Album Naming Schemes assistance

**garym** · January 23, 2014, 10:42 PM

Re: Album Naming Schemes assistance

I don't think this is something done by editing profile. You can easily do what you want, but you do it in ID TAG UPDATE by combining info from different tags. Also easy to do in mp3tag (where you'd use an action in mp3tag (in a batch manner) to tell it to make the ALBUM tag field: %artist% - %album%, etc. You might need to create a temp ALBUM field called NEWALBUM, and then copy the NEW ALBUM value back to ALBUM. All this can be done in actions. And I believe it can all be done similarly in dbpa with ID Tag Update.

For New rips, you can just do this in the ripping screen by, for example, adding U2 - .... to the album title before you rip.

**mville** · January 24, 2014, 12:22 AM

Re: Album Naming Schemes assistance

Originally posted by bch

At the moment I have the default setting and when listing "Albums" on my Sonos Controller, they show up as follows:

"Name of Album"
Example: The Johua Tree

Instead of this, I would prefer to have the Artist inserted in front with a space after it and then a "-" and then another space and then the "Name of Album", like below:

"Artist" - "Name of Album"
Example: U2 - The Joshua Tree

If there is a compilation album (different artists), I would like it to be listed as:

VA - "Name of Album" (VA would be constant)

I guess you would need to customize the Sonos Controller app to display albums to your preference i.e. Genre\Album Artist - Album, instead of just Album.

**BrodyBoy** · January 24, 2014, 09:03 AM

Re: Album Naming Schemes assistance

Originally posted by bch

At the moment I have the default setting and when listing "Albums" on my Sonos Controller, they show up as follows:

"Name of Album"
Example: The Johua Tree

Instead of this, I would prefer to have the Artist inserted in front with a space after it and then a "-" and then another space and then the "Name of Album", like below:

"Artist" - "Name of Album"
Example: U2 - The Joshua Tree

If there is a compilation album (different artists), I would like it to be listed as:

VA - "Name of Album" (VA would be constant)

.................................

I was thinking of creating several slightly different profiles to achieve different name listing in the Sonos Controller of the "Album" tag, depending on what type of music it is. I believe I can just export the profile from registry and then modify it as appropriate and then import it back with a new suitable profile name. I tried this and it seems to work fine.....

What I am thinking is that if the music is Country (of which I don't have very much), I'll create a "Country" profile and would like the resulting Album tag to show up as:

Country - "Artist" - "Name of Album"
(Country would be static, i.e. all my Country albums would start with Country as seen under album listing on Sonos Controller)

And if Country compilation album:

Country - VA - "Name of Album"

....................................

I am more than happy to have a profile for each of the above and manually select the appropriate on when ripping.

All help is most appreciated!

- Bch

In considering your questions, I've been trying...without success...to imagine any scenario where it would be useful to combine all that metadata (ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST, ALBUM, and GENRE) into one tag. Is it possible that you're making this a lot more complicated than it needs to be? I suspect the Sonos itself offers a more elegant solution to your issue than this kind of tag manipulation.

If your music library is well-tagged, with all pieces of pertinent information assigned to their appropriate tags, most playback devices (including Sonos systems) allow a variety of views and approaches to navigation. In fact, trying to squeeze so much data into one tag creates problems that actually diminish usability:

The resulting long album titles are apt to display poorly. In some cases, the actual album title would likely be cut off completely!
Example: Country - Mary Chapin Carpenter - Come On Come On
But even when not cut off, the album name would be a long, cumbersome, redundant (with ARTIST included) string. All Sonos controllers use the "Now Playing" display below. As you know, artist is always displayed anyway, and really long album name strings may not fit.
If you ever actually use the Album view of your music library, the list could be kind of a long, jumbled mess.....some listings would be by artist (the "artist-first" format you specify) while others would be by genre (the "genre-first" album names). The Album view doesn't have much utility anyway, since it's just a really long alphabetical list of your albums, but adding other data that re-sorts that list seems to diminish its one limited function (looking up an album when all you know is the album name...assuming that ever happens ), while making all other views more cumbersome to use as well.

So....I have to ask: Why not just use the other views on your controller(s)? I'd venture to guess that the vast majority of users navigate their library through the Artist view, though the other options are handy in some situations. In any case, I just don't see how constructing these long Album name strings could improve display or navigation. I could be missing something, of course, so maybe if I better understood how want to you navigate your music (on your Sonos controllers), I could offer more specific help.

PS: Even when you do want to employ various kinds of tag manipulations and custom naming schemes, you should never have to edit the registry to do so. The Path & Naming strings, along with the ID Tag Processing DSP, are where you edit & customize your metadata. You can also create and save custom ripping Profiles there.

**garym** · January 24, 2014, 11:42 AM

Re: Album Naming Schemes assistance

I very much agree with BrodyBoy's thoughts.

**bch** · January 24, 2014, 08:09 PM

Re: Album Naming Schemes assistance

Thank you all for great replies with thoughts and recommendations!

Yea, maybe I am making this too complicated and cumbersome....

My idea was that, under the default view of the Sonos Controller, all the Albums are listed below one another in alphabetical order, ordered by the name of each album (on the right hand side of the Sonos Controller display). My idea was that I thought I would find it easier to quickly find the album I wanted to play (as I don't always know the exact name of the album) by quickly scrolling down to the name of the group/artist (which I would definitely know). But as you all say or indicate, it is maybe not a good idea to start putting in long album tags, as maybe this will cause problems further down the line and also some of them may be too long to be displayed anyway ("a jumbled mess").

I will further investigate the views and options available in the Sonos Controller app (I use it on a PC and also on a 10.1" Android tab). I know that certainly the search function in the Sonos Controller is great and seems to search for artist by default, so I guess that may be the way to go. I am ripping all my CD's to uncompressed FLAC (have done a 100 or so - maybe 500 or so to go....).

The idea with exporting - modifying - and then importing back in .reg files would be so that I could easily create custom profiles for each category type of album I wanted (i.e. Country - %album%, Country - VA - %album%, etc. and name each profile appropriately) - based on my already desired dBpoweramp settings and only changing the one line in each profile to deal with the album tag.

Well, you guys have certainly given me some food for thought and I'll need to have a wee think about this, but I guess I will probably just carry on ripping as I have done, letting dBpoweramp create the tags as they should be and maybe changing the odd tag if appropriate.

Thanks again for great response and advice to my post - it is much appreciated!:smile2:

- Bch

**BrodyBoy** · January 24, 2014, 10:29 PM

Re: Album Naming Schemes assistance

Originally posted by bch

Thank you all for great replies with thoughts and recommendations!

Yea, maybe I am making this too complicated and cumbersome....

My idea was that, under the default view of the Sonos Controller, all the Albums are listed below one another in alphabetical order, ordered by the name of each album (on the right hand side of the Sonos Controller display). My idea was that I thought I would find it easier to quickly find the album I wanted to play (as I don't always know the exact name of the album) by quickly scrolling down to the name of the group/artist (which I would definitely know). But as you all say or indicate, it is maybe not a good idea to start putting in long album tags, as maybe this will cause problems further down the line and also some of them may be too long to be displayed anyway ("a jumbled mess").

I will further investigate the views and options available in the Sonos Controller app (I use it on a PC and also on a 10.1" Android tab). I know that certainly the search function in the Sonos Controller is great and seems to search for artist by default, so I guess that may be the way to go. I am ripping all my CD's to uncompressed FLAC (have done a 100 or so - maybe 500 or so to go....).

Album view isn't the default view....it's probably just the one that you keep using so Sonos goes back to it. But click the back arrow (at the top of that right-hand column on your controller display) to see the music library view options. Simply select Artist to get a MUCH more useful way to navigate your library.

As I suggested in my previous post, it's important to tag your music well to make it all work properly. For example, avoid inconsistencies like "The Beatles" and "Beatles" in your library....they'll show up as two different artists. And if you use ALBUM ARTIST as the primary artist identifier, be sure to go into Settings and tell Sonos to use that tag. (Manage > Settings > Music Library > Advanced > Group Albums Using...)

The idea with exporting - modifying - and then importing back in .reg files would be so that I could easily create custom profiles for each category type of album I wanted (i.e. Country - %album%, Country - VA - %album%, etc. and name each profile appropriately) - based on my already desired dBpoweramp settings and only changing the one line in each profile to deal with the album tag.

You can do this within the CD Ripper interface. Right above the Path and Naming windows, there's a "Profile" window. You can set all the parameters you want for different categories of music, then save those settings as a Profile with a unique name. For example, I have different Profiles for Standard (single-artist) albums, but also for things like Soundtracks, Compilations, Classical, and Multi-Disc Sets, and most of them only differ by a tag or two.

**bch** · January 25, 2014, 06:36 AM

Re: Album Naming Schemes assistance

Thank you so much BrodyBoy!

I will take your advice and experiment with the Sonos Controller interface - and yes, I have used the artist view option - and will probably now start using it more:smile2:. Also when ripping CD's, I will just make sure I check the different tags for each album to make sure they are consistent with other albums from the same artist.

Thanks again for all the good advice!

-Bch

Album Naming Schemes assistance

Album Naming Schemes assistance

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