Tags And Capitalization Question Options

[jasnic02]

Here's a problem that has really been bugging me. I want to know how everyone else handles capitalization in their file tags and filenames. I have read the guide that cddb suggests, which is different than what musicbrainz.org wants, which is different than what freedb wants, which might all be different to what everyone else wants. I am trying to add this to a perl script that I use for all my encoding and I want to get it right this time!

Do you uppercase the first character in all the words? Do you leave certain words like 'a', 'an', 'the', 'of' lowercase? Any others you leave lowercase? I have looked at English rules for capitalization for song titles and it gets real confusing. For instance, prepositions that are less than five letters long (at, by, for, etc) or lower-case, but only when followed by a noun. How do you script the exeptions for that?

What if the song has the artist 'Featuring' another artist? Or 'With' another artist? Do you append that to the track name instead of the artist field? Do you use the abbreviation 'ft.', 'ft', 'Feat.', 'feat.', 'Feat', 'feat', or 'With', 'with'?

If the disc is part of a 2-disc set do you use (Disc 1) or (Disc 1 of 2) in the album field?

So far, I have been capitalizing all the words .. using 'ft' and appending it to the track title instead of the artist field.

Please let me know how you handle this! There must be some sort of standardization or something that most people go by. If not, there should be!

The things I worry about ...

This post has been edited by jasnic02: Jul 4 2003, 20:31

[bfourney]

I've begun to come across these issues lately and rather than start a new thread I figured I'd revive this one.

Issues at hand:

1. Do featured artists belong as part of the song title, artists name, or maybe under the comments field? How should it be formatted? Usually I have been putting this info in parenthises after the song title but what happens when this information gets ingredibly long or the song title includes parenthises such as -

Atlanta (Remix) (feat. P Diddy, Jermaine Dupri, XYZ Group & Etc.)

or

Atlanta (Remix feat. P Diddy, Jermaine Dupri, XYZ Group & Etc.)

it can get complicated and incredibly long on rare occasions (rap CDs are notorious for this). What about Compilations and Anthologys? Should the featured artist info go under the artist name or track name? My logic tells me that it should fall under the track name. Ideally there would be an Artist tag Heirarchy, but I guess that isn't feasable.

2. How to name bonus tracks? For now I've been putting an Asterisk before the track name, but it could just as easily be -

*Mumbo Jumbo

or

Mumbo Jumbo (Bonus Track)

or

Mumbo Jumbo [*]


3. What about hidden or untitled tracks? If a track is hidden after a long pause do you extract it seperately as another track even though technically it was originally part of another?

Take for instance the hidden track on Nirvana - Nevermind that starts something like 10 minutes after the last song is over. Or for instance the extra track on Creed - Human Clay that isn't in the liner notes etc.

4. How do you define what goes into what Genre? I suppose this is more of a personal thing, but how do you decide? What if something falls into more than one Genre? What if you only have one disc with a unique genre, do you create a new genre just for it? Ideally I suppose you could have one song belong to more than one genre or a main genre and a sub genre.

5. What about compilations? Do you define the original album and year to each track? An Individual Genre to each track?

6. For multi disc sets I pretty much have my own standard. I don't put the discnumber in the album field because like fileman said it is all the same album. I keep the original tracknumbers (so if disc 1 has 12 tracks song 5 on disc 2 is still track 5, not 17). I seperate the filenames so track 1 on disc 1 would be -

1-01. Intro

and track 1 on disc 2 would be -

2-01. Searchin'

Done this way I have one folder for multidisc sets with cue and logfiles for howerver many discs were ripped.

It seems iTunes will be my player of choice soon and it supports a discnumber tag.

This post has been edited by bfourney: Oct 29 2003, 21:11