Unoffical empeg BBS

Quick Links: Empeg FAQ | RioCar.Org | Hijack | BigDisk Builder | jEmplode | emphatic
Repairs: Repairs

Topic Options
#247169 - 22/01/2005 22:57 Organizing MP3s?
drakino
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
I'm going back through my CD collection and reripping my music to MP3 again. I have decided this will probably be the easiest way I can ensure everything is VBR, properly tagged, add lyrics and album art.

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?

Ideally I'd like some sort of Samba VFS plugin and a database holding all the tag info. That way I could retag things easially, and the raw files would just be similar to the FID naming scheme the empeg uses. If I make a tagging change in the db, some tagger could go through and correct things easially Samba VFS would take care of making a nice folder layout based on the database or tags. Sadly I can't find much in the way of any Samba VFS projects doing anything remotly similar to this.

My old method was 8.3 formatted, so not much info was conveyed looking at the names. No real folder structure existed either beyond a single folder for the album. I then threw 650 MB worth of my collection on a CD. This time, space will just be used up on my server, with RAID-5 and tape protecting it.

Top
#247170 - 22/01/2005 23:19 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: drakino]
wfaulk
carpal tunnel

Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
Personally, I use Artist - CD Title - Track# - Track Title.mp3 for regular albums and CD Title - Track# - Artist - Track Title.mp3 for VA albums. That seems to work out pretty well for me.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk

Top
#247171 - 22/01/2005 23:20 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: drakino]
tonyc
carpal tunnel

Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
Quote:
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.
_________________________
- Tony C
my empeg stuff

Top
#247172 - 22/01/2005 23:37 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: tonyc]
wfaulk
carpal tunnel

Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
To be clear, the delimiter I use is ' - ' (that is, space-dash-space). And if I have an artist or track with hyphens, I just don't use spaces there. So: Sleater-Kinney - One Beat - 03 - Oh!.mp3

Although a cooler idea is using different delimiters for each type of data, like put artist in parens, cd title in brackets, track number in braces, etc., etc. That way, you could include whatever information you want without worrying so much about sticking to a set scheme.

Also, it's irritating how many characters are illegal characters in WIndows filenames. Unix only disallows slashes and NULs.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk

Top
#247173 - 23/01/2005 01:15 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: wfaulk]
mlord
carpal tunnel

Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14472
Loc: Canada
I use three directory levels to help keep things convenient:

"artist/album/NN - Title"

Top
#247174 - 23/01/2005 01:27 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: tonyc]
Dignan
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12318
Loc: Sterling, VA
IMO, Bitt's naming format is the best. The others that have been suggested here don't seem very good in my mind. Without the Artist - CD Title - Track # - Track Name.mp3 format, if you have any files from different CDs in the same directory, they won't be in a good order. With this format, you could combine all your MP3s together and you could still have them in order.

I'm not saying you would frequently mix all your files, but even if you didn't, that naming convention makes the most sense to me.
_________________________
Matt

Top
#247175 - 23/01/2005 04:42 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: mlord]
wfaulk
carpal tunnel

Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
Yeah, I actually do both. Artist/Title/artist - title - tk - name.mp3
_________________________
Bitt Faulk

Top
#247176 - 23/01/2005 07:40 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: mlord]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5680
Loc: London, UK
Quote:
I use three directory levels to help keep things convenient:


Firstly, I'm reripping everything to FLAC, so I can reencode later if necessary. I'm still working on a way to keep the tags synchronised between the FLACs and the MP3 files, though.

Secondly, I use artist\album\Disc D\NN - Title.ext for single-artist albums (the Disc D is optional). If it's a compilation, I use album\Disc D\NN - Artist - Title.ext.

If I were to keep the year in the tags, I'd put it in brackets after the title.

At the top level, I have Artists, Books, Compilations, Dance, Humour and Soundtracks directories.

I use space-hypen-space as a field separator. I don't use underscores, and I've not worked out what I'm going to do about Windows-illegal characters (particularly question marks and double-quotes).
_________________________
-- roger

Top
#247177 - 23/01/2005 12:23 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: drakino]
cushman
veteran

Registered: 21/01/2002
Posts: 1380
Loc: Erie, CO
I posted my method for naming MP3 files in this post a while ago, I pretty much use the same scheme now. I use MP3 Tag Studio to do all of the tag maintenence, so I can substitute characters for non-windows allowed ones (like ^ for ?), and they will show up right in the tag.
_________________________
Mark Cushman

Top
#247178 - 23/01/2005 13:05 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: wfaulk]
tfabris
carpal tunnel

Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31563
Loc: Seattle, WA
Quote:
To be clear, the delimiter I use is ' - ' (that is, space-dash-space). And if I have an artist or track with hyphens, I just don't use spaces there. So: Sleater-Kinney - One Beat - 03 - Oh!.mp3

This works extremely well for me, too.

In addition to this, I've taken to including the genre and year in the file name, so that I've got every single tag field represented in the file name. My Jemplode configuration looks like this:

{genre} - {artist} - {source} - {year} - {tracknr:2} - {title}{ext}

Quote:
Although a cooler idea is using different delimiters for each type of data, like put artist in parens, cd title in brackets, track number in braces, etc., etc. That way, you could include whatever information you want without worrying so much about sticking to a set scheme.

No, this doesn't work. Because what if you want to use one of those character types within the file name, and want to have some software parse that data out of the name. For instance, at one point I had put the year in parenthesis. And then I wanted to do a filenames-to-tags pass on a certain group of tunes. And "Was (Not Was)" got assigned a pretty funky year tag. No, I think the space-dash-space thing is the best delimiter solution.

I go a step further. This is my new tagging and file naming strategy, and it's worked well for me so far:

Never Allow A Windows-Illegal Character In Any Field

What I mean is... If the field has a question mark or a slash or something, delete it from the field completely. For instance, using the Was (Not Was) example above, the album name is really "Are You Okay?", but I simply title it "Are You Okay". Or another example, "Foreplay/Long Time" from Boston's first album becomes "Foreplay, Long Time" or perhaps "Foreplay- Long Time".

At first you might think that the above is a bit obsessive, and also a pain in the neck when correcting existing tags. But I've found it's the least amount of work later on because of what it has gained me. What has it gained me, you ask? Here's what:

File names will always, 100 percent, character-for-character, match the tags. So I can freely do filenames-to-tags passes, or vice-versa, and have them always work and always look good and always be correct, on any system. Woops, didn't tag that file? No problem, right click on it and have Tag Studio fix it for you. There are a bunch of other cases where I've found having the tags and the file names match exactly is convenient, and they're all tiny little things, but they all make managing the files and tags a lot easier.
_________________________
Tony Fabris

Top
#247179 - 23/01/2005 13:16 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: Roger]
peter
carpal tunnel

Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4172
Loc: Cambridge, England
I keep my FLACs and MP3s in exactly parallel directory structures, and have a little script (actually Mike wrote it) which runs over the two trees, encoding any FLACs which don't have corresponding MP3s, and any time the FLAC is newer than the MP3, re-copying the tags.

The structures go "Artists/artist/album/NN title.ext" for studio and live albums (with multi-disc albums numbered as if they came from one gigantic disc), and "Artists/artist/title.ext" for stuff from singles, greatest hitses, and compilations (and which I don't already have the exact same version of on an album). Compilations themselves are represented as playlists, "Compilations/title.m3u", which point to their songs wherever those live in the main Artists hierarchy. The only exception to this is continuous-mix CDs such as 2 Many DJs or DJ Yoda, which (as they only make sense played as a whole) live separately in "Mixed/cdname/NN title.mp3".

As for character set, I tend to use proper quotes (U+2019 etc) so they aren't an issue; likewise the program I use for naming a file based on its tags uses fraction slash (U+2044) for slash, which is sort of cheating but looks OK. When I'm looking at them over Samba I still have trouble with colons and question marks, but by and large I just live with the mangled short-names for those tracks and albums. (Though I have got a bug in against Samba, whereby it doesn't mangle Foo?.flac to the, still playable, Fwhatever.FLA but to an extensionless file, despite the documentation saying it gets it right.) I think you need Samba 3.x for this; Samba 2.x doesn't present UTF-8 filenames to Unicode clients properly.

Peter

Top
#247180 - 23/01/2005 13:17 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: tfabris]
DWallach
carpal tunnel

Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
I originally used Grip, which lets you store everything in a MySQL database on the side, but there weren't any tools to help you keep changes to the files in sync with the database. Still, I think the external database is the right idea. Apple's iTunes gets you close to this, but you have to use Apple Lossless instead of FLAC, among other trade-offs. Still, the iTunes interface wins the day for me, particularly for tag management.

Top
#247181 - 23/01/2005 13:53 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: peter]
russell
journeyman

Registered: 22/05/2004
Posts: 50
Peter would you mind sharing that script with the rest of us. I have one i wrote myself to do the same thing you describe but it seams very slow to me.
_________________________
Mk2a 64mb 60gb

Top
#247182 - 23/01/2005 14:13 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: peter]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5680
Loc: London, UK
Quote:
...and have a little script (actually Mike wrote it) which runs over the two trees, encoding any FLACs which don't have corresponding MP3s, and any time the FLAC is newer than the MP3, re-copying the tags....


Actually, I've got one of those as well, but it doesn't (currently) use parallel trees, and it doesn't (currently) copy the tags, either, which is a bit of a pain.

It's written in Ruby, so if anyone wants to take it and fix those problems, then yell at me and I'll fish it out.
_________________________
-- roger

Top
#247183 - 23/01/2005 20:27 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: Dignan]
andy
carpal tunnel

Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5914
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
Quote:
Without the Artist - CD Title - Track # - Track Name.mp3 format, if you have any files from different CDs in the same directory


I can't think of a good reason to suddenly start putting a bunch of files from different CDs in a folder together.

I stick with the simple /Artist/Album/Track # - Track name.ext

I have also started ripping my entire collection, to lame's alt-preset-extreme (don't have enough space for flac). 50 CDs done, 450 to go...
_________________________
Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday

Top
#247184 - 24/01/2005 00:35 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: andy]
hybrid8
carpal tunnel

Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
I keep mine in the same way as Andy. Once you have things properly in Tags, the filenames are rather irrelevant if you use any type of decent MP3 management/player program. If you're going to be playing directly froom the filesystem then names are an issue. I do wish the good tagger programs would go full-tilt on keeping an external database and doing background syncs to the files. I also wish my two favorite tagggers (Dr.Tag and Tag&Rename (which I like only because of Amazon support and auto-numbering)) would allow listing/manipulating by tag structure as opposed to being filestructure-based only. iTunes is the other way around and really stinks if you're starting from scratch with messed-up tags.

Bruno
_________________________
Bruno
Twisted Melon : Fine Mac OS Software

Top
#247185 - 24/01/2005 06:38 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: Roger]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5680
Loc: London, UK
Quote:
Actually, I've got one of those (scripts) as well


...which I rewrote yesterday in C#. I haven't tried it in Mono yet, but there's nothing in there that definitely won't work.
_________________________
-- roger

Top
#247186 - 28/01/2005 05:06 Re: Organizing MP3s? [Re: mlord]
image
old hand

Registered: 28/04/2002
Posts: 770
Loc: Los Angeles, CA
Quote:
"artist/album/NN - Title"


curiously, thats the way iTunes autoformats tracks also.

Top