Capitalizing Titles Options

[DAO]

Other than personal preference, is there any reason why many people choose to capitalize the first letter of every word in a CD/track title? Typically, articles (a, an, the), prepositions , and conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet) are not capitalized in titles.

[Ardax]

My first guess would be because people are dumb and can't remember, determine, or look up the rules or guidelines governing capitalization of titles.

[eevan]

Maybe because it's easier to capitalize automatically in that way. Personally, I stick to the orthography when tagging files

[odyssey]

I use this incorporated in a masstagger script - It's heavy, but very useful to keep a standard in my entire collection.

[lunkhead]

it's simpler

This post has been edited by lunkhead: Sep 4 2007, 16:10

[DAO]

Thanks all. I wasn't sure if there was some technical reason why this was done. If so, I wanted to avoid it before ripping 300 disks!

[Nick E]

Other than personal preference, is there any reason why many people choose to capitalize the first letter of every word in a CD/track title? Typically, articles (a, an, the), prepositions , and conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet) are not capitalized in titles.

Not all printers treat titles in the same way. Many newspapers seem to use sentence case for their headlines. As the Wikipedia entry on capitalization says the treatment of Headings and publication titles a matter of house style.

Looking at the books on my shelf, I can see titles in sentence case (Sir Walter Scott on novelists and fiction) and a form of "title case" (Three Critics of the Enlightenment). But perhaps the most common is all caps (HUME's ENQUIRIES).

I treat titles how you do, but it seems there's no standard practice among printers, so I think it's unsurprising if other people prefer to do differently.

And I bet there are people out there who prefer not to standardize but to always does whatever has been done on the CD case -- just as there are people who always write "e. e. cummings", because that's what he did.

This post has been edited by Nick E: Sep 4 2007, 16:37

[Junon]

In The Past, Out Of Pure Laziness, I Capitalized Every Single Word As Well. This Looked A Bit Stupid.

But Meanwhile I'm Sticking to the More Appealing System Mentioned Above - Prepositions, Articles and Conjunctions Are Written in Lower-Case, Except Those with More Than 4 Letters, As Well As the Ones Found at the Beginning and the End of the Titles. With EasyTag It's a Quick and Painless Job to Change the Titles According to This System. Now It Doesn't Look Stupid Anymore!
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Hmm... I'm writing complete nonsense.

[mll]

You can consider also MusicBrainz (Wikipedia description). They did a considerable job on defining Capitalization Standards, and enforcing it on their music database.

It's quite a clean database now (and everyone can correct remaining mistakes), and using it with their latest tagger provides you very clean tags.

[kjoonlee]

I sometimes do that because it's printed that way on the CD leaflet. No more time lost trying to figure out what sort of style to use..

[~*McoreD*~]

I use this incorporated in a masstagger script - It's heavy, but very useful to keep a standard in my entire collection.

That's a great standard odyssey. I can't wait to get hold of that script if you don't mind.