best naming practice for sound tracks & various artist

My albums that have various artist/and or sound tracks from movies are not being shown together, but instead are scattered throughout my library. Which naming practice is recommend to keep them together, thanks. BTW I'm using Plex Server.

mick

Keep the same ALBUMARTIST and the same ALBUM for all tracks that belong together. "Same" means that there is some data in the fields. An empty field is not there and leads to unpredictable results.

With naming schemes it is best to plan ahead taking into consideration how you will use the data. If you primarily sort or search by Artist name then put Artist name first in the Filename. If you tend to sort or search by song Title then put song Title first in the Filename.
A Filename with suitable separators might be: Title - Artist, Album Track.

Once you have all of the data fields required you can create the appropriate Filename by using the Tag - Filename conversion eg:
Format string is: %title% - %artist%, %album% %track%

If you have files with the Filename items in a different sequence you can easily re-sequence them using the Tag - Filename conversion and a Format string similar to the above. This method is preferred since it corrects all filenames regardless of there being a mixture of different sequences in the original filenames.

You can also use Filename - Filename conversion using the Old filename pattern and the desired New filename pattern.
Suppose you have:
Title - Artist, Album Track and want
Album - Track, Artist - Title.

Old filename pattern: %1 - %2, %3 %4
New filename pattern: %3 - %4, %2 - %1

If you use this method it is best to group together filenames with the same error and then perform the required action on separate batches.

The Track Number appears in Mp3tag but is often not included in the Filename. However, some audio players automatically sort by Title so you lose the original track sequence. To overcome this and keep the track sequence you can start the filename with the track number:
%track% %title% - %artist% etc

My preference is to use track numbers with leading zeroes so that the titles align, all starting at the same character position.

I disagree as the hyphen, the comma and the blank are also separators in quite a number of title strings and album strings.
For me a suitable separator would be a valid character for the OS but an unusual one for everyday language.
I found the underscore to be almost the optimum choice.
So I would rephrase it to "A Filename with suitable separators might be: Title _ Artist _ Album _ Track."

1 Like

The key to using separators is to ensure that what you use will be interpreted correctly when applied to your data. To illustrate this I showed an example with some plausible separators that each included a space viz: " - " ", " and " ". I said this might work for you, but it might not. I avoid using "_" because in my data it's used in "_x264". My preference for separating Title/Artist is %title% ~ %artist% since this use of the tilde is unique in my data.