How do I suppress repetitions?

[DeleterMann]

/Volumes/LaCie 1/DBPowerAmp/Handel/Handel G.F;-concertoOboe Concerto in B flat major (No.1), HWV 302a; AllegroSarah FrancisOboe Concertos & Sonatas [Francis]1732.m4a

OK, all the way to HWV 302a, all is well, but then
Q: how do I delete this which comes after the word Francis?
Q: how do I create a space between Allegro and Sarah? the same with the words concerto and Oboe. I have put an "_" to create space, is there a better way?

[mville]

Re: How do I suppress repetitions?

Please can you post your Naming string?

[DeleterMann]

Re: How do I suppress repetitions?

Sure but what is "Naming string"

[mville]

Re: How do I suppress repetitions?

Sure but what is "Naming string"

Sorry, but you need to read the help documentation and understand the basics, before you continue.

How can you expect to use the software, without learning how it works?

[DeleterMann]

Re: How do I suppress repetitions?

I am reading a lot all of what you are posting in help. But I am not english and do not understand it all.
I am not doing nothing.
Plz bear with me.
p.s. I will keep rading and come back to you

[mville]

Re: How do I suppress repetitions?

Sure but what is "Naming string"

The string that is setup here by default or that you have edited:

[mville]

Re: How do I suppress repetitions?

I am reading a lot all of what you are posting in help. But I am not english and do not understand it all.
I am not doing nothing.
Plz bear with me.

I understand that you are finding it difficult, especially when English is not your first language.

What I am trying to say is that there are some basic concepts that need to be understood first, before you rip your CDs. Otherwise, placing a CD in your drive and clicking the Rip button, will only lead to a lot of confusion, as is evident in your posts.

Don't worry though. I and others here will bear with you.

[schmidj]

Re: How do I suppress repetitions?

Hello my friend, First, for us to help you, try not starting a new thread with every question. My current list of new posts has three different threads you started, two are on the same subject and even the third one is related to the other two. The "reply to thread" button is your friend, unless the new thread is truly a different subject. Otherwise everyone will be running in different directions.

Now onto your current issue. You, like almost all the people who are new at creating media files, are unfamiliar with "tags" and how most well designed modern media software finds and handles media files. I suspect you come from a computer background because you are obsessing over filenames, and historically, filenames were how both you and computer software identified what file you wanted to use (in this case, presumably the file you might want to listen to.) But the people in the media file business some time ago realized that using filenames was a very limiting way of searching for particular media files.

So lets go back a ways and look at physical media like tapes and records (not even CDs yet.) How did you determine what was on a particular track? You looked on the label of the record and/or the jacket. You looked on the tape box, or perhaps a track sheet inside the box. The actual audio track had no built in identification. If you wanted more detailed information you might have accessed a reference book to find out more about the particular recording, information that might have been logged by the recording engineers but not included with the retail product. And if the label on the record became unreadable (by cleaning the record too aggressively for instance) or the tape got put in the wrong box, you were in trouble. Even with CDs, if the label on the CD had no written information, you had no way to tell what was on it (ignoring CD text, a later attempt originally from Sony and still only used occasionally to deal with this issue.)

So now a couple of definitions: The actual (in this case audio) media content data in a file is called the essence. This is the (encoded) audio data that you are preserving in the file. Information about the essence is called metadata. Metadata can be considered as data about data. Audio files contain the essence, and sometimes metadata. Historically when audio was digitized, there was no or very limited metadata with the audio data. The CD "redbook" standard only contained a metadata subcode TOC or Table of Contents, which basically tells the CD player where each track begins. Nothing about the content of the track. Digital tapes like DAT tapes similarly.

Meanwhile, when computing extended the concept of a file beyond a deck of IBM cards or paper tape, they came up with the concept of filenames. Up until the mid 1990's (I think) filenames were required to be short (8 characters before the dot for DOS, and not contain spaces. Also DOS and some other operating systems made all alpha characters in a filename upper case. With the coming of large numbers of files being stored on hard drives, and attempts at making the description of files being somewhat human understandable, the limitations on filenames became "liberalized". Different file systems began to allow longer filenames; spaces and some special characters became allowed.

But to this day, different file systems and operating systems put different limitations on filenames, causing all kinds of compatibility problems. Samba, the utility that moves files between Windows systems and Linux systems like most NAS boxes has a length limit for the whole name including directories of (I recall) 255 characters. Seems like a lot until you try putting the names of some classical works and their artists or composers, or both, into the filename. You will run out of space without realizing it. Then there is the problem of "restricted" characters. These are characters that tell the operating or file system to do something. We all know about the slash. Don't name the rock artist in your filename AC/DC, it won't work. But there are quite a few other special characters that may not work, depending on whether you are in Windows, IOS or Linux. And you have to be careful not to duplicate a filename within a directory, or the file would be overwritten.

The issues in naming audio files started to become an issue with the digitization of audio files, particularly with the distribution over the Internet or on other file-based storage. Using file names to describe the content of the file had serious limitations. And there was no record jacket or CD insert to supply the missing information. So now we get involved with metadata, data about data, or in this case about the contents of the audio file. The original Microsoft .WAV files contained no internal metadata, the contents were just a straightforward representation of PCM audio. But people would use filenames that provided some description of the contents of the file. No standardization, and given the filename limitations, not much detail. This became an issue with digital music players like the Ipod. People wanted more information, like the full artist's name, the full title of the song, the album title, the composer (particularly for classical works) and eventually "album cover" artwork.

So as various new storage formats were developed, such as mp3, provision was made to allow metadata to be stored as a part of the file, not just cryptically in a filename. Standards were developed for these different storage formats with space for the artist name, the title, the composer, the album title, the album artist, the year, the genre, and what ever else you could dream up. These pieces of metadata are called tags. And since they are part of the file, not the filename, they can be any characters the encoding system permits. Your artist name AC/DC is perfectly OK here. You have a Japanese artist or song title, no problem as long as your text encoding allows Japanese characters, which most do. You can make the tags as long as you like within only the restrictions of the tagging standards for that storage format (file type).

To work with this, almost all music players, such as Ipods, apps on smartphones, and PC players will ask you to specify where you store your music (or use a default directory like "Music") and create a database where they read and save all the tags stored in the music files and allow the user to sort or filter the tags to find the music they want and then the database tells the player the filename so it can red the file and play the music. This process is typically called indexing. So as long as the music files are reasonably well tagged, the filenames don't have to be human readable. The file can be named hTlNG54T.mp3 but if the artist tag says "Beatles" and the title tag says "Love Me Tender", your player will display the artist and title so you can chose to play it without ever knowing the real filename. Even Windows Explorer can read the tags for some of the more common audio file types and display them.

There are a couple of exceptions: some automotive players that allow the use of USB "thumb drives" are very stupid and only read file names, not tags. And some radio broadcast automation systems don't read tags. The one I manage requires all the filenames to be unique 5 digit numbers, like "46732" and has a separate "library" which contains the metadata for all the files. (which have to be .WAV files). At this point, I should mention that several incompatible additions to the .WAV standard to allow tagging have been developed, but different players may or may not recognize tagged .WAV files and display the tags. The worst players will try to play the tag as audio, resulting as a burst of noise before or after the music. And some of the popular audio editing software tends to strip some or all of the metadata off of your .WAV file when it edits it.

For this and other reasons, many of us on this forum will recommend using a different lossless filetype for your library, such as FLAC or ALAC, rather than.WAV, whatever your preferred player will accept.

So unless you are making USB thumb drives for a stupid automobile radio to play, you shouldn't obsess too much over the filenames, rather get the tag data correct.

You need to think about how you want your file directories structured, not because that is how your player (and therefore you) will be searching the filenames to find what you want to play (It won't search filenames, it uses the tags) but so you can find a particular file in Windows (or IOS) to delete or to edit incorrect tags in. Not something you do every day. You need to decide whether you want a directory structure where all the albums by a particular artist are in a directory or whether your top level directory just has artists and album titles with a different sub-directory for each album - as I do. Or any one of a large number of other possibilities. Just make sure that every file will end up with a unique name (including directories), or else files will end up getting overwritten or files from different albums will end up in the same directory.

The naming string is how this is determined, it has nothing to do with how your player displays your music, again that comes directly from the tags. The naming string is instructions to the software in how to come up with file and directory names (so you can find the files if you need to delete or edit one) from the tags that you enter or read from one of the online music directory databases. The path and naming string are displayed (and can be edited) on the lower left hand side of the dBpoweramp screen. Until you've experimented with a few rips, you'd be best to leave it as the default that came with the software, except possibly to change the directory where your music is stored. And if you do experiment with changing it, make sure to keep a copy of the old naming somewhere, such as in a .txt file.

Again, don't fret too much about the filename, spend your time getting the tags entered correctly.

[garym]

Re: How do I suppress repetitions?

@schmidj has provided an excellent tutorial. Make sure you study this carefully before moving forward.