Music File Metadata and OCD

For bonus tracks I add * at the end of the titles instead of saying [bonus track]. I thought it looked cleaner that way.

Example:
Not
Sally G [bonus track]
But
Sally G*

If it’s an alternate take I still put that (alternate take) but still use the *

So any songs that have a * let’s me know it was not part of the original album.

 

I have the occasional album where i've altered the original sequence, or eliminated tracks on double albums to create single albums . I include both versions in my digital library. i've done that with:

Wild Cherry Electrified Funk
Johnny Guitar Watson - A Real Mother For Ya
Earth, Wind & Fire - Faces
The Isley Brothers - Winner Takes All
Prince - 4Ever

On others, I added bonus tracks that I felt pertinent to the release. Often, those bonus tracks are my needledrops of things that aren't available digitally.

 

That is exactly how I tag bonus tracks! Spooky!

 

Neat, noted and nicked! Thank you

 

I saw the "aka" names on the Wikipedia page for Gabriel's albums. The advantage of using the release year after the album name is that it is firm objective information. The first album was released in 1977 and that is not true of any other Peter Gabriel album.

At one time, as a result of having so many Greatest Hits albums I tried using a number in bracket after the album title to differentiate them (my audio player fused all of the Greatest Hits albums together into one massive album since the player considered it one album). However, it became a headache because I had to keep track of which number I should use when I add a new Greatest Hits album to my collection ("should I use [23] or [24]?"). In the end, when two or more albums have the same name I put the album artist's name in brackets after the album title. This made it easy to differentiate them by album name.

 

When it comes to bonus tracks, what I do is add "[Bonus Tracks]" after the album title for the bonus tracks. This keeps it linked to the original album, but allows you to listen to only the original album if you choose.

 

Super useful for soundtracks & compilations. Use that functionality all the time for those.

 

Nope I correct all of mine the minute I acquire the album and push it to my NAS.

 

But only if one fully understands which field is used for what. These two mentioned fields are a confusion for many. There are things one does that organizes an HDD full of music, and things that make the data show up correctly in a player display, and is searchable.

I found that there is some trial and error involved. But maybe I'm slow grasping some concepts.

 

Soundtracks I use Album Artist OST and uncheck the Compilation Flag, whilst using Genre - Soundtrack. I believe some software can have problems giving Genre and Album Artist the same name.

Obviously as I could search just by Genre, this could be considered OCD or vanity.

As I display by Artist / Album / Year, which mostly puts them in chronological order, it puts them together and not dispersed amongst hundreds of Compilations.

Over time you can come up with neater solutions that work well for yourself and the player, without causing other problems; so you personalise the tags more before ripping.

Sometimes you can over complicate a very basic operation!

 

The way I use the Album Artist tag is to group the tracks from albums together, while the Artist tag is for the artists/act who performed the song itself. As an example, Petula Clark released an album named Duets where each song is a duet between her and another artist. So, the album's Album Artist is "Petula Clark" while for each track the Artist is are the people who performed on it (like "Can't Get You To Love Me" by Petula Clark And Gilbert O'Sullivan).

When it comes to compilations, I use "Various Artists" as the Album Artist because it travels accurately from program to program (some of my files have traveled through several programs many times). The problem with using a Compilation checkbox is that some programs may not recognize it or may read it in a different way. It is a similar issue with ratings where some programs use a percentage number translated into stars (such as "100 - 81 = 5 stars").