Digital Audio Naming Convention

Revision: 1.2 (2016-02-14)

This guide was created to provide a high quality naming standard for digitally encoded audio files.

A file may be called „DANC 1.0 compliant“ if it meets the conditions mentioned in this document.

Most media files already have tags associated with it. However there are some really annoying things with some of the tags. This guide was created to verify your music library so that all files are tagged using the same guidelines.

This guide can be summarized to 3 simple rules:

1. Tag your files
2. (If done automatically) check that the entries are not cropped at 32 characters (as GRIP does it)
3. Check that Various Artist albums are tagged all the same way

• The TAG of the file MUST include:
  1. Title
  2. Artist
  3. Genre
  4. Album (if track is part of an album)
  5. Track Number & Total Track Number (if track is part of an album)
  6. Media Number & Total Media Number (if track is part of an album with more than one media (ie. 2 or more CD's))

• Text fields HAVE TO be as authentic as possible:
  1. Original text length
  2. UTF-8 encoded

As of today, all TAGs (ID3v2, XiphComment, APE, etc) support variable length fields. It is NOT ACCEPTABLE that a text field of a song is stripped at 32 characters because of ancient tagging limitations!

All TAGs (ID3, XiphComment, APE, etc) support UTF-8. If a text field contains non-US characters such as äöü, you MUST NOT strip them.

Most Compilations consist of tracks from many different artists. This leads to „artist flooding“ on your mobile mp3 player if you have lots of compilations. To prevent this problem you SHOULD tag albums with more than 2 artists using the following convention:

• Artist = „Compilations“
• Title = „Title“ & „ - “ & „Artist“

example:
title  = "Street Life - Randy Crawford"
artist = "Compiliations"

Soundtracks are a little bit different from normal songs. Songs part of a soundtrack HAVE TO be handled like this:

• Album = Movie_Name
• Genre = „Soundtrack“

Filenames are not really important. But they SHOULD make it possible to identify the file content and as such you SHOULD use the first proposed variant. You MAY use your own convention to organize your files.

You SHOULD use the following convention:

Filename: „Genre“ & „/“ & „Artist“ & „/“ & „Album“ & „/“ & „Track Number“ & „ “ & „Title“ & .extension

example: ./Techno/Prodigy/The Fat Of The Land/02 Breathe.mp3
example: ./Techno/Compilations/The Rock Soundtrack/02 Hummel gets the Rockets.mp3

Filename: „Artist“ & „/“ & „Album“ & „/“ & „Track Number“ & „ “ & „Title“ & .extension

example: ./Prodigy/The Fat Of The Land/02 Breathe.mp3

You MAY convert the tag to a filename. Keep in mind that some characters are NOT allowed in filenames:

1. UNIX/Linux:
   • / - used to seperate directories

1. Windows:
   • \ / : * ? „ < > |

1. Mac OSX:
   • / - used to separate directories
   • : - in Finder the colon (:) is displayed as slash (/) inside filenames

1. Mac OS:
   • (? unsure which characters are not allowed )
   • : - used to separate directories

Use the following convention to get good filesystem compatibility:

NON-ASCII Characters:

Todays filesystems should be able to properly handle UTF-8 filenames. You MAY keep special characters such as äöü in your filenames. If you strip them you MAY replace them by an underscore (_).

You SHOULD use the following additional rules to get nice folder structures:

1. When GENRE is not set, use „Unknown Genre“ as the directory name
2. When ARTIST is not set, use „Unknown Artist“ as directory name
3. When ALBUM is not set, use „Unknown Album“ ad directory name
4. When TRACK NUMBERS are not available, leave track numbers away
5. When the COMPILATION flag is set, use „Compilations“ as the ARTIST name
6. When DISCNUMBER is available, add the discnumber before the TRACK in the filename

1. MP3 Tag for Windows is a great application (and there is a port for OS X too)
   1. Windows: http://www.mp3tag.de/download.html
   2. OS X: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/mac-osx.html

I used the following rename rule to tag my files:

00_NEW\%genre%\$if($isdigit(%compilation%),"Compilations",$if($len(%artist%),%artist%,"Unbekannter Interpret"))\$if($len(%album%),%album%,"Unbekanntes Album")\$if($isdigit(%track%),$if(isdigit(%discnumber%),$left(%discnumber%,1)-,"")$num(%track%,2) ,"")%title%

A file may be called „DANC 1.0 compliant“ if it meets all of the above conditions.

A file may be called „DANC 1.0a compliant“ if it meets the following conditions:

• The file is „DANC 1.0“ compliant
• The file includes a cover art of the album

A file may be called „DANC 1.1 compliant“ if it meets the following conditions:

• The file is „DANC 1.0 compliant“
• The YEAR-TAG of the file is set.

A file may be called „DANC 1.1a compliant“ if it meets the following conditions:

• The file is „DANC 1.1 compliant“
• The file includes a cover art of the album