Music Banter - How do you organize your music files?

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- - How do you organize your music files? (https://www.musicbanter.com/lounge/34874-how-do-you-organize-your-music-files.html)

i 'only' have about 16K songs, around 150gb, and foobar doesn't even flinch. i don't much care for media monkey and wouldn't suggest trying it with such a massive library, but it's worth trying.

also remember that foobar is free, while media monkey charges for their best version.

not sure about playlists, it's been many years since i used itunes. but i assume you can save them in a standard format and import them just fine. i seem to remember having to do that with ratings, since itunes doesn't write them to tags. just made one playlist for 5-star, one for 4-star, etc. then imported them in foobar, redid ratings, and all was golden.

as for scripting - both apps require it if you want to go beyond what they give you out of the box. but you can get away without scripting easily enough, whichever app you choose.

i guess your best bet is to try both and see which one feels best for you!

Artist Name \ Album Name \ 01 Track Name.mp3

Album year & genre are visible in iTunes.

Song title > Duration > Artist > Album > Genre > Year > Bit Rate

It's not often I need to look at my files through explorer etc as I do all of my stuff through MM, but I do like to have my music sorted into proper folders. I just do it like this as I have no need for the rest of the info:

<Album Artist>\<Year> - <Album>\<Track#> - <Title>

Which looks like this:

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x...titled-1-6.jpg

Downloads \ Artist name \ Album name \ Track name

I think some of you would be astonished at how pedantic I am with regards to my music collection... I'm definitely not that OCD in any other facet of life. The motivation behind it is ease of locating artists and searching by genre on my music drive, ditto for my iPod, and correct scrobbling for last.fm.

I name my music using a <Genre>\<Artist>\<Year> <Album>\<Track#> - <Title> mask and tag it accordingly. It requires genre tags and disc # tags (in the case of multidisc albums) for my iPod's sake since folder structure means nothing to it. All other tags (lyrics/comments etc.) should be blanked out because they usually contain crap like bittorrent tracker and blog URLs. I ensure that all albums have album art too (there must be a small folder.jpg in each album which should then be embedded in each track). I think I might run my music against MusicBrainz to iron out any discrepancies.

If any of you have mp3 tagging questions, ask away. And how ironic is it that I should just notice from my last.fm sig that The Red Krayola is mistagged? :(

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seltzer (Post 850171)

How do you organize mixed artists compilations like certain soundtracks or albums like "golden oldies"?

Although I'm pedantic about tagging all my music, I still keep the folder set-up simple (as shown above) because it's very rare I need to actually go into folders to look for music. 99% of the time searching and organising is done through my music software. So, for me, the physical folders only need a simple arrangement.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seltzer (Post 850171)

I think some of you would be astonished at how pedantic I am with regards to my music collection...

that doesn't sound pedantic at all. in fact, it sounds absurdly inefficient. you'd be much better off using tags for things like genre and year, then using a strong library-based media player like foobar for organization.

also, embedding artwork is redundant, and it only serves to increase the size of your collection. i assume you do it for the sake of your ipod - again, if you use foobar, then you can embed artwork on the fly while syncing.

or you can go balls out and flash your ipod with rockbox firmware. not only will it let you use folder.jpg for album art, but you can use your own directory structure for organization, and can do away with all 'syncing' apps. just copy files in disc mode.

tore - sounds like you're still struggling with mixed-artist albums. how do you do things now? do you dislike the idea of using "various artists" as the album artist?

since you use foobar, you can make use of further tags to keep things sorted. i have an "album type" tag which could be set to "soundtrack", "mixtape", "compilation", etc. it helps me divide all "various artist" albums into finer categories for easy sorting.

Quote:

Originally Posted by noise (Post 850258)

tore - sounds like you're still struggling with mixed-artist albums. how do you do things now? do you dislike the idea of using "various artists" as the album artist?

since you use foobar, you can make use of further tags to keep things sorted. i have an "album type" tag which could be set to "soundtrack", "mixtape", "compilation", etc. it helps me divide all "various artist" albums into finer categories for easy sorting.

Hehe, not really. I'm just wondering how people sort these albums (where they store the files) as it seems to be the only real difference in how we do things. :)

When it comes to tags, I do like you. I use Various artists for album artist and of course I also have album types tag to let me find stuff like soundtracks, studio albums, best ofs and so on. With foobar, I also like using multiple values in the artist field now and then, for example on songs like "Islands in the Stream" by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. It should of course show up under both these artists in my library tree and with foobar, I can make that happen. :)

When it comes to the physical location of my files, my goal is (still) to include searchable information in the path and filename, so all mixed artists compilations are organized in a folder called "!Mixed Artists Compilations" rather than f.ex under V for Various Artists. That way, a search query for "%path% HAS Mixed Artists" will give me all mixed artist compilations despite what album type is or if I've somehow forgotten to tag them .. Not that I I'm forgetful!

edit :

I also include album type in filename (f.ex "1972 - Close to the Edge [Studio album]") and all that together made the transition to foobar and retagging albums a breeze, for example by automatically filling %album type% with the information from that directory. Not sure what the benefit is right now, but if somehow my tags get screwed, it'll be of use. ;)

Quote:

Originally Posted by tore (Post 850184)

How do you organize mixed artists compilations like certain soundtracks or albums like "golden oldies"?

For each track in a mixed artist compilation or VA soundtrack I set the artist as whoever the artist is and album artist as VA. For the compilations, I check the Part of a Compilation tag and set the genre to Compilation. For soundtracks, I simply set the genre to Soundtrack. This seems to be iPod friendly.

As for how I physically store compilations/soundtracks on my file system, I do it as below. Most of my soundtracks are in Soundtrack Albums but if I have heaps of soundtracks by one artist (i.e. Ennio Morricone) then I have a folder for them in Soundtrack Artists.

Compilations & Soundtracks
|--Compilations
|--Soundtrack Albums
|--Soundtrack Artists

For the MB compilations, I set the album art as the MB logo. :laughing:

Quote:

Originally Posted by noise (Post 850258)

I organise according to tagging (genre tags + Foobar) as well as folder structure. Personally, I prefer the first approach but I also maintain a folder structure for the benefit of other people downloading music from me (since they obviously can't make use of genre tags when downloading music off our flat server). And yeah, for the structure by tags approach to work, it is necessary to use a strong library-based media player like Foobar as most others including WMP are laughably crippled by large collections.

I embed artwork in every song for the sake of my iPod but also in case people want to download individual songs from me. If each track has its own album art embedded then it doesn't matter if it is taken out of context. I ensure that my album art is < 400k (and usually 20-50k) so that the storage requirement is negligible (unless I'm dealing with grindcore albums haha).

I've been meaning to look into flashing my iPod but I think I'll wait until the warranty expires. I've figured out most of the vagaries of iTunes/iPods so it won't be too much of a headache until then. One of my main gripes with iTunes was its unanchored shift-select but they seem to have fixed that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tore (Post 850298)

I also include album type in filename (f.ex "1972 - Close to the Edge [Studio album]") and all that together made the transition to foobar and retagging albums a breeze, for example by automatically filling %album type% with the information from that directory. Not sure what the benefit is right now, but if somehow my tags get screwed, it'll be of use. ;)

I forgot to mention that I do that too - I annotate album names with (Compilation), (EP), (Single), (Bootleg), (Live Album) etc...

ipod flashing is very safe. all the original firmware remains intact you can boot into it at any time. as far as i understand, the only thing actually flashed is a sort of boot loader that directs things towards the custom firmware. and of course it's all completely reversible :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seltzer (Post 850750)

Sounds good, but I'm not so sure about using the genre tag for information like soundtrack and compilations! If you use foobar, why not just store that information in a new tag (f.ex "album type"?).

I didn't like sorting by genres back in the days, but now I've got a python script part written by myself which I can run from inside foobar that fetches genre and style tags from the discogs database for releases. It's fast too! It's nice because discogs have a reasonably strict set of allowed genres and styles and any album can have more than one in each field which is fine since foobar has no problems with multiple values.

Style Guide - The Unofficial Discogs Wiki
Example album on discogs, Over-nite sensation (note genre and style information)

If I didn't use this, I'd probably have over a thousand different genres still on my computer .. :p:

tore, are you willing to share that script? it sounds incredibly useful!

at one point i tried using various plugins to grab genre/style info from AllMusic, but never got very good results...

i'm not sure how much i would like using someone else's categorizations, but i can always back up tags and restore them if things don't work out :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by noise (Post 850818)

Certainly :) It's a bit of a workaround - it's actually based on a plugin which allows custom python scripts to fetch lyrics .. But since they are custom scripts, it's not hard to rewrite them so that they fetch other things. My own script is a merge of two other scripts, one to fetch discogs genres and one to fetch styles .. First, I just put those two together. Then there was a problem with queries, you're only allowed to access discogs 5000 times per 24 hours that way, so you could only tag 5000 files. I came up with a workaround for that problem by using text files as temporary storage for information. Basically, when the script starts working on a file, it writes that song's album title into a text file and fetches discogs info. When it moves on to the next file, it compares the album title to the information written to the text file by the previous song. If it's the same, it just tags it with the same info. If the album is different, it fetches new info and rewrites the text files. It also uses a text file for temporary storage of the information that goes into the genre and style tags, but that's the jist of it. Instead of tagging 5000 songs, you can tag 5000 albums ..

It doesn't work for all files, but at least for more than 3/4ths of my own collection. Aside from artists and albums having wrong titles, a possible problem is when there are more bands with the same name. Discogs register them as Band (1), Band (2) and so on (f.ex Arsenal (1), Arsenal (2) etc.) and since we don't normally have numbers in parantheses after band names, those may not get tagged.

Anyways, to make it work, there are a few things you're gonna need:

foo_utils

And these two, both found at the same location :

The latter of those two contains some files and folders (ex. python25.dll) that all need to be located in your base foobar folder. The files and folders should look something like this :

Code:

C:\Program Files\foobar2000>dir p*.dll /s/b & dir *grab* /s/b & dir pygrabber\* /s/b & ver

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\python25.dll

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\lyrics_grabber_provider.cfg

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\components\foo_grabber_python.dll

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\components\foo_lyricsgrabber.dll

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\libs

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\newscripts

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\newscripts\newscripts.rar

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\AZLyrics.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\DarkLyrics.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\Discogs_GetGenre.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\Discogs_GetStyle.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\LastFm_Bio.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\LastFm_TopTag.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\LastFm_TrackTags.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\LeosLyrics.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\LyrDB.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\Lyricist(LRC).py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\scripts\TTPlayer(LRC).py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\autoexec.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\BeautifulSoup.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\BeautifulSoup.pyc

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\Html2Text.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\Html2Text.pyc

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\LevenshteinDistance.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\LevenshteinDistance.pyc

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\Lucky.py

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\Lucky.pyc

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\pyexpat.pyd

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\Python25.zip

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\unicodedata.pyd

C:\Program Files\foobar2000\pygrabber\system\_socket.pyd

Sorry if I'm making it look tricky. If you have foo_utils, then all you really should have to do is unpack those two archives to your foobar folder, but I managed to misplace these files on my first try, so I figured I'd just make it clear. :)

Your foobar folder will now contain a folder called "/pygrabber/scripts". This is where you should put the script I've written. The simplest way to do it I guess is just paste the script here for you to copy and paste. Then I can show you the changes you should make.

So, copy the following script and save it in a text file in the scripts folder. Rename it to something like "tores_discogs_script.py" and then you may want to edit it and have a closer look at the red parts :

Code:

import urllib, urllib2, gzip, cStringIO

import xml.etree.ElementTree

from xml.dom import minidom

from encodings import utf_8

from grabber import LyricProviderBase



class Discogs_GetGenre(LyricProviderBase):

    def GetName(self):

        return 'Discogs GenStyles'

    

    def GetVersion(self):

        return '0.1'



    def GetURL(self):

        return 'http://www.discogs.com'



    def Query(self, handles, status, abort):

        result = []

        api_key = '783001745d'



        for handle in handles:

            status.Advance()

            

            if abort.Aborting():

                return result

            

            artist = handle.Format("[%artist%]")

            album = handle.Format("[%album%]")

            album_file = open("C:\Python26\!album.txt", "r")

            test = album_file.read()

            album_file.close()

            

            try:

                if album == test:

                    text_file = open("C:\Python26\!tag3.txt", "r")

                    writeout = text_file.read()

                    text_file.close()

                    result.append(writeout)

                else:

                    URL_s = 'http://www.discogs.com/search?type=all&q=' + artist.lower().replace(' ','+') + '+' + album.lower().replace(' ','+') + '&f=xml&api_key=' + api_key

                    request = urllib2.Request(URL_s)

                    request.add_header('Accept-Encoding', 'gzip')

                    response = urllib2.urlopen(request)

                    data = response.read()

                    unzipped_data = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj = cStringIO.StringIO(data)).read()

                    res = minidom.parseString(unzipped_data)

                    uri_1 = res.getElementsByTagName("uri")[0]

                    rel_id = uri_1.childNodes[0].data.encode('utf-8').rpartition('/')[2]



                    URL_r = 'http://www.discogs.com/release/' + rel_id + '?f=xml&api_key=' + api_key

                    request = urllib2.Request(URL_r)

                    request.add_header('Accept-Encoding', 'gzip')

                    response = urllib2.urlopen(request)

                    data = response.read()

                    unzipped_data = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj = cStringIO.StringIO(data)).read()

                    xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(unzipped_data)



                    def getGenres(tree):

                        genres = []

                        release = tree.find('release')

                        genreList = release.find('genres')

                        if genreList:

                            for i in genreList:

                                genres.append(i.text)

                        return genres

                

                    def getStyles(tree):

                        styles = []

                        release = tree.find('release')

                        styleList = release.find('styles')

                        if styleList:

                            for i in styleList:

                                styles.append(i.text)

                        return styles



                    lyric=getGenres(xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(unzipped_data))

                    lyric.append('//')

                    lyric.append(getStyles(xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(unzipped_data)))

                    lyric=str(lyric).strip('[').strip(']').replace(',', ';').replace('\'','').replace('[','').replace('Folk; World; & Country','Folk, World, & Country')

                    result.append(lyric)

                    album_file = open("C:\Python26\!album.txt", "w")

                    album_file.write(album)

                    album_file.close()

                    text_file = open("C:\Python26\!tag3.txt", "w")

                    text_file.write(lyric)

                    text_file.close()              

            except Exception, e:

                traceback.print_exc(file=sys.stdout)

                result.append('')

                album_file = open("C:\Python26\!album.txt", "w")

                album_file.write(album)

                album_file.close()

                text_file = open("C:\Python26\!tag3.txt", "w")

                text_file.write('')

                text_file.close()    

                continue

        

        return result



if __name__ == "__main__":

    LyricProviderInstance = Discogs_GetGenre()

Continued ->

awesome! i'll definitely play with this over the weekend. i like your text file workaround, it will let me run through my whole collection in one go. i expect i'll have to do a lot manually, and i have quite a few releases that are not even listed on discogs, but such is life :)

many thanks for taking the time to put together those instructions, i really appreciate it :D

<- continued from last post

The red bits you might wanna change are the folders and filenames of the text files for temporary storage. You may wanna keep these text files out of the program files folders - at least Win 7 doesn't give my script the rights to create or write to text files in there. You may also wanna create the text files before you run the script. As I'm not actually a python programmer, I'm unsure if the script will create them, but it uses them if they at all exist.

After that, you need to start up foobar. Right click any file and go to "Legacy commands (unsorted) -> Configuration". There's an option for provider. Choose Python and then "option -> setting". A new screen opens. Click refresh in the bottom left, then OK to close it. In the configuration screen, also write the name of the tag the information should be written to, f.ex "genstyles".

Now, all you have to do is mark the albums you wanna tag, then right click and choose : "Legacy commands (unsorted) -> Python -> Discogs Genstyles".

All the information will be written to the tag you specified like this : "Genre; //; Style"

To split them into genre and styles tags, right click the selection, choose properties. In the bottom left corner, click tools and choose "automatically fill values". In the new window, change "source" to "other" and then write %genstyles% or whatever tag you used to save the information to .. Then in the pattern field, you write :

%genre%; //; %style%

And press okay. That's it!

EDIT : Included a picture as well!

http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/9251/fillvalues.png

The reason this ain't all beautiful is because when I started fiddling with this, I'd never looked at a python script before and I didn't make this with the intention of publishing it anywhere, but it should work. If it doesn't, just ask and I'm sure I can help.

edit :

Quote:

Originally Posted by noise

You're welcome! I suspect I made it look harder than it is, but since you have foobar experience already, it should be fairly easy :)

oops sorry, didn't mean to interrupt your post :)

i've used that script plugin before so it won't be tough to sort out.

thanks again. looking forward to this!

Quote:

Originally Posted by noise (Post 850888)

oops sorry, didn't mean to interrupt your post :)

i've used that script plugin before so it won't be tough to sort out.

thanks again. looking forward to this!

Let me know how it works out :D

Quote:

Originally Posted by noise (Post 850756)

I'm reading about Rockbox now and the manual makes it sound like nothing is flashed at all as the Rockbox bootloader & firmware are stored on disk rather than in flash memory. The Rockbox bootloader apparently replaces the iPod firmware on a boot partition (and presumably the original iPod firmware is copied elsewhere) so the boot sequence would be iPod bootloader (flash) --> Rockbox bootloader (disk) --> Rockbox firmware (disk), and the original iPod firmware could still be loaded from another location if need be.

This not only makes it even safer than I would have imagined but would also allow me to erase any evidence of using Rockbox should I need to make a warranty claim on my iPod. Up until now, I'd avoided looking into Rockbox because I assumed it manipulated flash memory and would thus make it harder to discreetly revert but that doesn't seem to be the case and so it's easily reversible as you say.

Well I guess I'll install Rockbox when I have the time - the project sounds quite mature now so I'm sure it's relatively free from threading, performance and power consumption issues. The coder/hacker in me really wants to play around with this. :D

Quote:

Originally Posted by tore (Post 850796)

Yeah it is a bit of a hacky solution to set the genre tag as Compilation or Soundtrack but on the other hand, it is iPod friendly (iPods don't natively support custom ID3 tags afaik).

I didn't mind applying the genre tags to my entire collection because by that point I'd already had each artist in a genre folder so writing that structure to a tag was a simple batch operation using Tag & Rename. This does mean however that all of my artists each belong only to one genre but iPods don't allow songs to have multiple genres anyway... if a song has a genre tag which is a comma/semicolon delimited list of genres then iTunes/iPods simply see the song as belonging to a custom genre defined by that string rather than belonging to each of the genres. A common hacky solution is to use delimited genre tags and create smart playlists which include music on the basis of some rule (i.e. genre tag contains 'Jazz'). I can't see iTunes properly supporting multiple genres any time soon (people have been after it for ages) and even when it does, iPods would still require firmware updates to support this.

Nice work on the Python script; I might use it one day when I get around to using the smart playlist hack or if I decide to flash my iPod. :)

Don't worry about putting allsorts on your iPod, in the past I've had linux working on it, wikipedia, rockbox, etc. It can all be changed or removed if you change your mind and Apple wouldn't know.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seltzer (Post 850936)

I'm reading about Rockbox now and the manual makes it sound like nothing is flashed at all

oh! i made a big assumption. good to know it doesn't flash anything, makes me feel even safer using it :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seltzer (Post 850936)

Well I guess I'll install Rockbox when I have the time - the project sounds quite mature now so I'm sure it's relatively free from threading, performance and power consumption issues.

about the power consumption - it is a big issue. at least when playing flac, since the disc access rate increases so much. i basically have to charge it every other day, and i just listen for a few hours during my commute.

If it's music I made I usually put a date around it so I know what it's about, same goes for pictures

But really..just "X artist - Y album"

Here's a screenshot of my incredibly simplistic process:

http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/9137/stems.jpg

You'll notice that not only do I use a hierarchical structure, but I also still use XP and poor little WMP. I dunno... it plays my music when and how I want it to. I dunno if that's considered "settling" or not. Maybe my expectations are just abnormally low.
Anyway, I've been using this process for years without any issues.
I probably seem outdated and unrefined to most of you, but I'm a man of practicality and I pride myself on it. I know where everything is, and exactly how to use it. I don't lose things and I don't get errors. It just... works.

Anyway, that's me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by InfamousNotes (Post 851955)

All the bands and albums are in the separate folders

I'm afraid posts in the lounge don't add to your post count.

Freebase, do you double click files to play them? If yes, you're a barbarian. :p:

Quote:

Originally Posted by tore (Post 851971)

I'm afraid posts in the lounge don't add to your post count.

Freebase, do you double click files to play them? If yes, you're a barbarian. :p:

Haha... no.. I right-select a folder to play the whole album, or right-select the band folder to play the whole catalog... Or create a playlist.
I dunno... seems kinda standard to me, barbaric or not. ;)

All using iTunes.. and of course I have artwork for every single thing

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zarko (Post 851408)

Lazily

tsk tsk... :D

I actually have a very similar approach. It's just a windows explorer folder like yours, but I have all of my albums in it arranged for example like...

50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin
A.B Cretsil - The Osooku Stars

etc

Quote:

Originally Posted by Conan (Post 853135)

I tried ages ago, and if you go up one folder it contains the majority of my albums which have been organised to some fair degree eg

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/9461/orga.jpg
http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/7886/orga1.jpg

But one day, approximately a year ago, I created the mystical '-01' folder, in which all zipped downloads are unzipped into, possibly for future organisation. That day has never come, and I doubt it ever will (Currently has 23GB worth of albums in there :o:)

Haha, i've got the same thing. It's called ZX - The Processing Bay ... I thought the name was pretty badass. My main folder for all my music is called "The Vault" :laughing:

Bad news for me. Rockbox isn't supported on iPod Classics so I'm stuck with bilious iTunes and its single genre restrictions (amongst other things)! And it's got me thinking that I wouldn't mind working on the Rockbox project but I don't think I have enough hardware knowledge (my degree is software oriented).

Btw, I've been using your script today Tore and it seems to work pretty well. The only modification I've made is adding .replace('&','%26') so that it can handle artists/albums with ampersands.

And so far, the genre categorisation at discogs.com seems to be reasonable except for when it comes to metal. They don't consider it a top-level genre so that means that every metal band gets tagged with Rock whether it's Burzum, Wormphlegm or Stratovarius. Occasionally ambiguity causes amusing genre tagging such as Death - Human being industrial/power electronics and Freak Kitchen being house. :laughing:

Now to wait ~20 hours for another 5000 hits (not to sound like a crack addict).

Ah, brilliant idea Seltzer :) I'll add that to my own. Glad it could be of use!

I've noticed on a few occasions, it's done a search for artist and album with the script where it found the wrong album and then tagged it with wrong genre and styles. This is a problem with the genre / style scripts I merged and modified to make my own and I'm not sure how to get past it. Anyways, if you see Burzum tagged as disco, you know something's up!

edit :

Thinking about it, it should be easy to modify the script so that it works better with compilation albums. Just make a copy of the script and make it use %album artist% instead of %artist%, then if you tag VA compilations with "Various Artists", try to add .replace('Various Artists','Various') .. Oh, and change the title of the script!

edit :

The modifications would be in this bit :

Code:

artist = handle.Format("[%album artist%]").replace('Various Artists','Various').replace('&','%26')

how do you guys tag disc names?

lots of box sets have disc names. like New Order's Retro box, or Bjork's Family Tree...

With regards to tagging, I ignore the special disc names so that they're treated exactly like unnamed discs. I do acknowledge them in their folder names but that's almost completely irrelevant given that I use Foobar.

how does using foobar make it completely irrelevant?

Sorry, that was a bit vague and I should have clarified it (that's what I get for posting at 4 am).

Back in the day, I used to play music by navigating through hierarchies of folders and selecting the mp3s I wanted to listen to (the barbarian approach as Tore calls it :D), so the folder structure was crucial. Now that I'm using Foobar, I rely entirely on tags for structure and for music metadata in general and I rarely use folder structure view, so the fact that I acknowledge special disc names in the folder names is irrelevant. The only reason I still include them is for the sake of consistency.

So how are you dealing with named discs atm?

ah, ok :)

well i used to add the disc name to the %discnumber% tag in foobar, but it's not very practical since most of the time the tag is just filled with a number. so if i want to display it anywhere, i need a big space.

so i switched the name to the %comments% field, which i'm not so happy with, but i can't think of anything better. which is why i asked here :D

I did like you, noise, except I added it to it's own tag instead of comments. I call it %subtitle% for now as I figured it's a title, but lower down in the title hierarchy. :p:

I realize using too many custom tags can get a bit troublesome to keep track of after a while though.