Not exactly a tagging question...mostly a folder question

Many here say, the ripping process isn't all that difficult, once you get the tagging the way you like it; my issue is even a bit more basic than that. And, because I'm Dillydipper...more complicated and specific.

Ripping with dBpoweramp to FLAC, having problems with the destination folders themselves, in Windows Explorer on Win7. Apparently I can't even describe the problem precicely enough to search for basic Explorer help. Yes, even in 2019..!

dBpoweramp routes the FLAC, tagged (almost) as I set it up, to an album folder, folder sits in an artist folder. So far so good. Tweaks I would like to make to the process now, I can't seem to do. I thought I had the artist name set up with helpful commas ("Beatles, The"; "James, Tommy & The Shondells"; "Jennings, Waylon"). But dBpoweramp seems to ignore that - so yeah, this part is a dBpoweramp problem I need to fix.

Before doing that, there's the album folder. If I could change it, I'd display the year from the metadata first, and album title in next column (being able to sort chronogically by year in this folder, negates the need for needing a Moody Blues album to re-titled, "Question of Balance, A"). That's all I'd need the album to display in the artist folder, without folder icons under "Artist ID", or "Date Modified" dates - just year, and album title.

But, unchecking the "Album ID" doesn't get rid of the album's icon...it just puts the icon under the column title, "year"...and still the actual year of each album doesn't appear in there. Right-clicking on the icon only allows me to rename the album title, no option to even manually enter the year; left-clicking only highlights the line of that album, left double-clicking only opens the album to the tracks inside. No option to fix what I want.

Similar problem inside the album folder where the tracks reside. Since many of these ripped tracks are going to come out of the album folder and into a "General Population" ("GenPop") folder to reside with probably 2000+ other artist favorite tracks, I want to change the way these display within the album folder as well. So I can move the colum listings around, but can't make the info change in the colums. I want the first thing visible to be the filename ("artist\-\title"), then length, then album the "modified date". If and only if the track number can be invisible, I could still use it to sort tracks in order so they won't be alphabetical. If not, I just don't need it unless I move it way over to the right.

Yet again, I can't seem to enter info manually, or rearrange columns and have the metadata appear in the right place. And, since both sets of folders need to be configured differently, I can't just use the "all folders like this" function.

With a little more figgerin'-out, I can get dBpoweramp and/or MP3Tag to get the tags right. But, how do I get the folders right? Is there some sort of a, "This-is-a-football"-basic Windows Explorer tutorial that I'll actually be able to set things up unlike what most people satisfy themselves with?

(Thanks for reading through all this)

 

For the dBpoweramp part of your issue, have you looked here?
dBpoweramp Naming

Set your file naming to:
[year] - [album]\[track] - [title]

Or add "year" to the default naming structure, which I think would look like this:
[IFVALUE]year,[year] - [IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[IFCOMP]Various Artists[][IF!COMP][artist][][]\[album]\[track] [artist] - [title]

As for how things display in Windows Explorer, you can drag column headers around to reorder them, and you can right-click on the column headers to set which columns will be displayed.

 

Sadly no, I've tried this over and over. Yes, I can drag the column headers where I want them...I just can't put any information in the entries, because the only column I can enable, is the one (album title) that already had information in it. Every column header I tick-on, displays no information for the album listed, nor is there a right-click, left-click, or clickety-clickty-clack I can try that will open up a field in there - it just opens up the album title field, and that's it.

It's like not being able to test-drive a car, because there's no keyhole in the dash, and the salesmen are all out celebrating hitting their monthly goal.

 

Ok, I think I understand: Windows Explorer is only able to read tag information from FLAC files starting with Win 10.

IIRC, there was an add-in that solved this problem. Read this thread; there is a working link about half-way through:
Windows can't read FLAC tags Solved - Page 2 - Windows 7 Help Forums

Alternatively, you could use a proper music manager such as J River, MusicBee or MediaMonkey.

 

“Windows 7" does not support flac natively and consequently, has poor support for reading metadata of flac files in “Windows Explorer/File Explorer.” DbPoweramp and other programs (once installed) do provide Windows with some property handler tools to read some of the metadata in “Windows Explorer/File Explorer.” “Windows 10" has native flac support, but the pre-defined categories don’t come close to supporting all the available flac/mp3/etc categories. And nor do the column title names always align with common flac/mp3 standards.

How to customize “Windows Explorer” columns:
Google search

How to configure the default viewing templates in File Explorer

Windows 7: Windows Explorer Columns - Change Width


I suggest that you rely on using just a few headers in “Windows Explorer” for basic file sorting and to instead, rely on mp3tag for reading your metadata. In mp3tag, you will also need to customize/select the columns that you wish to read from metadata, but at least most values are there to select from and they also reflect common industry standards.

 

Gentlemen, thank you - I can look into this today!

 

Using Poweramp, this is how I set it.
I manually create folders first:
Neil Diamond/sub folder (Comps)
for this title
Greatest Hits Vol. II-1982 (IFPI)
In poweramp I hit the 'Set' button and direct it to that folder.
Naming I have it set to
TrackNum-Title