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How to build a media library

This is the fourth article of the series. In the previous ones we ‘ve covered how information is stored in digital audio files, as well as what tagging software can do to manipulate that information.

In this chapter we will examine the decisions involved in making a media library, such as what file and folder structure to use, how the information contained in tags will be formatted and which tags will have to be complete to consider files ready for the library.

Consistent tags

In order to efficiently browse your media library by any particular tag and the results to be absolute, that tag field has to be consistently complete throughout the library. This way, you are sure that when you type in “David Bowie”, you get all of your Bowie albums, without missing the ones that had their artist tag completed as “unknown artist”.

Primarily, in order for the albums to sort out correctly in a media library player, you will need to have the following tag fields complete:

• Artist name
• Album name
• Track name
• Track number

To get that information, you probably will use the Freedb or Musicbrainz lookup function of your tagger. Even if the files already have that information, it is good to check if they check out with internet databases, as it is a quick way to check if the album is complete.

Other information you can choose to consistently have are:

• Number of total tracks in an album.This is useful, as it makes it easy to identify if an album has missing songs (i.e. after a minor hard disk failure). This practically means that you’ll want your tagger to write trackumbers in an xx/xx format.
• Release dates. Having the dates display next to the album can give you a whole new level of understanding your music. Most freedb results have dates, and the rest you can get in allmusic. Manually looking for them might be a bit time consuming, but I believe it’s worth the extra effort.
• Disc numbers (where applicable). For multidisc albums there’s the discnumber field, where we keep the disc number (preferrably in the x/x format). It is very common to write the disc number information on the album field, but it’s better to avoid that.

Deciding if you want to use some (or all) of those extra fields consistently in your library is a matter of balancing the library’s quality against the amount of work needed. In my opinion, it’s worth it to be consistent in those tags, too.

Other tag information

Apart from those required tag fields, there are bits of info that some albums are going to have and some are not. One example is the Comment tag field, where sometimes there is a comment, a review, a crc checksum or the name of the encoder used. Depending on the source of the files, the comment field is going to be used for all sorts of purposes.

Depending on your tagger’s capabilities, you might decide to overwrite all the comment fields with either information relevant to the files (such as a checksum), or with a fixed string (like “Tagged by Lamz0R N00b”). On the other hand, an easy -and probably more appropiate- solution is to leave all comment fields as they are, so you don’t miss any information that was in that field of the original files.

Album covers are also not hard to find, but don’t have any reason to be a required part of the library, since they don’t interfere with the folder structure. It’s good if you select a name for cover images and save them in the same folder as their corresponding album by that name. A few common names are folder.*, cover.* and front.* (when there are also back.* covers). The filetype may vary according to how much quality you need and what you could find on an album.

Finally, there’s the Genre tag. While this tag is frequently listed in internet databases and can be autofilled by taggers, it is usually grossly inaccurate. This is not only because it’s hard to categorize music, but also because each person wants his music categorized differently. Probably the only way for it to be of any use when browsing your music, is if you categorize all of it by hand, and know what every album is. This would be far more work than all of the rest of the tagging, and it’s probably better if you just ignore the genre field.

Folder structure

The tool we have for manipulating the library’s folder stucture is our tagger’s tag to filename mask. This means that we are looking for the specific mask(s) we are going to use in our library.

Because of the folder structure’s hierarchical nature, the tags that we are going to use for folder names in masks must have the following two characteristics:

1. The tag field must be consistent in all of the files in the library, to prevent blank filenames and directories and general ugliness.
2. All of the files in the album must share the same value for that tag. If it’s a per-file value, it’s best kept for the file name.

The Artist field, when making this distinction, presents an abnormality: There are albums that are all by the same artist, and albums that feature many artists -for example, movie soundtracks-.

A mistake that is commonly done in order to compensate for this abnormality, is to place the artist name in the song field (Artist - Title) and tag the artist field as “Various Artists”. This is wrong simply because the artist field is the artist field, and well… it should contain the artist.

Instead of this, it is better to keep compilation albums in a separate folder structure, that takes into account the fact that the tracks do not have similar artists. This means we need one mask for “Artist albums”, and one for compilations.

The Masks

I’m presenting the masks in an arbitrary form that *might* work in some taggers but is mostly as close to plain english as possible in order to be easy to read. The masks are made so they deposit tagged music in a “Sorted” folder, so the files are then moved manually into the media library in order to avoid mistakes.

Music/Sorted/Artists/%artist%/%year% -%album%/%number% - %title%.*

I’m assuming the library’s root directory (the one you give to the player) is called “Music“. This is the mask for the “Artists” folder: The one with the albums that have the same artist. Under this folder there are folders with artist names, and in them folders of their albums. Placing the year before an album name is nice because when browsing through your file manager you can see the order in which the albums were made. Inside there are the tracks, named after only track-specific information: Track number and song title.

Music/Sorted/Compilations/%year% - %album%/%number% - %artist% - %title%.*

This is the mask for compilation albums. Instead of starting with artist folders, the “Compilations” folder starts with albums (again sorted by year). Then, the tracknames also contain the name of the artist, as it is now track-specific.

Now we need two variations of the masks for multidisc albums. We mentioned that there’s a disc number tag field. The disc number (in preferrably a x/x format) goes there, and not on the album name.

This means that for single artist multidisc albums we apply:

Music/Sorted/Artists/%artist%/%year% -%album% [Cd %discnumber%]/%number% - %title%.*

And for multidisc compilation albums:

Music/Sorted/Compilations/%year% - %album% [Cd %discnumber%]/%number% - %artist% - %title%.*

This just adds brackets with the disc number (should show up like [Cd 2-2]) so the two discs don’t end up in the same directory. Apart from that, it lands the albums in their corresponding “Artists” or “Compilations” hierarchy.

If your tagger’s mask expressions support “if” and you think it’s worth the effort, you could make a more complex one that automatically checks if there is a disc tag and puts the ” [Cd %discnumber%]” part only on that condition.

If you decide to skip these last two masks and keep the cd number in the album name instead, players probably will not recognize that the two discs are part of the same album. This is not very crucial, but anyway, there’s the right way and the only-sligtly-less time consuming sloppy way.

Ready to go

By now, we’ve probably covered the logic behind all of the decisions that need to be made to start building a media library. Remember to set your tagger to use UTF-8 for tags (so your library is capable of international text) and apply capitalization rules at least to the folder structure (because some filesystems are case sensitive and others are not, so it’s good to not have folders with the same spelling and different case, even if you can).

And this is the end of the fourth part in the series on managing digital music. Up to here we have fully covered how a digital music library is structured. In the next (and last) part we end with some tips on maintaining and manipulating your media library.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 22:34 and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.