Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bob L.]

Hello everyone,

I could use help with a couple of questions (currently using 8.0.257):

1.  Recently on interact I believe I saw that the default filenaming was switched to "track # - name".  Was this because of potential problems with Windows file name lengths?  

2.  If I'm tagging files that way in ID3v2, can I be pretty sure that mp3 players will be able to read the tags and will display artist, album and track name?  Related to question 1, is there any reason to have more information in the filename than "track # - name"?

3.  Are there any good reasons to use a different pathname than \music\album?  I like having all the tracks from an album in the same directory for manual (non-MJ) backup or transfer reasons.

Thanks for any insights you all may have.

Regards,

Bob L.

[JimH]

Please update.  Current version is 8.0.275.

[Darwyn]

I am glad the default has been restored to "## - Song.mp3" as I have been using that anyway.
To answer the question about what needs to be in a filename. That is up to the user and any configuration for backup or portable usage. As far as windows is concerned the song should just be the track name. The artist and album is listed below from the tag info as details. Track number is handy for keeping the tracks in original album order, but more difficult for locating by song name. This is where a library manager like Media Jukebox comes in handy. Long titles can helping in two ways. Damaged tag info can be rebuilt from file name. Tracks mixed in a directory can be easily sorted. The negative effect it may be more difficult to see the track name in Explorer (ie. when set to tiles or icons.) CD burning programs often truncate file names at 64 total characters including the extension. In the case of very long artist or album names all in the filename can cause complete confusion on an mp3 cd. My rambling can prove one thing. Its confusing no matter how you slice it. That's why I use "Artist\Album\## - Song.mpc"

[Bob L.]

Thanks to Darwyn for his ideas.  I'm bouncing this thread back up to the top to see if anyone else can share any downsides to the filenaming/directory strategy I outlined.  Thanks for any help you can give me.

Regards,

Bob L.

[nila]

I always use: Artist - Album - Track # - Track.
Admittedly it's not the shortest of names and sometimes the file names can be pretty long but as far as being able to manage the music without a Jukebox program it gives you the most control. Even if all my songs ended up in the same directory somehow it would be extremely easy to restore them to folders simply by using the file name.
When I'm including covers in the dir's too I'll usually give them the names: Artist - Album - 00 - Front.jpg etc too.
By using 00 as the track number it makes the covers show at the top in explorer.

Naming conventions are always just personal preferance.
Including more info in the name like I do is good for being able to see exactly what a song is just by looking at the file name.
The downside is often really long file names which might cause problems.

Including less info: eg:  track # - track name.mp3
is good to get around the problems mentioned but isn't as useful for providing information about the track purely from the name.
In the event of some accident where all your mp3's get jumbled and loose their directories, it'd be harder to organise them all again (without using some program that reads the id3 tags).

[Michel]

> I always use: Artist - Album - Track # - Track

I prefer

[artist] {album} track_number - track_name

This way there is no ambiguity on the fields in case you don't have "artist" or "album".

(of course that could be not compliant with some file systems but it is not a problem as it is easy to rename the files from the tag with others rules with MJ - or others tag managers)