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Topic: How do you name your files? (Read 7556 times) previous topic - next topic
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How do you name your files?

Because I user MYHTPC I have always named my songs track number-song so that I dont have a bunch of text across the screen. There is limited space and track name takes up enough space.

Ive notice most people using naming conventions that are very long, I see the benefit of have all the info in the file name but when you are using a player or browsing doesnt this make it complicated to look at the file name like

Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train (1982) Diary of a Madman.mp3

or something like that or am I missing something? I am a amateur so please excuse any obvious oversite. I am about to rip a large collection using FLAC and am trying decide on how I want to name my files. This forum has been incredibly helpful!

I wanted to see how others are naming there files and why?

Thanks

How do you name your files?

Reply #1 –
My Music/Artist/Album/Artist - (Track #) Title

The reason for the slightly unusual 'Artist - (Track #) Title' setup is so that tracks are listed in order when listed alphabetically but you can still pull an individual file out of context and know what song it is.

How do you name your files?

Reply #2 –
I like it plain and simple:

Code: [Select]
Artist - Title


They get named the same way on my harddrive too, thanks to MP3Tag's Tag > Filename feature.
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How do you name your files?

Reply #3 –
It depends.  If it's a "regular" (i.e. non-soundtrack) CD, I use Track_Artist_-_Track_Title.  I leave everything else up to the tags.  Example -

Sarah_Brightman_-_What_a_Wonderful_World.mp3

For soundtracks, I use CD_Title_-_Track_Title.  Again, I leave everything else up to the tags.  Example -

Free_Enterprise_-_No_Tears_for_Caesar.mp3

How do you name your files?

Reply #4 –
Artist/Album/Track# Title.xxx

Though I haven't had to mess with (or look at) filenames in the past couple years.

How do you name your files?

Reply #5 –
I've adapted to the iTunes naming scheme:

Artist\Album\Track# Title

Example: 3 Doors Down\Away From the Sun\01 When I'm Gone.m4a

It's easy and works for me since I use iTunes for ripping and let it organize my music folder.  Has made things very easy for me.  Some people would hate that but I like it.

How do you name your files?

Reply #6 –
For complete cds I use the scheme:
Drive:\Music\Artist\Album\TrackNumber TrackName - Artist

For artists that I only have a few tracks by:
Drive:\Music\Artist\TrackName - Artist

Artists that I have less than four tracks by just sit in the music folder in the form:
Drive:\Music\Artist - TrackName

I orignally adopted this scheme back when I used a RioVolt for portable music, though it's carried over nicely for my Archos Recorder as well.
"We live as if the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be..." - Angel

How do you name your files?

Reply #7 –
Artist\[Year] Album\Track # - Track Title

How do you name your files?

Reply #8 –
I'm sure there have been threads like this before.

Anyway...

"Artist\Album\Title" The rest is taken care of by tags.

How do you name your files?

Reply #9 –
As the vast majority of my music comes from video games, songs are more recognizable by their "album" (game) than artist, and many games contain multiple artists, so I usually have it like this:

Game [System*]\Soundtrack**\Game*** [System*] - [Track #****] Title.ext

* (optional; only if different systems have different music for the same track of the same game)
** (optional subdirectory; OST or music for games w/o OSTs stays in the Game root directory)
*** (Soundtrack is listed instead if from a special album that is not the OST)
**** (I also use "Extra" in it's place for a special track, or "MIX" for a remix track; such as those from OCReMix or VGMix)

I use brackets for the track numbers (which help to order things) because I like to denote that as low relevance (track number in regards to the song itself, and not the Game, is somewhat irrelevant).  I also like to have the Game visible in the file name for easy manipulation and transfer of individual songs.

I put the composer in the "Artist" tag of each corrisponding file.  For remixes, the remixer goes in "Artist" and the composer goes in "Composer".

--------------------

For everything else:

Artist\Album\Artist - Album - [Track #] Title.ext

How do you name your files?

Reply #10 –
Music\Artist\Artist - Title.ext

I use meta-tags for the rest of the data and have some foobar playlist code to format it appropriately.

I put playlists for the albums in the music directory as Artist - Album.ext

How do you name your files?

Reply #11 –
thanks for the replies. SO I guess how I name my files isnt so different. I am a member of quite a few large forums but the number of posts some of you have is some of the highest Ive ever seen. Thats great!!

How do you name your files?

Reply #12 –
artist - album/track# - title.xxx

All my music is from complete album, and stored in CD for listening with a portable mp3 player.

How do you name your files?

Reply #14 –
"Artist/Album (Year)/Artist - Title.ext"

How do you name your files?

Reply #15 –
artist\album\track nr. - title
I believe that there is no idea of having the name of the artist in two places (directory and filename).

How do you name your files?

Reply #16 –
I'm basically doing the same as you, track - title. With folders, it looks like this:

\flac\artist\album\track-title.flac
\mp3\mycds\artist\album\track-title.mp3
\mp3\audiobooks\author\book\track-book or book-track.mp3
\mp3\artist\album\track-title.mp3
\mp3\radioplays\artist\album\track-title.mp3
\mp3\soundtracks\movie\track-title.mp3
\mp3\variousartists\album\track-title
\mp3\radioplays\artist\album\track-title.mp3

For books, often the tracks don't have a title, so it's the same as album.  Because of a limitation on my MP3 player, my Artist-Album-Title must be unique for every single file.  So I set the title as album-track or track-album.  I'm not sure which is better  yet.  Either way, this is an important rule to follow for my player, a Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra 60GB.

The Nomads use tags.  They dispose of the filenames.  So they ONLY use Artist, Album, and Title to determine a "unique" entry.  They use the track number, but only for ordering, not uniqueness. 

If Artist, Album, and Title are the same, for two differrent files, regardless of any other tags, different file names and even different file types (wma and mp3), the Nomad's consider it a duplicate track.  If tags do not exist, it tries to guess them from the file name.


This means I have to make sure that Artist, Album, and Title are unique for every single audio file in my collection.  The easiest way to avoid dupes for me is to change album or title tags as requied. For music I change the album.  For books and radio plays I change the title to include tracknum.

If I used same titles/album/artist in audiobooks, but with unique tracks, the Nomad would only accept the first track and consider the rest dupes.  I set the file name to the same thing as the title then.

That takes care of the Nomad.  But what about other MP3 players?  My wife has a Sony S2 am/fm/cd/mp3 player.  It browses by folder, so the short file name format with folders works here. 

Also, DVD players play MP3s too, although some don't handle folders as well as others.  One thing is, they are limited to Joliet CDs, which have a max name of 64 chars I think.  So, track-title is better for 2 reasons.  It keeps the name short to hopefully fit in Joliet max file names of 64 chars.  And if I use track num first, it usually keeps them playing in correct order on most MP3 players.

Then there's the audio players on computers.  Most of today's file systems can handle long file names, so it's not an issue.  But tags still are.  What tags do you need to be useful in your music player of choice?

- artist, album, title, track are bare minimum for me.

- I use genre to sort out music from audio books and radio plays.  I don't pick every genre under the sun.  Is that dance/trance/techno/synthpop/electronic or electronica?  Is that rock, classic rock, alt.rock or alternative rock?  I don't know.  I usually have one artist's albums all under one genre.

- Year is good to have, if only to pick out albums of an artist over time when making playlists and to better document what you have.  Some playlist generation tools make good use of it.

- I find Comment is handy for saving dates of radio plays.

- I use Encoder / Encoded By to document who made the file and what was used to encode it (eac / flac / lame)

- I haven't started to use Various Artists or Composer yet.  What I do is set the DJ of a compilation CD to "Artist" and set the artist of a track to "Orig Artist".  For sountracks, I just put artist in artist.  I don't think I'm necessarily doing this quite right yet and it may take more thought.

- I use ReplayGain on flac files.  I haven't used MP3gain on MP3s yet. 

- Some players let you include track ratings, etc.

There are lots of other tags, both in ID3v2 and Vorbis / Flac, but I don't use them.  I try to keep my tags down to the minimum of what I need to accurately identify a track and it's history.

BTW I'm using Tag & Rename to do both tags and file names.

Summary:
- which tags do your MP3 player(s) use? PC, portable, CD, DVD, ?
- how does it use them?
- what is the best way to ensure tracks play in order?
- what do your music players do with file names?
- what file name convention will help tracks play in order?
- do you need to use file names to make up for lack of tag support?
- what file name length limits do you have on your players, if any?

How do you name your files?

Reply #17 –
artist/album/arist - album - [#track] title

the reason for the full filename naming is so that i can move/delete them with total flexibility and no need to rename in the future. Changing my folder structure is easy, renaming all all files inside of them would be a pain, even with foobar's masstagger.

- Lyx
I am arrogant and I can afford it because I deliver.

How do you name your files?

Reply #18 –
For individual tracks, this is the naming scheme I came up with that I like the most (mainly for how they appear while viewing in a folder):
[01] AC-DC [Back In Black (2003 Remaster)(1980)]- Hells Bells.mp3

Only thing I closely watch for are the filename lengths. Quick way to check them: http://www.dcsoft.com/products/longff/longff.htm (Long File Name Finder).

For CD/DVD backups, I always use UDF filesystems (this can be chosen in Nero) so the filenames are not truncated, keeping the playlists. Every once in a while I have to do some fixing for an unsually long track title, but this isn't very often.

FLAC images I handle differently, mainly because I use a single FLAC file for each album (rather than compressing individual tracks with FLAC):
Free- Molten Gold- The Anthology (Disc 1).flac

I've tried various tools for tagging the individual tracks in a single FLAC image, and the only method I've been pleased with is by editing them manually with Foobar, and it's admittedly still a tedious process I don't bother with.

I mainly use FLAC just for CD backup purposes- in other words I'm more likely to decompress a FLAC to wav and burn to a CD-R using the original cuesheet created by EAC. In other words I use FLAC more for storage rather than playback.

Using METAFLAC to extract embedded cuesheets works for me but it doesn't seem to preserve all the track details as EAC's cuesheets do. So when backing up FLAC images I include those cuesheets created by EAC.

This is all how I like to do things, so it's my preference, and this method is not better than anyone elses. I really think you need to spend an afternoon trying different naming conventions to come up with a naming scheme for what *you* are going to like the most and what makes the most sense to you, since you're the one that will be using it!

How do you name your files?

Reply #19 –
artist - year - album\artist - album - track# - title

or sometimes

artist - year - album\track# - title

for non album sort alphabetically #AB, CDE, and so on...

How do you name your files?

Reply #20 –
I think I am going to go with something like this

Genre/Artist/Album/Track#-Song.flac

is the cuesheet so that other apps like Foobar can read the tag info?
 

How do you name your files?

Reply #21 –
Check out this link 

How do you name your files?

Reply #22 –
I've finally came to a single base way of doing everything that I found works well. All my stuff is properly tagged as well, so its easy to find the artist of a song without the directory structure.

Regular Albums:
Artist - Album - [Disc # if there is one] - Year\TrackNum - Title

Live Stuff:
Artist - Live @ Venue - FullDate(YYYYMMDD)\TrackNum - Title

Compilation:
Album - Year\TrackNum - TrackArtist -- Title

Single tracks:
Artist - Title

How do you name your files?

Reply #23 –
I just name the track as    artist - song title [any relevent info such as remix name or live etc]

but I name the album and album folder as    artist - year - album title - [disc number is multiple]

works well for me