Various Artist / Soundtrack

General Discussion
1

Now that I'm reaching almost 17000 MP3s, I'm trying to reign them in so they're easier to manage. One of my biggest headaches is Various artist releases and sound tracks.

I promise I searched the forum and I couldn't find any good examples of how people deal with them. I know about the 'Album Artist' or 'Band' tags, but I would love to hear how people use them.

I'm currently putting either 'Soundtrack' or 'Various Artist' in %various artist%, and then using Tag -> Filename using this:

e:\\audio$if2(%album artist%,%artist%)\%album%\%track% - %title%$if(%album artist%, - %artist%,)

Which will give me something like:

e:\\audio\Soundtrack\Electric Dreams\03 - The dream- Culture Club.mp3

for soundtracks and

e:\\audio\They Might Be Giants\Flood\05 - Dead.mp3

for non soundtracks.

any ideas or suggestions?

2

howdy nolageek,

for va and soundtracks, i use a top folder of "by_album" and then use ...
%album%-$num(%track%,2)-%artist%-%title%

... for my tag-to-filename config.

that give me these ...

  • directory names
    Z:\By_Album\TELARC_Blues_In-Store_Sampler_2001
    Z:\By_Album\Little_Shop_of_Horrors_[OMPS_1986]

  • file names
    TELARC_Blues_In-Store_Sampler_2001_-01-Graham_Parker-Poor_Me.mp3
    Little_Shop_of_Horrors    [OMPS_1986]_-01-_Michelle_Weeks,_Tichina_Arnold,_Tisha_Campbell,Bill_Mitchell-Prologue(Little_Shop_of_Horrors).mp3

for my artist stuff i use this ...
%artist%-%album%-$num(%track%,2)-%title%

... and get this ...

  • directory names
    Z:\By_Artist\Emmylou_Harris_&the_Nash_Ramblers\At_the_Ryman[Live]
    Z:\By_Artist\Smokin'Joe_Kubek&_Bnois_King\Roadhouse_Research

  • file names
    Emmylou_Harris_&the_Nash_Ramblers-At_the_Ryman[Live]_-01-_Guitar_Town.mp3
    Smokin'Joe_Kubek&Bnois_King-Roadhouse_Research-01-_Healthy_Mama.mp3

as you can see, i like underscores. [grin] i use them to make the dir/file names more readable for my really bad eyes.

take care,
lee