A while back, I burned an MP3 CD for my car that contained several Electric Light Orchestra CDs on it. My CD player supports fairly long file names, but as it turned out, most of them ended up looking something like this (not exact, but you'll get the point):
Electric Light Orchestra - Out of the Blue - 16.mp3
When it should have looked like:
Electric Light Orchestra - Out of the Blue - 16 - Birmingham Blues.mp3
I realized that I should have used the abbreviation "ELO" for the artist name. The problem is that I don't want it abbreviated in my library.
So, I was wondering what everyone thought of having an "Alias" field in MC for the Artist, and possibly Album names. This field would be used for naming the files *instead* of the full name and would be set on a per file basis. So, if you clicked "Rename files from properties" MC would use the alias instead of the full band name, but the full name would still appear in the library. This is also necessary for AudioScrobbler as they are now working on standardizing all artist names for integration with MusicBrainz.
It seems that this might help alleviate some of the issues with Quicktime as well.
The workflow that MC would use, as I see it, is something like this:
When the user invokes the “Rename Files from Properties” function, MC would…
1. Check to see if the “Artist Alias” or “Album Alias” option is turned on
2. If alias option is on: MC would check to see if the alias field(s) were blank
3. If not blank: use the appropriate alias to rename the files (Artist Alias value would substitute for Artist value, etc.)
4. If blank: use the full value for Artist/Album
5. If alias option is not on: use the full value for Artist/Album
When the user invokes the “Fill Properties from Filename” function, MC would basically perform the reverse of the steps above.
In reference to my example above, the result would be (using Artist Alias):
ELO - Out of the Blue - 16 - Birmingham Blues.mp3
It seems like this might be an easy way of generically "fixing" the various file name length problems.
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Topic: Enhancement idea: Artist Alias (Read 720 times)