What is the best, in your opinion, for file name convention for songs and directory structure?.
Do you use 8.3 format or long names?
Is advisable to use underscore _ intead of plain space?
Is true that blank space morph into a larger string set as "%20" in some cases?
Is dash - allowed in most operating systems?
Is OK to rely on "Internal Tags", if so which format.
I'm ready process to Rip (for the second time) my CD collection, but I'm strugling now for godd name convention to use.


Thanks,
Lucem

perhaps if you use Windows 3.1? There shouldn't be any problems using spaces even if you are going to post them on the 'net

I use
Band\Album\TrackNumberLeadingZero - Title

as in

Yes\90125\01 - Owner Of A Lonely Heart.mp3

Everything stays in order, nice and tidy. I don't use 8.3 names, but I do pay attention to the Joliet 64-character limit for burning to CDs. Used to have the Band and Album in the file name, and ran into the 64-character limit problem.

There's nothing wrong with using spaces. The %20 comes into play when a file goes on the web somehow, and HTML interprets a space as "%20".

I have a directory named MP3 and another named Lossless, and all the bands appear as subs of these 2 directories.

Thanks, for your opinions.
The reason I'm considering 8.3 style names is because some portable players and other devices use this format, and since all the key information is the Tag as a meta data anyways then the 8.3 shouldn't be a problem except for devices that don't read tags or have problems with it.

The other alternative I like is Track# Track name.
But since some devices are really limited with the length of character it can display at one time I am considering to do the Track number separated from the title only by *ONE* character.
But I have yet to decide for Underscore _ Dash - or just one plain space.

01_Owner Of A Lonely Heart.mp3
01-Owner Of A Lonely Heart.mp3
01 Owner Of A Lonely Heart.mp3

Visually I Like the following since is easier to read:
01- Owner Of A Lonely Heart.mp3
But is one character more for the small screen real estate.

Any opinions?

for pc: "01 - Owner of a lonely heart.mp3"
for portable mp3 player & backup cd's/dvd's: "01.Owner of a lonely heart.mp3"
you can use some program to switch between these two naming conventions.

I do the same as 56Nomad. I like the visual look of a two digit track number, space, hyphen, space and then track name. I used to think that I surely should put the band name in there as well. That was until I learned that tags keep all that information anyway. I definitely like having the track number in the file name just to keep songs in the correct order. Otherwise, they get alphabetized. I think Geopoul's idea for different portable names has merit. But you only gain two spaces. The displays on portable devices are getting bigger, and some of them scroll. For me, I think I'll just stick to one naming convention for both lossless and compressed files.

"Visually I Like the following since is easier to read:
01- Owner Of A Lonely Heart.mp3"

This is the naming convention I use. After spending way too much time caring about tags, file and folder naming conventions, cd/dvd backup methods, transcoding, and what-not, I came to one conclusion - (KISS) Keep it simple stupid.

I use

Artist - Year - AlbumTitle\Artist - TrackNumber - SongTitle

This allows me to throw a bunch of files together while keeping artists ordered (and knowing who wrote what). At the same time, the TrackNumber keeps each record ordered.
It is of course a mess if you have songs from different records by the same artist, but

Artist - AlbumTitle - TrackNumber - SongTitle

is simply too long in many cases.

when i rip from to cd to wav, i use a really long file name.

artist_year_album_tracknumberleadingzero_tracktitle_genre

as in: anthrax_1993_sound of white noise_01_potters field_heavy metal

i do this because wav files don't hold ID tags, and foobar can guess the tags from the file name, so it's really convenient having all the ID info right in the file name. then i convert the wavs to aac in this format:

artist\year album\tracknumberleadingzero tracktitle

as in: anthrax\1993 sound of white noise\01 potters field

the slashes indicate a subdirectory of course. this way all artists are sorted alphabetically, and all albums are sorted chronologically.


if i have an extra song that isn't part of an album, i just put it in a folder named (misc) and the file name is simply artist - title.

I have had no problems using dashes anywhere. And about your other concerns, as others have pointed out, on a "modern" operating system you should have no problem "letting loose" with long filenames, spaces or dashes.

I personally use Track - Album - Number - Title. It's indispensible when you have multiple artists/albums in the same directory (for whatever reason); i find myself in that situation frequently when converting to AAC for my portable.

Hope it helps

I use:
Artist -- YYYY -- Album Title/01 Song Title.ext

as in:
Devendra Banhart -- 2004 -- Nino Rojo/01 Wake Up, Little Sparrow.flac

Haven't found any problems with this so far. I keep all my music in folders per Album Title. It's a great way of skimming through your collection without constantly going in and out of folders to see how many albums you've got of each artist - and then loosing your place in the list! It can make your folder lists REALLY long though - with over 400Gb of digital audio I can attest to that! Thank the OS gods for keyboard shortcuts though, simply typing of "d-e-v" takes me straight to "Devendra Banhart" for example!

The YYYY field is a more recent addition for me, I use to stick at the end of the folder name, but it made more chronological sense to move it forward. A simple batch rename utility took care of this pretty effortlessly.

I do like the idea of having the "." instead of the " " between Track Number and Song Title, however, I'd worry about portables (and maybe even some command line applications) getting this a little confused with what the extention is. And after all, whatever convention you end up using - ".", " ", "-", "_"... - will end up looking aesthetically pleasing to you after a couple minutes once your eye is 'trained' anyway!

I use the below format, i choose it to make folder navigation on my iriver iHP140 as simple and informative as possible and to optimise the space on the display, also to make browsing folders easier on the pc.

Artist/Album (Year)/01. Track Name.mp3

It looks like this on the main screen when playing

Blue Album (2004)
Orbital
Transient

and the folder tree view shows this

Blue Album (2004)

01. Transient.mp3
02. Acid Pants.mp3
03. You Lot.mp3

etc

Perfectly simple for nice neat albums but Various Artists are bit less informative and clumsy.

I dont use the database function as it doesnt really offer any benifits.

I have settled on:

\@Genre\ArtistName\Year-AlbumName\TrackNumber.TrackName.extension

where TrackNumber has a leading zero if the number of tracks is under 100, and two leading zeroes if the number of tracks is under 1000.

If I ever need/want to change formats, I use BulkRename, which is a VERY flexible tool.

There are plenty of previous discussions on this topic; have a search.

I've settled on this some years ago:

Artist/[YEAR] Album/TrackNo Title.mpc

e.g. Pink Floyd/[1967] The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn/01 Astronomy Domine.mpc

As for spaces - I don't think they cause troubles on any recent OS - and they look ugly IMHO.

This format is pretty compact and I also like the chronoligical order introduced by Year in the album name. This might be annoying though when browsing using a mobile device and only see the first few characters of the album (so you might only see the year, not the album title at first).

Note, that this format is especially useful if you have a lot of albums by each artist. If you have lots of samplers or only copied specific songs from each disc, other formatings will probably do a better job.

I use

Band\Year - Album\TrackNumberLeadingZero - Title

as in

Meshuggah\1998 - Chaosphere\03 - Corridor of Chameleons.mp3

I suggest you Tags and Capitalization Question thread.

Edit: I use this convention for both my PC and DAP...