Digital Audio Naming Convention

Revision: 1.1 (2005-09-08)

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 following conditions:

• 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 MAY tag albums with more than 2 artists using the following convention:

• Artist = „Various Artists“ or „Compilations“ or Artist = Album_Name
• Title = „Title“ & „ - “ & „Artist“ [ & „, “ & „Artist2“ ]

example:

title  = "Street Life - Randy Crawford"
artist = "Various Artists"

Soundtracks are a 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. They SHOULD make it possible to identify the file content. However, you MAY use your own convention to organize your files.

You MAY use the following convention:

Variant1 (iTunes): Filename: „Artist“ & „/“ & „Album“ & „/“ & „Track Number“ & „ “ & „Title“ & .extension

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

Variant2: Filename: „Artist“ & „/“ & „Album“ & „/“ & „Track Number“ & „ - “ & „Artist“ & „ - “ & „Title“ & .extension

example: ./Prodigy/The Fat Of The Land/02 - The Prodigy - 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 (_).

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