Chromium’s Media Naming Conventions

I’ve been processing a lot of media since I obtained my iPad.  It used to be music only and then video, now e-books, comics and magazines.  In the course of collecting all of this I have come to realize that it all needs to be named according to a set of rules or else chaos will soon prevail.

Here are the rules that I use to name/rename my media categorized by media type.  I understand that you all may have your own set of rules that you follow, but I’m sharing mine in the hopes that maybe you’ll give some thought to situations you might not have considered before (foreign variations etc.)

Music – Since music is usually released by album, I organize everything by folders which represent albums.  I use Artist Name – Album Name [i.e. B.O.B. – The Adventures Of Bobby Ray] for most albums.  Then for albums with multiple artists I use VA Album Name (which stands for Various Artists) – this helps to keep compilations in one area [i.e. VA Now That’s What I Call Music 25].  For Soundtrack albums (since there are so many of them), instead of VA, I just use Soundtrack Album Name [i.e. Soundtrack Kill Bill Vol 1].  For the tracks themselves I name things by Track Number Artist – Track Name – this allows me to copy tracks out for my own compilations and still retain Artist name and Track name.
EAC has the following Naming Scheme – %D – %C\%N %A – %T

Video – I use XBMC for movie playback and as such it wants movies in their own folders named Movie Name (Release Year) [i.e. Tremors II_ Aftershocks (1996)].  The underscore is a colon, and this matches the IMDB name so that automatic lookups or media cleaners have an easier time of pulling down synopses and poster art.

Magazines – Here there are a lot of variations, so I’ve simplified it for ease of categorization.  I remove all instances of the word magazine since that’s unnecessarily repetitive.  I also simplify the word case just to make things look nice in list form (No all caps = legibility) [i.e. Spin 2010 08.pdf].  I usually disregard issue numbers, and just go straight for Year and Month [i.e. Road & Track 2010 09.pdf].  If a magazine spans multiple months then I add which months it’s applicable to [i.e. Every Day With Rachael Ray 2010 06 07.pdf].  If the magazine is weekly, then I’ll use Year Month and Day of release [i.e. Billboard 2010 08 28.pdf].  If the magazine has US and foreign variations (usually UK) then I’ll append that to the end – it’s important to keep the US designation for the magazines that have those variations as well [i.e. Men’s Health 2010 09 UK.pdf and Men’s Health 2010 09 US.pdf]

Comics – I usually try to have directories for each major title/character and then put all of the related titles underneath the root folder in their own folders [i.e. X-Men is the root, and X-Men Ronin has a directory under that].  Quite a few series have reboots and this I use volume nomenclature on the folder name – v1, v2, v3… etc [i.e. Batgirl/v3/Batgirl 013].  For the comics themselves I usually just use Title Number with number being a two digit number with a leading zero for those under 10 – issues over 100 just maintain their number [i.e. Action Comics 888]. For titles that have a definitive lifespan I will add (of #) at the end so I can see easily whether it’s complete or not [i.e. The Spectacular Spider-Girl 02 of 4].

Books – I’m the most lenient here since to me it depends on the title.  Sometimes the author takes precedence and sometimes the title.  Here Authors generally have their own directories with the titles in the root underneath [i.e. Stephen King].  Some series are more popular than their authors though so I’ve given them naming priority [i.e. Star Wars or Sookie Stackhouse].