Ramblings on organizing music

[careytilden]

I love MusicBrainz a whole lot, but there are a few things I don't like about their data.  Eventually I will come up with some way to override these things automatically (perhaps with Picard plugins), but for now I'm making a raft of changes by hand:

• Artist name substitutions.  Say all you want about "original intent", but I get really agitated by artist names in all caps or all lowercase.  I change these, and a handful of other naming oddities (e.g., "blink-182" becomes "Blink 182").

• Sort name hack-n-slash.  I end up removing the sort name tag from all but the few artists that need one.  The vast majority of sort names I keep are to remove "The" from the beginning of a bunch of artists, but there are a few other cases (e.g., to remove the dots in front of "...And you will know us by the trail of the dead").  I completely abhor the "Last name, First name" convention.

• Genre cleanup.  Using folksonomy tags for genre is a good starting point, but I've been changing a lot of them by hand.  I sometimes wonder if it's even worth the effort.

I also decided to flatten my file naming convention a little bit.  I switched to the following:

• Albums/{Artist} - {Album} - {Total tracks} tracks/{Track num} - {Track name}
• Albums/[multiple artists] - {Album} - {Total tracks} tracks/{Track num} - {Artist} - {Track name}

This gives me one directory for each album release, even in the cases when there are more than one release with the same name (unless both releases have the same number of tracks).  It reduces nesting and makes it easier to browse the collection more naturally (more analogous to a single set of shelves, rather than a bunch of rooms with separate shelves).