I’m setting up storages for my library and am curious about the experiences of this endeavor by others. Specifically, I’m wondering whether it makes more sense to make only one storage, which would be the main audio folder (/Audio)or would it be better to creat different storages for all folders. ex. = Audio/music, Audio/jingles, Audio/Station IDs, etc. Please, would anyone wish to share their experiences on the best configuration?
I thank you.
Regards, Alec
Alec
A good question and one that has no right answer!
See http://forum.mairlist.com/index.php/topic,4334.0.html for some thoughts …
Ron.
Ron-
Thank you for that. I’ll read the post for some ideas 
Best regards, Alec
I’ll just add my two-penn’orth: what you’re asking isn’t really to do with Storages, it’s a data storage organisation question. It doesn’t matter to mAirListDB whether you have one Storage or a hundred Storages.
(And incidentally, with your data organisation, you could have just one Storage, for C:\Audio. mAirListDB does recurse into the subfolders during a Synchronisation. 
But I digress …)
What you really want to ensure is that your chosen organisation is efficient for Windows. Hence, you ideally want to distribute the number of items (subfolders or files) so that no one folder contains significantly more items than any other. And remember that each top-level folder (in rather simplistic OS terms) contains all the items in every subfolder under it. So for sheer efficiency reasons, you really don’t want to do that if you can avoid it.
I’ve had to plan quite large data stores for a number of businesses of all sizes in my professional career as a computer geek, so based on my experience, ideally I would:
Put all audio on a separate physical drive from all other files (or more than one physical drive, if you have a large number of audio files, maybe 50,000 or more?).
Split the ‘music’ files up into sets of roughly equal numbers. This may not be as simple as it sounds. You are likely to have many more S and T artists than others, especially so if you consider ‘The something’ as a ‘T.’ 
So you may go for the ‘old-fashioned four’ folders based on the old UK phone book for London: A-D, E-K, L-R, and S-Z. This works well if you consider (say) Elton John as a ‘J’ and not an ‘E.’ For very large libraries, you may need 27 top-level folders (named #Others—which is where you put 10cc and 1910 Fruitgum Co. for example—and one each for A through Z).
You can usually put all station-related files under a single top-level folder (named something like Station Audio), though if you do a lot of voicetracking or local pre-recorded snippets or packages, you might even need to split up the ‘station’ audio into two or three top-level folders.
All of that will keep the performance as high as possible (important when you need to retrieve audio for live on-air playout!), even across a network. The rest (within mAirListDB) is pretty much unchanged, though I’d advise that all mAirList PCs have the same networked drive letter mappings. That keeps everything sane, and means that any quick swap to a mirrored backup drive (due to failure of the main drive) is simply achieved by re-mapping the network drive letter(s) to the replacement/backup physical drive(s).
BFN
Cad Delworth CEng MBCS CITP
Looking back at my previous post on this topic, my original comments still stand and I echo Cad’s post above. I’m still using 0-Z sub-folders for my tracks and have found it quite satisfactory for my 17,000+ songs. New songs are usually ripped/tagged on my house PC using my own software application and sent to the relevant sub-folder (eg: Z:\MUSIC\A for my ABBA songs)… Again, using my own library tool - my tracks may exist in multiple categories so that I can sort/copy/export all my “Punk” tracks from 1976, or all Instrumentals from the 60s (you get the picture).
As Cad says: Jingles and other station audio can live in their own subfolder. This makes a sync of your recent adverts or jingles fairly quick if you also happen to have 1000 or so songs waiting to be entered into mAirListDB! This means that not only is an import routine fairly quick, your “Imported/Unsorted Tracks” folder in mAirListDB doesn’t become too bloated with items.
So, a typical station folder may look something like this:
C:\DEMO FM\ADVERTS
C:\DEMO FM\JINGLES
C:\DEMO FM\MUSIC
C:\DEMO FM\MUSIC\0
C:\DEMO FM\MUSIC\A
C:\DEMO FM\MUSIC\B etc
Repeating my previous advice regarding moving songs around in specific playlist/category folders: Don’t! It’s much better practice to keep the audio in the same place and rely on the scheduler database to handle the category/rotation settings. Moving songs between A-List and B-List folders is usually asking for trouble although this kind of warning is really geared towards StationPlaylist Creator users
…and as for the actual hardware: size does matter - as big, fast and reliable is the general rule of computing
Ron, Cad, Charlie,
Thank you all for the info. I’ll organize according to your advice.
Thanks again and best regards, Alec