I thought that I'd post my method of tagging my music, ensuring that the Empeg's display shows the right information, and that Palantir can use the tags for it's own soup view. This may be useful to some that do not have their own method for doing so, and others that have their own system could post hints or tips that could be useful to me.

When I rip a CD or download the occasional song, I name them according to this format:

{Genre} - {Artist} - {Year} - {Source} - {Tracknr} - {Title}.mp3

not caring about the actual ID3 tag at this point. My G: drive on my music computer is where I store all my MP3s, and these files now go into the folder: g:\00 - Staging\Incomplete. I then listen through the files for quality/skips/pops/etc. and clean up any "hidden" tracks at the end (which may have x minutes of silence). After cleaning up the sound for the MP3s, I ensure that they are named correctly using allmusic.com (don't you hate the javascript links?). Here is my method for naming my MP3s:

Character substitutions:
------------------------
Substitute ^ for ?
Substitute % for :
Substitute _ for /
Substitute @ for %
Substitute ` for "
Substitute ~ for *

Tracks With Punctuation:
---------------------------------------
Urban - Beastie Boys - 1986 - Licensed To Ill - 07 - (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party).mp3
Pop - The Pixies - 1988 - Surfer Rosa - 07 - Where Is My Mind^.mp3
Pop - Talking Heads - 1977 - Talking Heads% 77 - 10 - Psycho Killer.mp3
Electronica - 28th Street Crew - 1999 - Ministry Of Sound% One Half Of A Whole Decade - 24 - O.mp3

Remixes:
--------
Urban - Beastie Boys - 1994 - [Remixes] - 00 - Sure Shot [Fat Teacher Mix].mp3
Pop - Björk - 1993 - [Remixes] - 01 - Big Time Sensuality [Fluke Minimix].mp3
Pop - Badly Drawn Boy - 2000 - [Remixes] - 01 - Another Pearl [The Fridge Remix].mp3

Single:
-------
Pop - Beck - 1993 - MTV Makes Me Wana Smoke Crack [Single] - 01 - MTV Makes Me Wana Smoke Crack.mp3
Electronica - Aphex Twin - 1999 - Windowlicker [Single] - 02 - A Complex Mathematical Equation.mp3
Rock - Bush - 1996 - Glycerine [Single] - 01 - Glycerine [Acoustic].mp3

Compilation:
------------
Pop - Beck - 1994 - DGC Rarities [Compilation] - 06 - Bogusflow.mp3
Urban - Beastie Boys - 1996 - In Defense Of Animals [Compilation] - 06 - Son Of Neckbone.mp3
Pop - Ben Folds Five - 1997 - Lounge-A-Palooza [Compilation] - 03 - She Don't Use Jelly.mp3

Soundtrack:
-----------
Pop - Beck - 1997 - A Life Less Ordinary [Soundtrack] - Deadweight.mp3
Pop - [Movie Score] - 1997 - Romeo And Juliet Volume 2 [Soundtrack] - 18 - Morning Breaks.mp3
Pop - Ahmet & Dweezil Zappa - 2000 - Ready To Rumble [Soundtrack] - 12 - Baby One More Time.mp3

Unreleased:
-----------
Ben Folds Five - 1999 - [Unreleased] - 00 - Video Killed The Radio Star.mp3
Country_Folk - Jack Johnson - 2001 - [Unreleased] - 01 - Flake [Acoustic].mp3
Electronica - Happy Hardcore - 2000 - [Unreleased] - 01 - Nintendo Tetris (Techno Remix).mp3

Song Information:
-----------------
Rock - Cake - 1998 - [Radio Performance] - 00 - Never There [Acoustic].mp3
Rock - Black Sabbath - 1983 - Born Again Tour - 00 - Smoke On The Water [Live].mp3
Rock - Butthole Surfers - 1989 - Double Live - 10 - The One I Love [R.E.M. Cover].mp3
Country_Folk - The Grateful Dead - 1979 - [Live 12_28_79] - 00 - Terrapin Station.mp3
Pop - Cowboy Junkies - 1989 - Misguided Angel - 03 - Sweet Jane [Featuring Lou Reed].mp3
Electronica - Moby - 1999 - Play - 05 - South Side [Featuring Gwen Stefani].mp3

After everything has been named correctly, punctuation is set, and everything is cool, I then move the files into g:\00 - Staging\Complete. I then run all the files through MP3 Tag Studio several times, performing the following steps:

Mass clean up tags: Remove ID3/ID3v2 tags.
Auto tag (from filenames): <Comment> - <Artist> - <Year> - <Album> - <TrackNr> - <Title>.mp3

Note: at this point, I have Case fix and replace setup to "leave case as is" and do substring replacements as per my Character substitutions table above. This makes sure that you can store the file in the filesystem, and still have a ? in the ID3 tag

Direct tag manipulation: <Comment> --> <Genre>
Mass clean up tags: Remove Comment field

At this point I'm finished with the MP3. It is now tagged correctly, and I am sure the file is without audio problems. I now batch upload the file to my Empeg, and then move the mp3's from g:\00 - Staging\Complete to their appropriate directory. I have mirrored what JEmplode will download to my computer via the soup view I have set up. Here are the soups that I have set up in JEmplode:

Artist and Source
-----------------
Search: (genre != "Audio Books") and (genre != "Comedy")
Range - Artist: [,0-9,a-c,d-f,g-i,j-l,m-o,p-s,t-v,w-z
By Artist
By Source

Genre and Artist
----------------
By Genre
By Artist
By Source

These make it easy to update playlists, and easy to recover your music collection (I've had to do this once). What are your methods for sorting/synching music?

Wow, good post. Thanks for the detailed explanation, Mark. Unfortunately, I named my files {Artist} / {Album} / {Tracknr}-{Title}.mp3 which means I don't have Genre and Year in the structure. Genre and Year are also the most mangled of my tags. I really like how you've handled the punctuation problem. That would also involve renaming files in my case. I also used underbar substitution for spaces, thinking that would be a good idea on the linux server. It's not necessary, but that is easily fixed with a shell script, too.

Unless someone has a better idea, my current thinking is to create a tag.txt file in each subdirectory that contains year & genre. Then I can write a shell script to rename everything based upon data it finds in this tag.txt file and the existing file name. If a tag.txt doesn't exist in an Album subdirectory, it inherits from the directory above. That way I can have a single tag.txt at the Artist level which contains the Genre information. I need to work out those details... Once everything is renamed, I can use MP3TagStudio to retag based upon the filename and delete the tag.txt files. I suppose I could also retag with Perl, as there are supposedly tagging libraries for Perl. I'm not very good with Perl yet, though.

I still haven't decided what to do about multi-artist compilations... Storing them in a "Various Artists" directory but tagging them with the performing artist makes sense except for what it does to the soup. The tag structure is also not adequate for classical music, where ideally one would have both composer and performing artist fields.

{Genre} - {Artist} - {Year} - {Source} - {Tracknr} - {Title}.mp3

Cool, I use exactly the same format for downloading songs with Jemplode, so that I can run a filenames-to-tags pass in Tag Studio.

A few differences, though:

1. Instead of ".mp3", did you know you can put {ext} as a filespec into Jemplode? Like this:

{Genre} - {Artist} - {Year} - {Source} - {Tracknr} - {Title}{Ext}

(Note no period.) That way you can get WAVs and WMAs and such, too.

2. When grabbing a compilation album that contains multiple artists, I do those separately and change the spec to:

{Genre} - {Source} - {Tracknr} - {Artist} - {Year} - {Title}{Ext}

... So that the files come out in track number order.

3. I do not do character replacement. I simply make sure that all of my tracks are named in such a way that they do not break Windows filename specs, and do not contain the space-dash-space sequence in anything other than the track title (since Title is the last one in the sequence, Tag Studio correctly imports the title even if it has space-dash-space). This is pretty easy to do, I just do a few searches in emplode or Jemplode looking for the usual suspects of DOS-illegal characters. Sure, it's not perfectly accurate, but it simplifies the download procedure and gets rid of any complications.

Windows filename specs

Mmmmm. Arbitrary limitations. FYI, Unix allows every character in filenames except `/', which is used to delimit directories.

FYI, Unix allows every character in filenames except `/', which is used to delimit directories.

Including the character code which dings the PC speaker. I've heard, though never verified, that you can name a file so that the PC speaker goes off every time you ls a directory. Ah Stupid Computer Tricks.

Matthew

Better, I have somewhere the filename that makes the cursor run all around the screen

Mmmmm. Arbitrary limitations. FYI, Unix allows every character in filenames except `/', which is used to delimit directories.

[pedant]And U+0000, which is used as a string terminator.[/pedant]

LSB says that characters above U+00FF (indeed, above U+007F) should be represented in UTF-8, which is of course the Right Thing[1], but I don't know how widely-adopted that is yet.

Peter

[1] When you're bored someday, try, on NT/2000/XP, making some files with characters above U+0100 and then accessing them from non-Unicode programs such as Cygwin. You'll find that "ls" lists them with question marks instead of the high characters -- and that when you try to open the question-marked name, it succeeds. And it's not simply using the question mark as a wildcard: it won't match non-high characters. Of course if there are several high-character names which match, you get an arbitrary one. Cheers, Boycey.

I really meant printable characters, but since you can use almost any non-printable one, I suppose that's relevant.