Album, Song and Filenaming Recommendations
There are many different filenaming schemes. This recommended scheme has several strong points:
- It's simple
- It sorts by artist
- It sorts an artist's albums chronologically (by year)
- It keeps individual songs in the original album order
Feel free to use your own or another scheme but if you're just starting, out this one works, is a 'standard' and the EAC Profile has already set it up for you.
Album Naming: Artist (year) Album
Song Naming: Track# - Title
Also used are Artist - Track# - Title and Artist - Album - Track# - Title. Those two hold a lot of information but often exceed the 64 character limit that many burning programs have. That would mean that you would have to rename some of your files - all of them if you wanted to be consistent. You might as well just do it once.
Various Artist (VA) Albums: VA (year) Album/Track# - artist - Title
Auxiliary Files: Artist (year) Album -type.ext
During the extraction process, you will generate several 'other' files:
- album.cue - the cue sheet (if you chose to make it)
- album.log - the EAC log(s) file(s)
- album.m3u - a Winamp playlist (if you chose to make it)
- ReplayGain.txt - the log file from replaygain.exe
- artist (year) album.md5 - your md5 checksum file
While they will all be at the bottom of the directory, the appearance is much better if they follow a common scheme. Also, you will run into problems sooner or later with many files the same name (ReplayGain.txt) scattered around your harddrive. Therefore, it is highly recommended that at the end of the extraction process, right before you make your .md5, that all the auxiliary files are renamed with a common scheme, different only by their extensions. It's a simple matter to do via 'copy and paste'. With that pesky replaygain file, it's also a good idea to add "-replaygain" to it just in case you ever want to add some sort of a .txt note file in the future. An example of what you would end up with would be:
- Neil Young (1992) Harvest Moon.CUE
- Neil Young (1992) Harvest Moon.log
- Neil Young (1992) Harvest Moon.m3u
- Neil Young (1992) Harvest Moon-ReplayGain.txt
- Neil Young (1992) Harvest Moon.md5
