blog.ratio.dk

Directory Structure and File Name Layout

I prefer to keep my audio files named as such:

Artist/Album/01 Name of Song.mp3

Achieving a consistent naming scheme requires either loads of time and patience or a genuine power tool. I have found that Bulk Rename Utility is a indispensable tool for almost any file naming job, and it is thus highly recommended.

ID3 Tag Editing Including Album Cover Embedding

With regards to ID3 tag editing there are two excellent choices: Foobar2000 and Mp3tag. I do prefer the former, but only for the somewhat easier navigation. Foobar2000 does however not support album cover embedding. This concept enables JPEG images to be embedded in the ID3 tag of MP3 audio files, and is supported by Mp3tag.

It is even possible to automate the embedding if album covers if they reside in the folders of the albums. Suppose each cover is named folder.jpg. Drag all relevant folders into Mp3tag, select all the files and press Shift+Alt+5. Select Import Cover From File and type folder.jpg as the format string. The album covers are then automatically embedded in each audio file.

Using Foobar2000 for ID3 tag editing (Alt+Enter or right click followed by Properties) enables one to make use of the magnificent Automatically Fill Values feature. If for instance one’s naming scheme for files is the track number followed by a single space followed by the title of the track, then this pattern will fill those exact values correctly:

%TRACKNUMBER% %TITLE%

Conversion Between All Sorts of Formats

If one wish to convert massive amounts of audio files from one format to another Foobar2000 is the way to go. Like everything else in Foobar2000 converting is really easy. Just import the audio files, select them, right click and choose Convert followed by Convert to Same Folder (for convenience). If you want a file naming scheme that is not retarded you can choose More Settings and insert

[%tracknumber% ]%title%

into the Single tracks field.

About Formats

The truth is there is no truth. If however one wish to bet on the winning horse, then MP3 is definitely the format of choice. Although MP3 is a lossy format and thus degrades the quality of your precious and costly CDs, it is still the most widely used and therefore supported by virtually all hardware- and software players out there.

Another possibility is to use FLAC. This stands for free lossless audio codec and so it is. However it is not supported by the major players including iTunes and iPods which make it good for nothing but storing your CDs on the computer for later conversion. With an acceptable compression level FLAC will take up half the space on the hard drive as uncompressed WAV files do. It is comparable to having the negatives from a film lying around for later development in whatever size suitable, which I find very settling given the perishability of compact discs.

The alert reader will notice that both the lossy and the lossless format I have highlighted here are in fact technologically inferiors. Monkey’s Audio is a technically better format than FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis beats MP3 when it comes to compression rates. Why then still highlight FLAC and MP3? Because availability is the only thing that is really important when it comes to formats. If my iPod (hypothetical remark, I don’t own Apple equipment) does not play Ogg Vorbis, then it isn’t really better than MP3 since it doesn’t work.

About Software Players

Over the time I have used a lot of different software players, because no one player had just what I thought I was looking for.

Foobar2000 (Windows)

As far as I am aware this is the most customisable audio player out there. All this flexibility however, comes the price of work on your part. Gradually as my needs changed I found it to be rather tedious having to invest a lot of time changing the player too. The player features

• An excellent ID3 tag editor for editing massive amounts of audio files
• An unrivalled conversion tool for converting FLAC into MP3 or WAV into FLAC
• Support for every interesting format
• Doesn’t try to do everything for you

SongBird / iTunes (Windows)

I am mentioning these two players in the same heading since they are very similar to my mind in their workings. The main difference I find is that SongBird is open source. As opposed to Foobar2000 these players are not very customisable but requires one to setup everything in a certain maner. They assume that their users are numbskulls which ironically means that it’s harder to figure out how to use them reasonably than Foobar2000 or WinAmp for instance. The features of these players include

• Looking good without too much work
• Feels finished (applies especially to iTunes)
• Easily navigated by friends who are not necessarily very tech savvy

At the time of writing most young people I know have quite large collections of music on their computers. Whether or not these collections are well organised is unknown to me. However, looking at my own collection as it appeared just a few days ago I am lead to believe that the answer to this question is: they’re quite disorganised.

Organisation of music collections include the following:

• Naming conventions should be laid out and followed. This goes for directory structure and names of the music files
• ID3-tag information should include some basic information about the track that corresponds to the name and path of the music files
• Cover Art should be included such that the player can find it

Preferably some extra bits of goody-goody attributes also apply:

• All the files in the collection share a common format such as MP3 or FLAC

So what do I do about it?

Over the next couple of articles I am going to discuss some of the power tools that get the job of managing a huge music collection done. Furthermore I will talk about why MP3 isn’t such a bad format after all, and a little about what the different software players can do.