Standardized Music Repository Setup
From Docupedia
- Date: 2006-01-11
- Revised: 2007-06-19
Contents |
Overview
I am the most anal, OCD fucker out there. Seriously. Its not because I'm screwed up or anything, but having to deal with 150GBs of mp3's just randomly scattered around a disk is deadly. I mean DEADLY. "Where the hell is that Ace of Base song?", god, you'll never find anything.
So myself and Jeff designed a standardized way of organizing and tagging all of our music. This way merging collections or finding songs is extremely easy, intuitive, and enforces compliance and full featured support of ipods and other music players.
When we are accepting submissions into our central repository (non copyrighted works only obviously), each submission will have to follow these guidelines exactly purely for my... our... sanity.
What Can be Added
Collections
I'm going to talk about everything like we are prepping an album for submission. We don't deal with single files or incomplete collections. 'ONLY' full albums can be submitted. This does not mean only albums from the artist, obviously some of the best music is my own mixes or compilations. Also music sets, like from a DJ or recorded from a show are not a traditional albums but albums in their own sense.
Basically we want collections that have a distinct home, not a collection of random songs in generic-named folders. 60 songs in a folder named "Good Rap" is not an album or a compilation, its crap. Get it out of here.
Format
The collection contains files in FLAC, M4A (AAC), Ogg, and MP3 formats. Due to limitations of the format, only Ogg and MP3 can be streamed. To allow FLAC and M4A (AAC) to be streamed, a transcoder must be employed. At the moment, only FLAC transcoding is supported, but hopefully soon the M4A (AAC) transcoder will be fixed.
Bottom line: Encode all "normal" submissions as Ogg. If lossless encoding is a must, use FLAC. If you already have files in MP3 or M4A (AAC) format, go ahead and submit those; there is no need to re-encode them. Any other format should be re-encoded.
Setting Up the File Structure
We want music to be found easily and intutively. A good file structure is essential!
We decided on Artist / Album / Song.
This structure will be used in naming as well but our file structure will have a standardized genre list, then each artist gets a folder, each album from that artist gets a folder and all the songs and meta-data is stored in that album folder. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule that I'll address later.
On Disk Structure Examples
Sorting by genres (the old method) sucks. We will not do it. All folders at the top level will be the Artist names. Inside each Artist name will be Album folders. The only exception to this order are compilations. Trance/Electronic/DJ albums do not count as compilations; they should be in a folder named after the DJ.
Examples:
Bob Dylan => Blood On The Tracks => Blonde On Blonde Compilations => Godzilla Soundtrack Paul Oakenfold => Global Underground 002 - New York
This structure is roughly analogous to how iTunes organizes the music library on-disk.
Naming and Tagging Conventions
General
ID3 Tags
The most important thing when naming song files is the ID3 tags. The filenames themselves are not important, the meta-data is the most important. Therefore, before you want to add anything, we have to load it up in a program that can read and edit ID3.
I've found that iTunes is relatively good at editing mass amounts of ID3 tags and its "Browser" uses the same search structure as us: Genre - Artist - Album - Song. Its easy to see that if the naming works in iTunes, it'll work in our repository. Adding album art is also very simple in iTunes.
Each song file must have the following meta data at least:
Genre Artist Album Song Name Track Number Total Tracks in Album Album Art
Anything else is optional but welcomed.. everything EXCEPT personal plugs, website address, and any other crap that doesn't pertain directly to the song.
Remember: The Genre - Artist - Album meta-data for each song must be EXACTLY the same as its place in the file structure, character for character.
For example: The Radiohead album Amnesiac would be in Radiohead/Amnesiac Every song in the Amnesiac album would have the genre: Alternative, artist: Radiohead, and album: Amnesiac. That way it is easy to find the song as the meta data contains a trail to it.
Album Art
Finally, album art is very important as well... well its not, but we want it so why not have it!? For regular albums, finding album art should be easy but for things like compilations or sets, take or make your own pictures. I like giving my compilations a picture that captures the mood of the songs within.
Normal Artist Album
No special instructions. You should be able to follow the general procedure easily. Just make sure you seach for the artist to see what genre they are under before choosing yourself. Its not on a per-album genre, its on a per-artist genre as lots of artist release music in different styles.
Personal Compilation
Personal compilations usually have no one artist, aside from yourself! So make yourself the artist. Compilations are generally too generic for one genre so make sure they go in the Compilations genre. Then your name as the artist and whatever you named your compilations as the album name.
For the song file, since we've replaced the actual artist in the meta-data with your name, the song no longer has its real artist on it, while not a requirement, i usually edit the song file name to include the artist name.
I have a rad ambient mix i named "Ambient Vocal Mix - Oso Original", its place is at Compilations/Bryan/Ambient Vocal Mix - Oso Original. A song's meta data looks like: Genre: Compilations, Artist: Bryan, Album: Ambient Vocal Mix - Oso Original, Song Name: Portishead - Numb. While we still have the file structure trail in the meta-data, we don't lose the artist name.
Note: Yes there is a small problem of song file duplication here. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do unless you want to sym-link your files and such or you are using a db-style filesystem.
One file Album (DJ Set, Live Show)
No special instructions really. Just make sure you tag it track 1 or 1 and it is treated like a mutli-file album.
Mutliple CD Albums
Again, not too different from a normal album but there is more required meta-data. For a multi-CD album, make sure all the songs are in the same "Album" folder (not "CD1", "CD2", etc...) and you specify the meta-data:
Disc Number Total Number of Discs
Track numbers are to be listed in relation to the CD, not to the album. For example, the songs from CD 1 have track numbers 1-14 with Disc 1 of 2 (or whatever). Songs from CD 2 have track numbers 1-10 with Disc 2 of 2 NOT track numbers 15-25. If the correct disc numbers are preserved, the ordering is perserved correctly.
Exceptions
I have a collection of Essential Mixes. Each is a two hour long DJ Set in a single file. I orginize these by putting them in Essential Mixes/<Year>/ and editing the meta-data as required. While Essential Mixes isn't the artist and the year isn't the album name, we have found this to be the most logical organization for these tracks.
