Music workflow
I spent some quality time with my favorite music player,
affectionately known amongst the geeks who a) tolerate using software
named “foobar2000″ and b) highly prize content over style) cleaning up
the tags on all my electronic music. I thought I’d done this ages ago
but evidently I had not.
My music workflow (which I’m pretty happy with) goes like this
- Download it to some folder
- If it isn’t tagged, tag it. Usually I can use foobar’s “freedb >
Get Tags” function to automagically retrieve the tags for any album,
but if the album is not found, I can do one or all of the following in
one batch operation: set the artist (”Kinski”), set the album (”Alpine
Static”), auto-track number, guess value from filename (usually
following a pattern something like: “%tracknumber% - %title%”). Now
it’s tagged. - Once it’s tagged, use foobar’s mass renamer to rename into the
stage 01 (”renamed”) directory like so:
(((%artist%,_, )),unknown
artist)\(%album%,unknown
album)\(%tracknumber%,(%tracknumber%,(%tracknumber%,2),__)-((%title%,_,
)),%_filename%). That’s pretty hairy so commenting to show what’s
going on (short story: “artist\album\tracknumber-title”):( ((%artist%,_, )), # artist based on tag, first words capitalized... unknown artist) # ...or "unknown artist" if untagged # directory delimiter ( %album%, # album based on tag... unknown album) # or "unknown album" # directory delimiter ( %tracknumber%, # if we have a tracknumber... ( # then... %tracknumber%, # ...if the tracknumber tag is set (%tracknumber%,2), # tracknumber, padded to two chars ("2" becomes "02") __ # else two underscores ) - # hyphen ((%title%,_, )), # title from tag, capitalized, with _'s turned to spaces %_filename%) # else just use the filename - Now that it’s all renamed, I load it back into foobar and can play
it or convert it. If I’m ripping from a CD, this is the first step to
adding it to my collection and I need to be careful that the
formatting string use (%_diskwriter_index%,2) since the
%tracknumber% doesn’t work like I’d expect from CDs. My converter
settings are to generate ogg vorbis, usually at quality 3 which
creates files that are a lot smaller than comparable quality
mp3’s. This renaming moves the files from stage 01 (”renamed”) to
stage 02 (”processed/new”). - Finally at some later date, it’s no longer new and I move it to
the stage 03 (”processed/collection”) permanent collection.
Normally that works great, but somehow a bunch of stuff in my
processed collection wasn’t tagged. How do I deal with this? Foobar
to the rescue, again!
My music winds up in the typical folder structure everybody uses:
03-archived\Husker Du\Ticket to Ride.ogg
03-archived\Husker Du\Metal Circus\01-Real World.ogg
Where album tracks collected together in “artist\album” and
miscellaneous tracks without tracknumbers are in the “artist”
folder. To get everything cleaned up, I set up a foobar script that
runs four actions to get the common four tags set:
- ALBUM =
(((%_path%,3),03-archived),(%_path%),Unknown)
- album is either the current directory of the file, or “unknown” if
this is a non-album style miscellaneous track - ARTIST =
(((%_path%,3),03-archived),(%_path%,2),(%_path%))
- artist is either the current directory of the file for non-album
tracks, or the directory two levels up - TRACKNUMBER =
((%_filename%,-),(%_filename%,1,((%_filename%,-),1)),1)
- tracknumber is set to “everything up through the hyphen” if there is
a hyphen, or 1 (this is broken but I can’t find any way using foobar’s
tagging reference to ensure that “everything up through the hyphen” is numeric,
but it’s right 95% of the time) - TITLE =
(%title%,((%_filename%,-),(%_filename%,(1,(%_filename%,-)),(%_filename%)),%_filename%))
- title leaves the tag alone if it’s already set, otherwise it uses
everything after the first hyphen (this is also imperfect but also
almost always right).
Now my whole catalog is neatly tagged and organized again. Foobar is
the perl of music players: it makes easy things easy (well, mostly
easy) and hard things possible.