Now that I have converted a couple of albums, using export multiple, I open my music folder where I directed Audacity to save them and the organization is strange to me. I imagine these can be re-arranged, but the columns are: Name, # (track), Title (of track), Contributing Artist, Album. originally all the songs from both albums were mixed in alphabetical order…I had to click to arrange by album name…every time I open the music folder.
When I click on my “Vinyl” music folder I want to see a file name for each album as “Artist-Album Title” and then click on that album and see a list of tracks. I don’t want to see a miles long list of individual songs as soon as I enter my “Vinyl” folder.
I imagine this is just a matter of creating folders and organizing within Windows, but I just wanted to make sure that it is not because of something that I did when I entered the metadata for each album prior to exporting from Audacity. Thanks in advance.
It depends on your player software and it’s usually unrelated to the file/folder name/structure. It usually comes from the embedded tags ([u]metadata[/u]). That allows you to sort/select by artist, album, title, genre, or play in track-number order, etc.
In Windows Explorer, if you select “Details” under “View” you should see most of this information and you can click the heading to sort-by that column. There is also an option to “Choose Details”.
Note that tags are not well supported for WAV files, but as far a I know every compressed audio format supports metadata including the lossless compression formats (some different fields for different formats).
You can use Audacity’s metadata editor but I generally use [u]MP3Tag[/u]. With MP3Tag, you can select a folder (usually an album) and enter all of the common information (Artist, Album, Artwork, Genre, etc.) and then select the individual file to edit the song title, track number, and any other unique information. MP3Tag works with most formats, not just MP3, and it does allow you to embed the album artwork.
My own strategy is to organise a folder structure first in the form artist-name\album title\ then I use track name prefixed by track number for the name of each wav file ( e.g. 06-Sultans of Swing.wav the leading zero is vital when sorting by filename). In the case of classical stuff I use composer name instead of artist or group name, but as I buy digital classical tracks rather than recording from vinyl I accept a different structure and just tweak it to simplify excessively long string values.
I want the folder and file names to be portable between windows and Linux so I’m careful not to include punctuation which might not be supported on both platforms but I do use spaces. When I save each track I fill in basic metadata tags using the Audacity dialogue. These are now perfectly well supported by windows 10 and also supported by my Linux music server running Minimserver. Any mistakes or changes to tags can be made in Foobar2000 which edits metadata on the fly without changing the wav data itself, but I wouldn’t want to do this in bulk. Its useful to have folder structure and file names which are complementary to metadata. Before working on a recording I also create a plain text file with artist album and track names in the same format then its easy to cut and paste values into Audacity as required. The text files remains with the tracks as a bit more insurance should I ever need to do anything with the files programmatically. Getting all this right before embarking on the many weeks of work to digitise what are now nearly 90 continuous hours of recordings has certainly paid off.
Its also useful to have a playlist creator to create structured playlists of the entire collection and the free software I use for that is actually called Playlist Creator.