Gerard JP

What's in my name?

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MP3 collection filesystem structure

The reason

I recently moved away from amarok and started using Exaile as my favorite audio player. I found out that Exaile automatically displays the cover art when it finds a “cover.jpg” in the album folder. Maybe I’ll start a ‘which-player-supports-what’ post some day but don’t hold your breath

I was very excited about this because my tast in music is ‘not mainstream’ to say the least so all those cover fetcher tools leave a lot of gaps for my album art. Since I started to clean up a bit I wrote down the structure on a note to remember it once and for all. I thought I’d might as well publish it and so this post was born.

Folder setup

It’s all in folder “~/Music/” but that isn’t that important. The structure is set up as follows:

Artist/Album/
             cover.jpg
             back.jpg
             info/              # For stuff like lyrics.txt, etc.
                  bookletX.jpg  # booklet images.
                  [back.jpg]    # if info/ exists this file moves here.

If it’s a multiple disc album the CD directories are called “cd1″, “cd2″, so smalls and no spaces. Then the info directory can stay on album-top level, but I place a copy of cover.jpg in all cdX directories so Exaile displays them.

Then if the album is a compilation it’s placed in this directory (got this from iTunes .

~/Music/Compilations/

You can find your Artists tag based because your player indexes those anyway. Assuming you use the tracks artist and not “Various artists”.

Track file naming

Then for naming the MP3 files themselves. When it’s a track in a full album:

01 - Trackname.jpg

When the track is in an album which is a compilation of various artists:

01 - Artist - Trackname.jpg

I noticed,when I used XMBC that it displays the tracks with “01. Trackname” even when naming them as above so that is at least understood without ambiguity.

When the track is just a single song:

Artist - Trackname.jpg

I have some old cassettes and MD’s I converted to MP3 in the past which have a Compilation suffix with “MD”, “AC”, “LP” at the end:

Trilok Gurtu - African Fantasy - Crazy Saints - Compilation MD.mp3

TAGs

Not to much hassle there. The only thing significant is when it’s a 1-pass MP3 of a full album the track title get’s some extra information. A full album suffix between brackets and a “cd1″ addition when it’s a multiple CD album.

Logical Progression cd1 (Full album)

Geeky

I think the subject of this post is totally geeky anyway but nevertheless .. Currently in the tags all words get first caps but with words being between brackets like the aformentioned (Full album) only the first word get’s capitalized. (Although I’m not sure yet what to do when it’s a subtitle or name).

Logical Progression cd1 (Full album)

I think that covers most of it for now. Hope it’s helpfull to anyone going bonkers over there MP3 collections.

Suggestions are welcome ofcourse.

GrtzG.

January 19, 2010  Tags: audio, clean, filestructure, mp3  Posted in: All ENGLISH articles, Technical

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