MP3 Naming Conventions

So the other day I sat down at my computer and started to sift through my music collection, when I realized something. I have a single folder with about 3,000 songs in there. I decided that this probably wasn’t the most efficient way of organizing my music collection, and decided that I would organize it using a basic folder/directory structure (thank GOD for Tag&Rename). You know, something along the lines of ‘Artist’\’Album’\’Artist’ – ‘Track’ - ‘Title’.

Currently, I have everything in a single folder as ‘Artist’ – ‘Title’. In the id3 tag, I had the Artist, Title, and Album fields completed, with the album art embedded into each individual music file, and NOTHING ELSE. (Recently, however, I went into Winamp and noticed that a good 65% of my files somehow had a bunch of fields automatically filled in, such as track number, genre, composer, etc. Is this a new feature in Winamp? How come it only happened to a little more than half of my music library ?)

Well, I successfully changed all 3,000 songs in about 3 minutes by entering a simple naming query into the mask editor, when I realized that not all of my songs contain track numbers, some don’t have album names, etc. So now I’m sitting here thinking, “Dayum. How in the hell should I name all of this bullshit.”

I’m a little torn between two options I have – I either suck it up, start feeling a little ambitious, and fill in every field in the ID3 tag of all my mp3’s so this naming convention will look good (), or just say fuck it and go with a more basic and more unorganized naming method ().

Now, as I stated before, I have Tag&Rename - truly a kickass program. Its auto tagger seems a little broken to me, though. I swear that I had it analyze my ‘10,000 Days’ album by Tool, and it gave each file the wrong title in the album. My ‘Jambi’ track was listed as ‘Right In Two’, my ‘The Pot’ track was listed as ‘Vicarious’, etc. Also, am I wrong when I say it will only analyze and fill in the appropriate tags album by album? Is there a way I can select my entire library, and click a big red button that says “GO” or some shit? I know WinAmp has support for a mass AutoTagger – too bad it crashes when you say go every single time. Does anybody know of any good ones?

Anyways, I’m curious as to how everybody here names there collection. At this point I’m really open to ideas, and just want to hear suggestions and opinions.


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TO SUMMARIZE THIS LONG ASS POST –
1) What naming convention do you use to organize your music
2) Do you have all fields in your ID3 tags filled in? If not, Which ones?
3) Do you know of a GOOD, ACCURATE, RELIABLE mass auto tagger?
4) How do you handle your Album Art? Embedded into the file, or a single file in the album directory?

DISCUSS!

EDIT:
ah snap is this even in the right thread. I dont know if this is more 'general discussion' than it is about 'music discussion'. I'll let a mod figure it out, I guess.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Since I got an iPod, I've pretty much switched over to iTunes for all my music needs. I'm pretty anal about having all my music stuff tagged properly, too. As for filenames, I usually use something like:

[Artist] - [Album]\[track #] - [track title]

Sometimes I leave the [artist] field out, if it's something like a Final Fantasy album, in which case I'll just write something like 'Final Fantasy XII OST' and leave it at that. As for the actual filename, sometimes when I download them, they have other things in them, but I never really bother to change them unless they're really complicated.

For tagging purposes, as soon as I load up the files into iTunes, I try to find the best way to tag them. Now I'm not sure if it uses ID3 tags, but I usually only have the following filled out:

Track name, artist, album, genre, year, and comments [if it has an album tag number or something else important]. And artwork as well.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

My problem is when it comes down to the actual filename. I don't know if I should do [Track #] - [Title], or just leave it at [Artist] - [Title]. I don't always have full albums, so it may be pointless and even look weird in some cases where I have a single track from an album.

Just found out that that auto-tagger in Winamp 5.52 is a pretty well known problem, and has been fixed for the 5.53 release (whenever the hell that will be...). Unless someone suggests a different auto tagging solution, I guess that I'm going to just have to just wait for that :/...

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Quote:

1) What naming convention do you use to organize your music

Unless the file has already been named by someone else, I only fill in the track name.

Quote:

2) Do you have all fields in your ID3 tags filled in? If not, Which ones?

Never, unless someone else has already done it.

Quote:

3) Do you know of a GOOD, ACCURATE, RELIABLE mass auto tagger?

No.

Quote:

4) How do you handle your Album Art? Embedded into the file, or a single file in the album directory?

I don't.

I never use iTunes or similar programs, and play 99% of my music through foobar, so things like album art or ID3 tags are irrelevant.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?