Music Tagging Again

Here’s a perfect example of the madness I mentioned last week.

I have a set of four compilation CDs which were released in 2001/2 called The Album. Yesterday I started ripping them. I use grip to rip CDs and grip gets CD and track data from FreeDB. FreeDB gets its data from submissions by users.

You can configure grip to name the files it produces to suit your preferences. I’ve configured it to use the filename %A/%d/%n.ogg. That means (as I mentioned before) a directory for the artist (%A is expanded to the artist’s name), a subdirectory for each album (%d is expanded to the disc name) and each file gets the name of the song (from %n). Most of the time this works pretty well (with the caveats that I discussed previously) but this time it just created a huge mess.

The problem is that people have decided that because these albums are compilations, then they are recorded by an artist called “various” (or sometimes “various artists” or just “va”). They then squeeze the real artist name into the track name slot. But, of course, there’s no standard to how they do it. Some of them are “artist – track”, some are “artist / track” and some have the artist and the track the other way round.

One idiot even decided that it was essential to have the track number in the track name field, so the track “name” was “01 – artist – track”.

What I want to end up with is a “Various Artists” directory (because that’s who the album is by) with a subdirectory called “The Album Vol 1” and files in that subdirectory named for the titles of the songs. And I want the tags within the files to contain the actual name of the artist who recorded that one track.

And getting to that is going involve a lot of manual patching of tags, directory names and m3u files.

And computers not doing what I want them to makes me grumpy.