Music library management

Everyone has compilation albums featuring multiple artists in their digital music collections. How they are tagged and how the music files are organised is much more variable. This goes for both the differences between collections but also differences within collections.

It's the differences within collections that need fixing. If compilation track files are named with inconsistent artist names, for instance, they become harder to browse on your hard disk and so more difficult to administer and, potentially, listen to.

How should the files in 'Various Artists' compilation albums be arranged, then? The first step is that the file and directory names should be based on the tags located within the music files themselves, and when the tag changes, so should the file name or file structure.

The next step is to work out how you want the 'album artist' to appear for compilation albums. You could choose 'Various', 'Various Artists' or whatever (depending on your language of course!) but the important thing is that this applies consistently across your entire music library. The text you choose should be applied to the 'ALBUM_ARTIST' tag within your music files.

Once all your compilation albums have the same ALBUM_ARTIST tag, it's time to work out how this is applied to your file structures. Somewhere in your file structure you will probably have the artist name. A 'pattern' for the file organisation may be:

/[album artist name]/[album name]/[track name].mp3

Or

/[album artist name]-[album name]/[album artist name]-[track name].mp3

Wherever '[album artist name]' appears, your chosen artist name tag should appear.

The final decision to make is how to treat capitalisation and whitespace. The latter only matters if you choose an artist name with whitespace, for instance 'Various Artists'. Assuming you did choose 'Various Artists', how capitalisation and whitespace is treated would give you the following differing example file structures:

Title case, allow spaces	/Various Artists/My Compilation/Intro.mp3
Lower case, replace whitespace with underscores	/various_artists/my_compilation/intro.mp3

Personally, I use lower case, replacing whitespace with underscores. This is because I use Linux whose files are case-sensitive. It makes writing scripts easier if files and directories do not have spaces in them.

The keyword for managing music files is consistency. Consistency of how the artist for each compilation album is named, and consistency in how you treat capitalisation and whitespace when applied to file structures.

I wish you luck!

Thanks to Mulad for the image at the top of this article

Don't use the genre of your music as a basis to organise your music files. Genre is inherently wholly, ambiguous and subject to change. As such, it does not make a good candidate for organising music files and directories.

I can see why some digital music lovers include genre information in their music file structures. Genre is interesting, it's a way of categorising music that makes sense for choosing playlists. To this end, music playing software and hardware allows you to browse your music library by genre. So why shouldn't you organise files by genre too?

The trouble is that file and directory structures don't lend themselves to structures where the names may change. Genre, because it's inherently wholly and ambiguous is one of the more frequently altered aspect of music meta-data. Music players often identify music by the file path of the music. Changing the file path when you decide to change the genre may reset information about the music stored in the music player, such as play counts, ratings and more.

It's important that meta-data communicated in your file and directory structures are the same as the data within your embedded music tags, give or take file system limitations. This means that when the genre for your music changes it should change both the tags and anywhere else the genre is communicated. If genre is in your file structure, this means changing your file structure too.

You may also wish to assign multiple genres to tracks and albums in your music library. This is perfectly possible and a valid thing to do using tags within the music files. However, because file structures are hierarchical, you can only pick one genre to organise by. Remembering why your chose the one-you-did is difficult, and leaves the potential for further problems at a later date.

So how should music files be organised? I think some level of categorisation is important, because music file organisation is often needed as a fallback when performing some administration tasks and also for music players that are incompatible with your music tags. We need to choose music meta-data that is better suited to use in file structures. This is meta-data that is less subject to change.

I choose to organise files within artist/album directory structures. These data, specifically the ALBUM_ARTIST and ALBUM_NAME tags, generally do not chage and the structure is layered enough to be sortable and navigable. All other meta-data such as genre, year, style and mood are stored within the music files themselves so that I can use them inside my music players.

And that is why you shouldn't use genre in your music file/directory structures.

Thanks to feverblue for the image used at the top of this blog post

Naming music files is important. Without a consistent and correct naming scheme your music files will be hard to organise. In some music players it can make music difficult to select. This blog post describes how I name my music files.

In general, information about a track should be stored inside the file itself, in 'tags'. However, you should also keep some of the same information about a track in its filename. Sometimes you must organise or play your music via software that only reads filenames, not the internal tags embedded within. An obvious example is a file explorer such as Windows Explorer. Less obvious is where you use a music player that does not support the tags your music files contain. For instance, Nokia mobile phones running Symbian v9.2/Series 60 v3 have no support for ID3v2.4 out-of-the-box.

Importantly, the information in the filename must be the same as the information embedded in tags in the music file. If they are different, life will soon get very confusing.

So long as your music files are named correctly, you can organise or view them in any application. It's a great fallback!

What should be included in a music file name?

First, the name of the song! This is most important, because without the name you don't know what music is contained within the file.

Also important is the track number within the track's album. This is important so that files are ordered correctly by file name. If you are queuing music to play by selecting files in a file explorer, this is the only way they can be selected to play in order. It's also good to left pad the number with '0's, e.g. 01, 02... 10, 11 so that tracks are not ordered 1, 10, 11, 2, 3 and so on.

Optional are album and artist names. I think these are only required in flat music directory structures. I, on the other hand, store music files in an artist/album manner. This means they aren't required in the file names.

In theory you could also include genre, and other tags. However, this would make the filename long and more difficult to read. It also opens a greater possibility of inconsistency between the filename and internal tags, because tags like genre are more likely to change than tags like track name or track number.

It's generally worth removing spaces in your filenames. This isn't always required, but you may find some applications don't work well with your music if they contain spaces. Ditto for Unicode characters outside of the 'normal' range for your computer.

How your music files' names should read

In my music collection, files are named:

[track number]-[track name].[file extension]

For instance:

02-The_Landing.flac

Note:

• The track number comes first - this means the files are correctly ordered
• The track number is padded with a zero. This helps where there are more than nine tracks
• The track name is there. It's space is replaced with an underscore '_'
• The track number and name are separated by a hyphen

So that's sorted then...

Unfortunately not. Remember what I said about the information in the filename being the same as the information in the tags? The real pain comes when you have a large music collection. If you want to change how your filenames are formed, or you want to change some of the information itself that is in both the filename and tags, then replicating the two can be a tedious and error prone process. Worst, you may just give up (but who could blame you?!). Existing tools like Jaikoz, Tag & Rename and MP3Tag help with this, although they don't generally operate in a fully automated manner.

I am hoping to introduce music file management to bliss. soon. As you'd expect, this will be management by rules, so you will state how your files should be named and bliss will rename them in bulk for you (or at least tell you where an album's tracks are not compliant with the name rule).

And that is how I name my music files.

Thanks to Velo Steve for the photo used at the top of this post.

Recently, new ways of packaging digital music have been developed that promise to improve the all-round experience of digital music. Traditionally, digital music would be delivered in a digital music file, for instance an MP3, which is 'tagged' internally with information about the track, artist, album and so on. These tags are static, but can be changed with a tag editor.

The recent announcement of MusicDNA
shows that the music industry is thinking about how these tags are formulated and represented. MusicDNA allows tags to be updated online. This would allow for novel new applications of tags, for instance providing information about upcoming tour dates for your favourite band. This is accomplished with a new, but backwards compatible, file format.

Another new approach to music packaging is iTunesLP. Rather than a different file format, this is a different approach to packaging tracks together. A group of individual tracks, for example constituting an album, are packaged together in one file alongside other media of interest, such as album art, videos, a self contained website and so on. Some of these are really quite impressive and take the album experience in different directions, just like great album art used to.

Both of these new packaging approaches offer useful and fun features for music consumers. Further, the tagging is likely to be accurate and complete as the music has been delivered by an authoritative source. However, they don't answer some of the deeper existing problems inherent when managing digital music libraries.

How do I ensure consistency across my music library? How can I be sure purchasing a new album won't introduce another meaningless genre I have to include in my playlists? Will compilations be tagged correctly for the different music players I use? How do I know the special way my mobile phone shows album art is catered for?

One way to ensure consistency would be to purchase all music from one source. However, that's unlikely to be practical or desirable (not to mention anti-competitive), doesn't actually offer any control over how a music library is semantically organised anyway, and finally does not help manage a music lover's existing art.

I can't help but think that while the industry may have found a new way to sell concert tickets and promote their acts, they still don't care about digital music collectors and their collections.

New file formats are helpful, but issues of consistency in music libraries remain.

When building a digital music library, it is important to store music files in a consistent and useful manner.

Digital music is stored in files on your computer's hard disk, just like the documents you may create in Microsoft Word or the photos you take with your digital camera. These files contain both the music and the 'tags' that describe the music. When digital music is purchased via download, or purchased via CD and ripped, it is saved in such a file in a predetermined directory structure. For instance, when purchasing from the Amazon MP3 store the files stored in a directory for the album, which is stored in a directory for the music artist. For example, look how Ludovico Einaudi's beautiful Una Mattina record is structured when purchased from Amazon:


The tracks that make up the record are stored in a directory named after the record 'Una Mattina' which in turn is stored in a directory named after the composer 'Ludovico Einaudi'. This is how Amazon organises its downloads, but other configurations are possible when, for instance, you rip your own CDs.

At first, it's best to fire up your music player of choice and allow it to work out how your music is organised. However, at some point managing a large music collection leads to working with music at a file level. Sometimes it's a music player which cannot correctly interpret tags. Sometimes you just don't like the way the files are organised.

Rule based management is the best way of automatically organising a music library.

The same rules that govern tags, saved within music files, should also be adopted in structuring the very same files on your computer's hard disk. This leads to a consistent reflection of your music library within both your music players and also your file system. The rules should be expressed in general terms, for example:

[artist]/[album]/[tracknumber]-[trackname]

Gives a similar structure as the Einaudi example above. The important thing is that the rule is automated so changing the format changes all of your music automatically. For instance, a flatter hierarchy could be achieved with the following rule:

[album]/[tracknumber]-[trackname]

Here, the artist is not recorded. In rule based music management changing the rule is all you need to do... the music is moved for you!

File structure rules give more benefits:
* Control over disallowed or undesirable characters in files (maybe you don't like spaces in filenames, for instance)
* How the structure should work in ambiguous situations (what artist directory to use for compilation records?)

Importantly, the file structure is still driven by the tags and the automatic rules governing the music library in general.

Managing music files is an important task in music library management and with large collections it is best done with automated rules.