I'm going back through my CD collection and reripping my music to MP3 again. I have decided this will probably be the easiest way I can ensure everything is VBR, properly tagged, add lyrics and album art.

One decision I am having a hard time making is file names. What is a good filename scheme to allow easy browsing of the collection by file directly? What does everyone else use with their collections?

Ideally I'd like some sort of Samba VFS plugin and a database holding all the tag info. That way I could retag things easially, and the raw files would just be similar to the FID naming scheme the empeg uses. If I make a tagging change in the db, some tagger could go through and correct things easially Samba VFS would take care of making a nice folder layout based on the database or tags. Sadly I can't find much in the way of any Samba VFS projects doing anything remotly similar to this.

My old method was 8.3 formatted, so not much info was conveyed looking at the names. No real folder structure existed either beyond a single folder for the album. I then threw 650 MB worth of my collection on a CD. This time, space will just be used up on my server, with RAID-5 and tape protecting it.

Personally, I use Artist - CD Title - Track# - Track Title.mp3 for regular albums and CD Title - Track# - Artist - Track Title.mp3 for VA albums. That seems to work out pretty well for me.

To be clear, the delimiter I use is ' - ' (that is, space-dash-space). And if I have an artist or track with hyphens, I just don't use spaces there. So: Sleater-Kinney - One Beat - 03 - Oh!.mp3

Although a cooler idea is using different delimiters for each type of data, like put artist in parens, cd title in brackets, track number in braces, etc., etc. That way, you could include whatever information you want without worrying so much about sticking to a set scheme.

Also, it's irritating how many characters are illegal characters in WIndows filenames. Unix only disallows slashes and NULs.

I use three directory levels to help keep things convenient:

"artist/album/NN - Title"

IMO, Bitt's naming format is the best. The others that have been suggested here don't seem very good in my mind. Without the Artist - CD Title - Track # - Track Name.mp3 format, if you have any files from different CDs in the same directory, they won't be in a good order. With this format, you could combine all your MP3s together and you could still have them in order.

I'm not saying you would frequently mix all your files, but even if you didn't, that naming convention makes the most sense to me.

Yeah, I actually do both. Artist/Title/artist - title - tk - name.mp3

I posted my method for naming MP3 files in this post a while ago, I pretty much use the same scheme now. I use MP3 Tag Studio to do all of the tag maintenence, so I can substitute characters for non-windows allowed ones (like ^ for ?), and they will show up right in the tag.

I keep my FLACs and MP3s in exactly parallel directory structures, and have a little script (actually Mike wrote it) which runs over the two trees, encoding any FLACs which don't have corresponding MP3s, and any time the FLAC is newer than the MP3, re-copying the tags.

The structures go "Artists/artist/album/NN title.ext" for studio and live albums (with multi-disc albums numbered as if they came from one gigantic disc), and "Artists/artist/title.ext" for stuff from singles, greatest hitses, and compilations (and which I don't already have the exact same version of on an album). Compilations themselves are represented as playlists, "Compilations/title.m3u", which point to their songs wherever those live in the main Artists hierarchy. The only exception to this is continuous-mix CDs such as 2 Many DJs or DJ Yoda, which (as they only make sense played as a whole) live separately in "Mixed/cdname/NN title.mp3".

As for character set, I tend to use proper quotes (U+2019 etc) so they aren't an issue; likewise the program I use for naming a file based on its tags uses fraction slash (U+2044) for slash, which is sort of cheating but looks OK. When I'm looking at them over Samba I still have trouble with colons and question marks, but by and large I just live with the mangled short-names for those tracks and albums. (Though I have got a bug in against Samba, whereby it doesn't mangle Foo?.flac to the, still playable, Fwhatever.FLA but to an extensionless file, despite the documentation saying it gets it right.) I think you need Samba 3.x for this; Samba 2.x doesn't present UTF-8 filenames to Unicode clients properly.

Peter

I originally used Grip, which lets you store everything in a MySQL database on the side, but there weren't any tools to help you keep changes to the files in sync with the database. Still, I think the external database is the right idea. Apple's iTunes gets you close to this, but you have to use Apple Lossless instead of FLAC, among other trade-offs. Still, the iTunes interface wins the day for me, particularly for tag management.

Peter would you mind sharing that script with the rest of us. I have one i wrote myself to do the same thing you describe but it seams very slow to me.

I keep mine in the same way as Andy. Once you have things properly in Tags, the filenames are rather irrelevant if you use any type of decent MP3 management/player program. If you're going to be playing directly froom the filesystem then names are an issue. I do wish the good tagger programs would go full-tilt on keeping an external database and doing background syncs to the files. I also wish my two favorite tagggers (Dr.Tag and Tag&Rename (which I like only because of Amazon support and auto-numbering)) would allow listing/manipulating by tag structure as opposed to being filestructure-based only. iTunes is the other way around and really stinks if you're starting from scratch with messed-up tags.

Bruno