A few points of discussion here, and it's also unclear to me what you're trying to achieve.
A lot of my material has been ripped from my original CD's over many years, so there is no metadata etc with them yet, just straight ripped files, most have file names matching the song titles.
I think that for automatic or bulk processing (adding album cover art, and having the album properly identified by MusicBee), Artist & Album Name folder names are used. Will having the year in front of the Album Name (YYYY) cause problems when doing this?
You say your files currently have no metadata (i.e. tags) so it sounds to me like you'reabout to embark on a project of renaming all of your folders and then using the folder and file names to automatically populate the tag values.
If that is the case, you can name your files and folders however you like.
When you use the auto-tagging tools (in MusicBee or Mp3tag or most programs) you specify your naming format as part of that operation.
In your case, use the
Infer and Update Tags from Filename... and specify that your naming template is:
<Artist>\<Year> <Album>\<Track#> - <Title>
and if your files are all named consistently MusicBee should be able to work out the correct values.
(I've just had a guess at your file naming convention as you didn't include that, but you get the idea.)
If I've misunderstood the reason for your question, feel free to clarify.
Also, I have seen people separate their Albums, EP's, Singles & Live Albums, Studio Albums using different subfolders within the Album folder. Any suggestions for what to do here?
I know the answer is 'do whatever works for you', but I find it better not to have to reinvent the wheel, and use existing naming & organising conventions already being used.
You are correct in saying you should do what works best for you, and it's largely subjective without a specific question to address. There are older threads discussing general folder and track structures and the pros and cons of different approaches.
But also realise that what you do with your folder/file structure doesn't automatically correlate with how MusicBee will display them. If you're trying to replicate screenshots that show albums separated that way in MusicBee, it's because people have tagged their files in a particular way in order for MusicBee to do so. It won't do that automatically based on folder structure alone. Not without some pretty good virtual tag fu anyway.
MusicBee is very flexible in achieving such things, so theoretically you could include an additional tag in the naming template example I showed earlier (I think
Media Type is built-in).
e.g.
<Artist>\<Media Type>\<Year> <Album>\<Track#> - <Title>
will populate the
Media Type tag, which you can use to group albums in MusicBee.
Therefore, I am thinking the directory structure of Artist\YYYY Album Name will be more useful.
Speaking from experience, if you're about to take the time to add the release year to each of your albums anyway, you may want to consider adding the release
date.
This is probably overkill for most users' needs, but can be useful if you have a lot of pre-1970 albums when it wasn't uncommon for popular artists to release multiple albums each year:
It will depend on how much time you're planning to spend on adding the years, but something to think about at the start of the process rather than adding the year to hundreds of folders before deciding "Actually, having the date would have been useful..." and having to start again. Like I did. Because I'm an idiot with too much spare time.
Topic: Naming: Year in front of Album Name, Bulk Album Artwork, Separating types (Read 508 times)