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One decision I am having a hard time making is file names. What is a good filename scheme to allow easy browsing of the collection by file directly? What does everyone else use with their collections?
You're on the right track trying to make the filenames and tag info line up, and have it match what's on the empeg. The other important thing is to use specific punctuation characters to delimit fields in the filenames so you can easily parse info from them. I use square brackets, because they're the least likely common punctuation character to actually appear as part of a legiitmate ID3 field, but are still legal characters on DOS and UNIX. When I see people use hyphens, I always wonder how they deal with times when the hyphen is part of the field itself. Some ugly escaping?
As for organization, I personally break my music down into albums and singles, and use a different file mask for each. For singles, I use:
"artist [title].mp3"
e.g.
"Alice in Chains [No Excuses].mp3"
For albums, I put more info in the filename:
"trackno. [artist] [year] [album] [title].mp3"
e.g.
"01. 10,000 Maniacs [1989] [Blind Man's Zoo] [Eat for Two].mp3"
The reason I use different specs for singles and albums is that I want the track number to be used for sorting tracks on an album, whereas there's no meaningful track number associated with a single. Furthermore, starting with the artist field would cause problems on "Various Artists" CDs such as soundtracks. The year comes before the album name because I like my albums sorted chronologically.
I've given thought to adding the year field to my single filenames, and maybe the album it came from just for informational purposes, but I haven't yet begun my "rerip, re-encode, and re-sync" project yet.
My method is a little quirky, but it avoids a lot of the common pitfalls, and since I browse my collection directly via SMB quite often, it works best for me.
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