Set-Up for Ripping

[garym]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

"FYI, I'd like to see files in my File Explorer as follows: Genera\ Album name\ Artist\ Composer\ Track"

I very much doubt this is what you actually want to see as file organization. Again, keep in mind that in your music library and player, you'll be using all your metadata tags. And this will contain GENRE, etc. and you can sort on this, search on this, etc. We're only talking about FILE NAMING at this point (not the tags). The example you give above, would produce this in file explorer for a willie nelson album with different composers.

c:\music\Country\Shotgun Willie\Willie Nelson\Willie Nelson\01.flac
.................................................. ...........\Johnny Bush\02.flac

etc. You'd end up with many different subdirectories under the album subdirectory. If it was me, I'd want:

c:\music\Willie Nelson\Shotgun Willie\01 - Shotgun Willie.flac
.................................................\ 02 - Whiskey River.flac
etc.

That is, I'd rather have a parent directory with the ARTIST, then all the ARTIST's albums underneath that single artist directory. I don't care about GENRE in my file names (but note I use it a lot in my PLAYING and sorting on the GENRE tag, etc.). But if you want GENRE in naming, I'd want

c:\music\Country\Willie Nelson\Shotgun Willie\01 - Shotgun Willie.flac

Additional important point

You mention a lot about classical and your "strange result" posting was classical CD. For classical CDs it is often important to make sure that composer, work, etc. is included in your metadata tags. And you may want the files named based on something like composer. So you'll likely want a different naming scheme for classical (you can have multiple naming strings, and save them under PROFILES in the naming string section in lower left of ripping screen).

You might want:

c:\music\classical\mozart\.....

The bad news is that the online databases that supply the automatic tag data are reasonably good for pop music, but for classical they are a mess! This means that at ripping time, you really need to do a lot of manual editing of the track titles, composer names, etc. to make sure they are right and what you want. Best to do this work up front and have good tags. When you put the CD in to rip, click on the little "tag" icon at top of page (3 over from the rip icon at upper left). This will open up the tag data page. You'll see all the options provided by the vendors. You can pick the one that is closet, and then manually edit each of the boxes to contain what you want.

Google a bit on info on tagging classical music. See:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=tagging+classical+music

Otherwise, for non classical, paste the following in your naming options.

[IFCOMP]Compilations\[album] [IFMULTI] \Disc [disc][]\[track] - [title] - [artist][][IF!COMP][IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[artist][]\[album][IFMULTI] \Disc [disc][]\[track] - [title][]

On bottom left of ripper screen, on Path box, click on SET then make it: C:\music
On naming box, click on SET, then delete the default string in the "Base location" and paste the string I provided above in its place.

then rip a few CDs (single, mulitdisk, and a compilation/various artists) and see what it does and what the file names/directories look like. Then report back on what you'd like to be different and what you'd like instead. Use a specific example to allow us to help the most.

[schmidj]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Fully Qualified is the entire name including the directories. So if your file name for the actual file with the music is "03 - Beatles, The - Help" and it's in a directory "The Beatles" which is in a directory "Rock" which is in a top level directory "Music" on the C: drive, the fully qualified file name is C:\Music\Rock\The Beatles\03 - Beatles, The - Help Your file system might use / instead of \. The issue is that some operating system routines won't work if the length of that whole name is longer than some surprisingly short number of characters. If you use a NAS (network attached storage) external file storage box with your computer to hold your music, and if it runs Linux or Unix, as many do, it uses software called Samba to pass the files to and from your Windows computer. Samba in that mode won't work if that name exceeds something like 250 characters. Surprisingly easy to inadvertently exceed if you use the whole names for the artists and titles of music in your file naming routine. Particularly for classical music, where the "whole" title of the piece can be very long, as supplied by the metadata service.

Dynamic naming is a term used by dBpoweramp as one of the choices (and almost always the best choice) for how the program names the files that it rips on your storage media. The rules for dynamic naming are that string with (possibly) the [] and other things that at this point puzzle you in the box on the lower left of the dBpoweramp screen that says "naming". It's "dynamic" because it can read the source (tag) contents and generate the file and directory names "dynamically" from the contents it reads. It is very powerful, but like anything so powerful it can get you into serious trouble if you don't fully understand what the changes you make accomplish.

While genre is important for listening, my feeling is you don't need it for file naming, just make sure that it is what you want in the tag. As several of us have said, most all players don't use file names to select your music, they use the tags, so if today you want to listen to blues, you select blues as the genre in the player. It doesn't need for the word blues to be in the filename, only in the genre tag.

A couple more reasons not to sort files by genre, it's very arbitrary. What you call soul, someone else, or a different metadata source, might call R&B. Same thing for rock versus pop. And you can actually have more than one genre for a song or album, so I might have a song tagged "rock; Christmas" and that doesn't fit well in a filenaming routine.

[garym]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Hi Schmidj,


1) What is "fully qualified file name."

does not contain forbidden characters (dbpa will automatically not use these) and is not too long. Google "windows file name" for detail on this.

[mville]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

3) Nowhere is the filename example that I've seen is the genera. To me this seems to be an important characteristic of my music, perhaps the most important. I'm inclined to think in terms of genera; that is, I first know that I want to listen to opera, or 60's Rock & Roll, country and western; then I go from there. Wouldn't genera be an important part of filename?

Just to clarify:

The file/folder structure is just a way for the end user to organise files in a simple/logical way (on storage media) for ease of access. A simple Artist/Album structure is usually sufficient for most end users. It is your choice however, how you define this structure, so you can if you wish include Genre.

Modern music servers/players DO NOT use the file/folder structure, rather, they organise an audio library based on the metadata tags contained within the files to create their own (usually more powerful) internal structure.

So, although you are right that Genre is important, your music sever/player will use the metadata tags, including the Genre tag and not the file/folder names to build it's internal structure. Then, you can use the music sever/player interface to view, sort, search and play your music based on Genre (e.g. opera or 60's Rock & Roll or country and western etc.) OR Artist OR Date OR Composer etc.

[dbarnby]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Hi Schmidj,

Thank you for your post. Again, it is helpful. Little by little I'm "getting" it.

Three questions:

1) What is "fully qualified file name."

2) What is "dynamic file structure?" What other kinds of file structure are there?

3) Nowhere is the filename example that I've seen is the genera. To me this seems to be an important characteristic of my music, perhaps the most important. I'm inclined to think in terms of genera; that is, I first know that I want to listen to opera, or 60's Rock & Roll, country and western; then I go from there. Wouldn't genera be an important part of filename?

[schmidj]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Don, thank you.

A few other thoughts. First, the actual file structure isn't nearly as important as good tagging. The major reason for a file structure choice is to be able to find the file again, if you need to delete it or update the tag metadata after ripping. I'd strongly recommend the KISS principle, keep it simple stupid. I'd play a little with ripping a few CDs using the default dynamic file structure, and possibly some of the others people have provided in quite a few different threads here before trying to cook your own. The programming language used to build the ripping structure is obtuse at best, I fought it quite a while when I found it necessary to deal with some issues. The small question mark help links are useful. But' I'd just try the default, at least at first.

Don't forget the file structure has no effect when playing music on almost all players. They scan your files and make a database indexed on most of the items you would use to select tracks to play, and you search that database, not the files themselves. The software looks up the filename for you and then plays the track. So correct tags are far more important than any reasonable file structure.

Given that, a couple of caveats: The most important thing is to avoid or reduce the likelihood of "fully qualified" filename duplications in your naming scheme. For that reason, your actual filename should probably include the CD track number. Otherwise you are likely to have issues with two tracks on a CD having the same title, or possibly the same song on more than one CD.

The other issue is not exceeding the number of characters in a "fully qualified" filename, with all the directories and slashes. Particularly with classical music with long titles it is easy for this to happen. The title in the tag can be, for all practical purposes, as long as you'd like, but not in the filename. This is one that bit me early on and forced me to edit the dynamic naming rule to limit the length. And quite a number of times, there have been threads here where others have had the same issue.

Your initial goal should be to rip CDs into a lossless format, like FLAC with good tags. You hopefully will have to do this only once, if your collection is at all large. Rip securely, not in Burst, that is one of the big pluses of dBpoweramp, over most rippers. I initially ripped using Itunes and then later Winamp to a compressed format for an Ipod. I'd guess something like 5 % of the rips were bad, they skipped, they cut off short and went to the next track, etc. Also about that time I got a new receiver that would play music from my NAS server and I found that some of the m4a tracks lacked quality over the room system, although they sounded fine in the headphones on the Ipod. So that's when I found dBpoweramp and started ripping again. to FLAC using secure ripping. Nonetheless, I still made some mistakes in my early dBpoweramp rips which have and will force me to rerip a few CDs a third time!

If you need smaller files for your car or phone, then use the batch converter in dBpoweramp to make copies in some compressed format that works with your car radio or phone, keep the FLAC copies as masters and probably for listening at home.

Also, back up your rips on removable media like one or more "brick" drives. They aren't very expensive, and you really don't want to start ripping all over again when your hard drive crashes...

[dbarnby]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Hi Schmidj,

I want to thank you for your long and detailed description of the issues.
It's most informative and helpful.

Don

[Oggy]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Great explanation Schmidt.

I couldn't agree more, so much great information in one post.
Spoon, could schmidj's post be made a sticky, please?

[garym]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

I'm traveling and answering will take more than I can type on my iPhone. I'll respond in a day or two.

[dbarnby]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Thanks Garym,

You're right, I haven't been actually trying things very much. I did try once in the beginning and got strange results which I detailed in a post on 7/8/17 entitled "Strange result." I've gotten no reply to that; perhaps you might take a look and give me some feedback.

2) Is it that the CONTENT of the filenames is determined by the tags, but the FOLDER STRUCTURE of the file name is determined by the name setup?

b) Is the naming set-up simply the process of identifying the folder, and sub-folder, and sub-sub-folder tree structure that I desire (which by the way shows up in the File Explorer tool? If I'm right about that, then I guess the thing I need is how to set such up properly. You've indicated that it's somewhat complicated, and I expect that such complication is in understanding how to apply all the words and ]'s appropriately. For that I will need a better tutorial on it, or I will need the help you offered to do it for me. I do like to understand what I'm doing and have documentation on it, but so far I don't understand what I've read.

FYI, I'd like to see files in my File Explorer as follows: Genera\ Album name\ Artist\ Composer\ Track

Please take a look at my earlier post "Strange Result" and help me understand what is going on.

I think I'm getting there.
Don

[garym]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Your long description is most interesting and informative. It is, though, a bit more granular that I need. What I'm currently faced with is the practical operational understanding I need to "rip right and rip once."

You should reread and study carefully. His points in fact are explaining the difference between file names and tagging. A concept which you are very much struggling with.

My area of not understanding is in the character of names vs. tags. What I've come to think I understand from your previous responses is that:

1) File names live in File Explorer, and, in fact, CREATE the File Explorer folder structure automatically.

YES. (not to confuse you but file explorer is just a tool to look at and find file names. There are other tools too. )

2) File names are created by the Tags.

not exactly. Dbpa creates the file names using information contained in the tags.

3) Tags come from the CD (and are of course recorded on the PC along with the essence), and they are used by the player to find the music desired.

no. Tags mostly come from online databases. Dbpa uses these databases automatically fill in the tag info when ripping cd. Schmidj explained all this in detail. Please read again.

If this is correct (please tell me if not) then what I'm stuck on is:

a) What is the practical (operational) benefit of having the music broken down into a name-directed folder structure in Windows Explorer?

simply being able to find something you are looking for. What if I want to delete an album i recently ripped. I don't want to scroll through 100,000 files looking for one album. Here's a non music example. You have a house and you own lots of stuff. Do you want to just randomly put all your stuff anywhere in the house with no organization? So if you want a cooking pot you might find it in bathroom, living room, under bed etc. no, that would be weird. It would be much better to have an organization scheme that keeps your cookware in the kitchen, your toothbrush in bathroom, your clothing in bedroom closet, etc.

For the same reason I prefer my music organized by artist then album.

b) If filenames are created by the Tags, then why do I need to set-up a naming structure? Don't the tags do it?

NO. DBPA DOES IT BUT YOU HAVE TO TELL it what YOU WANT. That's the dynamic naming. I've given you an example of what to use. Or default works for most. And tap on help ? Icons on that page for more help.

However, since dbpa asks ME to do it then I must be missing something. What am I missing here? See above.

c) Then the final issue is that if, indeed, I must set up the naming structure, how to do it (I don't understand the logic of that from the examples (too many [, /, etc.). I' not sure I even know where to look to see the effect of any file naming pattern I might establish.

thats the dynamic naming already discussed. Once set how you want it is then automatic.

I get the idea that you're not trying things with the software. You must do some experimenting. Rip a few different type CDs and see what the output looks like. You learn mostly by trial and error to get things the way you want it. There is no way too learn just from reading in advance.

[dbarnby]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Thanks, shmidj and garyrm for the extensive rundown.

First let me apologize for the typo in my last post; I said "It looks like that through your collective help I'm begging to get it." That should have been "beginning to get it" (however, the typo works, too).

Your long description is most interesting and informative. It is, though, a bit more granular that I need. What I'm currently faced with is the practical operational understanding I need to "rip right and rip once."

My area of not understanding is in the character of names vs. tags. What I've come to think I understand from your previous responses is that:

1) File names live in File Explorer, and, in fact, CREATE the File Explorer folder structure automatically.

2) File names are created by the Tags.

3) Tags come from the CD (and are of course recorded on the PC along with the essence), and they are used by the player to find the music desired.

If this is correct (please tell me if not) then what I'm stuck on is:

a) What is the practical (operational) benefit of having the music broken down into a name-directed folder structure in Windows Explorer?

b) If filenames are created by the Tags, then why do I need to set-up a naming structure? Don't the tags do it?

However, since dbpa asks ME to do it then I must be missing something. What am I missing here?

c) Then the final issue is that if, indeed, I must set up the naming structure, how to do it (I don't understand the logic of that from the examples (too many [, /, etc.). I' not sure I even know where to look to see the effect of any file naming pattern I might establish.

Thank you for all your kind care and hand-holding.

Don

[garym]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

1. Is the folder structure set up in File Explorer under the control of the CD's (by way of their chosen tags), or is it set up manually? If it is automatic, does that folder structure change continually as new CD's (perhaps with different tags) are ripped? i.e. does the tag selection of ripped CD's automatically impress upon the File Explorer a particular folder structure?

Automatic, in the sense that if I rip a CD of an artist I don't already have, dbpa ripper will automatically create the new directory name for that artist (and subdirectory name for the album). Let's say I rip a cd from an artist already represented in my collection. Dbpa is smart enough to use the artist directory I already have and only add the new album subdirectory.

2. If name is developed from tags, why is there a separate set-up for name as well as tags? Wouldn't name be set automatically -- wouldn't there be a likelihood of a mismatch if both are set up separately (particularly since naming is editable)? Put differently, what is the function of manually setting the name structure?

Because people choose to use many different file naming schemes. Thus, dbpa has the ability of the user to use dynamic naming with almost unlimited options. Other software may not allow for all these options. For example I recall that itunes uses a single file naming scheme when ripping. The user has no real choices.

3. Also: the example file name: Artist\Album\Track No.\Artist &*8211; Title, does not include Genre. Is that on oversight or is that not appropriate?

I don't need genre in my filenames. It is in my tags and I can select things by genre in my player using tag info. But there are people that do use genre in their file organization. For example, they might have

c:/music/jazz/miles Davis/Kind of Blue/01 - name of track.flac

c:/music/country/Willie Nelson/phases and stages/01 - Bloody Mary Morning.flac

etc. some people even organize files using year subdirectories. There is no one answer, every user has different preferences.

[garym]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Great explanation Schmidt.

[schmidj]

Re: Set-Up for Ripping

Hi,

Don't be concerned, not all of this is easy to get your head around. But here are some descriptions:

The "essence", a term you won't hear too often, but may help you understand what is going on: it is the actual thing you want to see or hear, the media (as digitized in this case), the audio or the picture or the video. Nothing else.

Metadata, data about the essence. in the case of an old analog record, the record label, the information on the jacket, some database, either private or public which may have more information about the record. The college radio station I used to be involved in put a label on each album with a number and had a printout by alphabet of all the records, so you could find the record in the library. Private metadata.

File and directory names are a form of metadata kept by a computer and/or storage device to help the computer, the software running on it, and the user locate a particular file. The structure depends on the particular computer and storage device. You'd find it worthwhile to spend some time studying the rules for composing file names for your particular operating system and file structure on the storage devices. Once upon a time, the names were very limited in length and allowable characters. But there are still limitations on length that vary with the operating system and software, and each operating system has a list of "prohibited" characters, like, in most systems, the slash. Filenames can be very arbitrary like"jaeb2es5rt.asd" which might be perfectly recognized by some particular software but is gibberish to the human eye, or something like "05 - Beatles, The - Help.wav" which gives the human a good (but possibly wrong) idea of what it contains. The part after the dot at the end is called the file extension, and basically tells the computer what software is its first choice to act on the file if you click on it. There is a table that you can modify in the computer that selects the software.

Directories are sets of files and other directories. They also are given names. Most operating systems separate the directory names from each other and the filename with slashes or backslashes. The filename with the names of the "directory tree" in which it is stored is called a "fully qualified" filename. What is most important here is that every fully qualified filename on a particular storage media must be unique. So when you name files for tracks on a CD and name the directory with the name of the CD, you must be careful. If you have two tracks on the CD with the same name, or two CDs with the same name (not too uncommon for "Best Of" CDs) you may have a problem. Depending on the operating system and software, when the computer tries to write a file with a duplicate fully qualified name, it may just erase the first file and write a new one with the same name, it may just leave the old one and never write the new one, it may ask the user what to do, or it may change the filename, possibly by adding something to it, to make it unique.

Filenames are a form of metadata but they are not a part of the file containing the essence, they are stored separately in some form of file directory on the storage device, and quite possibly also in the computer.

"Tags" are pieces of metadata that are typically (but not always) stored together with the essence in the same file. Common ones might include the title of the track, the title of the album, the track artist (s), the album artist(s), the track number (if it is one of a series of tracks which comprise an album), the disc number (if there are more than one discs in the album), the Genre, etc. Each tag (in most current tagging systems) a Frame, with a name which defines what metadata the tag contains (for instance TALB tells the software that the frame contains the album name in a tagging system used fairly commonly) and then the actual tag data, like "best of the Moody Blues" (sorry, I'm dating myself.) Different filetypes recommend different tagging schemes and definitions, you can spend a lot of time (as Spoon and his team do) sorting out the preferred tagging format, but since Spoon (or whoever wrote your software) already did it, for the most part you just type what you want in the boxes.

Tagging can store a lot more information about a piece of essence (a file) than you could ever fit in a filename, it can even contain copies of the album artwork or other graphics. Also, if the filename gets changed the tags should still remain the same.

Only files can typically be tagged, since the tag info is in the file, directories can't typically be tagged; in the usual sense, there is nothing to stop you (or a piece of software) from keeping a separate file with metadata (call it tags if you'd like) about a directory. In fact there are two pretty common pieces of metadata about music directories kept as files inside the directories. One is a JPG of the album art often in a file called "folder.jpg" (in addition to or instead of tags in the music files that have the album art) the other is a "playlist" of all the tracks in the album, in some format that some players can understand to find and then play the files that make up the album in a particular order. One common playlist has a filetype of "m3u". If you open the m3u file with a text editor such as Notebook, youll see that it has, in plain text, a list of the filenames to play in the order they will play. However, most modern players don't require playlists to play files if the files are well tagged.

Now the dirty little secret about tagging: you will probably quickly discover that getting accurate tags for your music will take you more time than actually ripping the music from CDs, particularly if your tastes in music are in the slightest esoteric, and that if you don't take care with your tags, you won't be able to find your music to play it after you rip it.

Where do we get the information to tag your files (or for that matter to generate filenames that have some chance of being read by humans and are in some hopefully logical order on your storage medium? You might think that they come from the CD... In mist cases not so. The original CD design had only metadata in a directory to tell the player where on the CD each track started, nothing about the name of the track or album or artist, etc. Some years later Sony developed a method of adding some data to a CD called CD Text which could be used to add names and artists to the tracks and a name and artist to the CD, little else. But CD text never became widely adopted, only a small percentage of the CDs have CD text burned into them and and even fewer CD players can read the CD text.

Now we get to the age of the PC with a CD or DVD drive to play your CD. Without metadata the computer (or your car CD payer) just says it's playing track 1 or 5 or whatever, no name of the CD or track. Some software developers looked for a way to get around that. The first issue was how to identify what CD you were playing. The most common, but not at all foolproof, method was to read the directory burned into the CD which tells the CD player where each track begins. This data is fairly unique for most CDs with a significant number of tracks but falls apart quickly with short CDs, like CD singles. There have probably been hundreds of different CD singles issued by different artists that have a length of let us say is 3 minutes, 25 seconds and 10 frames long. So the probability of getting the correct data goes down markedly for short CDs. The second issue is getting the actual metadata to match up with the track lengths for the CD. Here, the original method was crowd sourcing. If you played a CD you could type in the names of the tracks, etc. At first programs like Windows Media Player just stored that data on your PC, so if you played the same CD again, the data you typed in the first time would be retrieved to give you the track names you typed in earlier. Then some clever people realized that if you could upload that data to the "cloud" it would be available to other computers, so people could share metadata. Of course like anything else croud sourced with no QC, it is full of discrepancies (what you call Rock I might call Folk or Soul) and out and out errors, misspellings, inconsistencies in artists names, etc. A number of different metadata sources soon appeared on the Internet. Some only provide their data by subscription or to particular devices, like Apple, others are free to anyone who has the software to look up the data. Some still depend on or at least allow crowd sourcing, some now only use data sent to them or entered by the record companies. But I find all of the data on all of the services is riddled with errors and inconsistencies, and I usually try to compare the printed data on the jewel box to what the metadata has provided, and correct or change to my taste as I feel desirable.

DBpoweramp looks up metadata from 4 or 5 on-line databases, and CD text. The sources are selectable in the metadata setup, and there is a button (in a different place depending on which version of dBpoweramp you have) which displays all the downloaded metadata from each source and lets you select which item to use or type your own in. This metadata is now the source of the tags saved with the files, and also is used with the rather obtuse file and directory name generator you can program (or use the default, best until you fully understand how it works and the consequences of your naming scheme) to generate the filenames and directory names the ripper stores your music under.

Now, Which gets used, filenames or tags? Most, but not all players on computers or smart phones work best with tags, giving you the flexibility to select artists, albums, genres, years, whatever is in the tags. Many will also let you select by file and directory name if your music lacks tags, but you lose the ability to sort that tags give you. But if you take a thumb drive and plug it into your car radio, you may find that it doesn't read tags, only file names, and that it will only play mp3 files (another subject, the different filetypes and the advantages and disadvantages of each, for another night). Many car radios are in the 18th century when it comes to playing file based music. Also some older receivers or other players may not be able to read tags. This may affect your choice of a file naming scheme. But in any event, you should tag, and tag carefully, because your new car may play from tags and will in all likelihood play via Bluetooth from your smart phone, which does use tags.

Enough for you to digest for now, read and think about it, Google terms you don't understand, and ask more questions here. We all were where you are at some time in the past, and many of us, myself included, have ended up ripping parts of our collections twice because we discovered issues with the way we started doing things.