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Topic: best naming practice for sound tracks/various artist (Read 2849 times) previous topic - next topic
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best naming practice for sound tracks/various artist

My albums that have various artist/and or sound tracks from movies are not being shown together, but instead are scattered throughout my library.  Which naming practice is recommend to keep them together, thanks.  BTW I'm using PLEX server.

mick

Re: best naming practice for sound tracks/various artist

Reply #1
I'm not familiar with FLEX but normally you tag the file with the album/artist/title, etc.  Then your player software should allow you to select/sort by whatever field you choose.

If your player software can't tag your files, Mp3Tag can tag most formats.

Re: best naming practice for sound tracks/various artist

Reply #2
I don't use Plex for music, but I do know that, when I've edited metadata for video files using Plex, the tags don't always 'stick'. An automatic scan can sometimes change them.
I tag audio files with Foobar2000, then use the 'file rename' option to use the resulting tags for the file name.

Re: best naming practice for sound tracks/various artist

Reply #3
Various artists is why I started using the Album Artist tag, instead of just Artist. So the album artist in that case is VA and the individual tracks can have their individual artist tags. (One alternative is to put the artist names in the track titles...)

I don't know how PLEX handles this, though, and at the end of the day I still mostly use the folder structure view. :)

Re: best naming practice for sound tracks/various artist

Reply #4
I suggest a rather well tagging and a file naming scheme which is sorta minimal, but adequate. I use just "Artist - Songname.ext", and all further information is only recorded in tags.

Furthermore, my music collection is organized via folders such that: "<music root>/Artist/Artist - Album/Artist - Songname.ext" This makes it easy to move just one album, one song or an entire artist's collection in one go, without having to rename everything or messing up the entire structure. The database scans all the files and organises them according to tags. I've yet to find a more portable and self-organizing solution than that. If a player can't play these files according to their song number information, in order, I'd use a different player, if a music software is uncapable of doing that, it's not worth bothering with, IMO.

Re: best naming practice for sound tracks/various artist

Reply #5
@polemon:
++ for organizing the music collection via folders. A human readably structure outlives all possible changes in database structures and players.
Guess everybody has his/her own preferences here. Mine is like "<music root>/Artist/[year] - Album/Tracknumber_Artist - Songname.ext" which I found to be to most compatible/readable format for me, since it sorts for release years and track order in your file explorer etc.
Alas you can't always change your player easily, especially car stereos are notorious for playing in alphabetic order...

Proper tagging is mandatory. By doing so it's a breeze to change your file/folder layout (e.g. with mp3tag) if you want/need to...

Re: best naming practice for sound tracks/various artist

Reply #6
++ for organizing the music collection via folders. A human readably structure outlives all possible changes in database structures and players.
Guess everybody has his/her own preferences here. Mine is like "<music root>/Artist/[year] - Album/Tracknumber_Artist - Songname.ext" which I found to be to most compatible/readable format for me, since it sorts for release years and track order in your file explorer etc.
Yeah, your variant is probably better, when it's not important to share the collection with other people. The scheme I use (with the redundant artist information, etc.) is often used by DJs. The controllers and software they use, historically was only able to read filenames and cared little about tags and meta data. Hence this scheme kinda became a de-facto standard. It facilitates searching through a directory structure via artist and songname, which is the main thing when DJ-ing. Sometimes they'd put all their files like that into one directory, bei it on a CDROM into the root directory, or on flash media, since in that case going by album as such doesn't really matter. I.e. The scheme I use is entirely geared towards portability.

When it comes to in-car infotainment systems: I had a case where the stereo would only read MP3s from CDROMs (apart from regular CDs, etc.). The drive was horribly picky, it would reject burned CDROMs like crazy, no matter how carefully they have been burned. I ended yup modding the stereo with an AUX-IN (the car had a deactivated option for that, I figured out how to enable it, and modded a connector into it). I had a 3.5mm TRS connector hanging into a cup holder for a while, but I ended up attaching a Bt-receiver permanently to that port and hid everything behind the plastic paneling in the car. Then, my music came from my phone or tablet, streaming the music to the hidden receiver via bluetooth.

I got rid of that car in the meantime, and newer cars come standard with Bt connectivity, so that's not much of an issue anymore. But me modding the Bt receiver into the car, was by far the best thing I did to the infotainment system, etc.

 

Re: best naming practice for sound tracks/various artist

Reply #7
This bites me as well.. I generally use Artist/Album/Track# - Track Name.extension. It works well for me personally as I only ever buy whole albums. On the other hand, my wife loves compilation disks, so most of hers ends up under a various artist directory. The problem comes on players that prefer tags over directory structure. I invariably end up with the same song 12 times under the same artist since she has 12 different compilation disks with the same songs on them.