Discnumber. What's it good for?

General Discussion
1

I have never used it when tagging. However, when listening to some stuff I had ripped off a two-disc set in fubar2000 this morning, I discovered tracks numbered 1.01, 1.02 . . . 2.01, 2.02, and so on. I was just about to clear all the Discnumber fields, but I stopped myself. I'm trying not to be so impulsive in my old age.

So, is the Discnumber field of any practical use? I've always added [disc 1], [disc 2], etc., to album titles whenever there is more than one disc, and that's worked to sort things in both Windows Explorer and MP3Tag. I even put the tracks into separate subfolders (Disc 1, Disc 2, etc.) under the album folder.

I think this habit stems from my practice of listening to music on the computer and burning my own mix CDs for use in the car. Today, I'm listening to music off my phone via Bluetooth.

Maybe phones can use the field to play the tracks from disc 1 before playing the tracks from disc 2, and so on? I do admit it is sort of a drag to play something with multiple discs one disc at a time off the phone and in my car.

2

Pretty much all modern players utilize discnumber and or disctotal tags.
That removes the need to pollute the album field with information that does not belong to the album.

For reference:
I currently have 10.778 albums named and tagged like that. With [CD 1], [CD 2] etc. appended to the album tag.
Which happened because I started ripping and collecting digital music 18ish years ago and at that time had little knowledge/understanding of tags and how they are used in different software.
Also the software and player support for specific tags felt like hit & miss back then so it was easier to simply "hardcode" the information about the discnumber in the album tag.

That has numerous downsides.
If you for example use scrobbling services like LastFM, the albums won't be properly matched since there is no album called Wish You Were Here [CD 1], only Wish You Were Here.
The same applies to automatic metadata or extra information fetching software. It'll often fail to find an album because of the appended discnumber.

Another downside is that once you've polluted the album tag, you can no longer easily use it on its own. If you only want Wish You Were Here and not Wish You Were Here [CD 1] you'd have to strip the [CD 1] part every single time you work with the tag.
Which is possible by using regular expressions like this one:

^(.*)\s\[CD\s\d{1,3}\]$
replace with $1

for the simplest case.
However that needlessly overcomplicates everything.

If I for example suddenly decide that I want to see Wish You Were Here {Disc 1} instead of Wish You Were Here [CD 1] in MusicBee (my player of choice) I'd have to either edit the album tag of 10.778 albums, which would take ages.
Or I'd have to first run the current content of the album tag through a regular expression to remove [CD 1] and then I could re-append the information in the new form of my preference, which is just confusing.

If you properly tag your files from the get-go, you can still configure the more advanced music players to display the album in the way that you are used to or maybe prefer.

Instead of displaying %album% on its own, you can simply configure your player once to display
%album% [CD %discnumber%] (if the value of disctotal is >1 to ensure that [CD 1] etc. is only displayed when there are more than 1 discs).
Getting that configuration right once might be a bit complicated if you're new to the syntax, however it instantly applies to ALL your albums that are properly tagged and is highly flexible.

Changing
Wish You Were Here [CD 1] to
Wish You Were Here {Disc 1}

becomes as easy as changing
%album% [CD %discnumber%] to
%album% {Disc %discnumber%}

I will eventually have to fix all my album tags via regular expressions, which will probably take quite some time (and I'll only start doing that once my entire collection fits on storage that is fast enough not to drive me mad).

So I advise you to invest the time it might take to get comfortable with using more tags (discnumber and disctotal for example) instead of cluttering the album tag with information that doesn't belong there.

1 Like
3

In addition to the points @Casual_Tea already mentioned:

I use the tag DISCNUMBER only for albums with more then 1 disc.

For example the album called "Communards" from the group "The Communards" in the Remastered Reissue, 35 Year Anniversary Edition has 3 discs.
DISCNUMBERs are 1/3 and 2/3 and 3/3

The folders in the windows file system are called:

The Communards\Communards (Remastered Reissue, 35 Year Anniversary Edition) (disc 1)
The Communards\Communards (Remastered Reissue, 35 Year Anniversary Edition) (disc 2)
The Communards\Communards (Remastered Reissue, 35 Year Anniversary Edition) (disc 3)

The ALBUM tag content is
Communards (Remastered Reissue, 35 Year Anniversary Edition)
and has two parts:
a) the albumname itself Communards
and
b) the so called "Disambiguation" (Remastered Reissue, 35 Year Anniversary Edition)

1 Like
4

Ah, yes, it is coming back to me: Another reason why I did what I did was because Windows Explorer could not read tags back in the day. If you put all the tracks of a multi-disc album into a single folder, there was no way to tell which track came from which disc (aside from MP3Tag). Windows 10 has a Disc column that can be added, but Windows Explorer does not seem able to read the Discnumber field in the metadata.

There again, I'm not using Windows Media Player, as I did twenty years ago. I'm using fubar2000, and it can read metadata properly.

There are a number of things I need to change in my collection. This has now been added to the list.