - again, this can be edited in Sense in case anything needs to be changed.
 
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