Sometimes you wonder what you were doing and writing down just a few years ago. My file naming convention is a good example; I handled it differently five years ago. The big question here is: where do the singer and the year go?

My understanding is that the singer belongs to the orchestra (e.g., Francisco Canaro-Ernesto Fama), and the year clearly belongs to the track title, because an orchestra often records the same piece multiple times. This isn’t just a quirk of mine; it has clear advantages, especially when using the search function of DJ software.

Here are my conventions from 2017 onwards:

 

1. File directories

A new CD is filed under the directory of the conductor or the orchestra, e.g.:

Canaro, Francisco             (Note: Last names come first here)

Fernandez Fierro Typical Orchestra

I generally don’t use diacritical marks like the tilde or acute accent here to facilitate searching. Spanish-speaking colleagues will hopefully forgive me. The title “La Punalada” therefore has to do without the tilde.

Below the directory for the orchestra (or artist) are the CDs listed as a directory with the name of the CD:

Main directory: “Canaro, Francisco”

Subdirectory: “20 grandes exitos”

Special editions of the album may include a description such as “remastered”, possibly a label “en FM Tango” or a year indication “1929-1933”.

A unique feature of my collection is the large number of individual files that I can’t assign to any CD. I’ve stored these files in the artist’s root directory and clean them up occasionally.

 

2. Files

The file consists of the short name of the performer or conductor, a hyphen with a space, and the title name:

Francisco Canaro – Milongon

No further information about the singer or year is provided here.

The abbreviation is chosen uniformly to keep the file name short. For example: “Francini Pontier”

 

3. Tags

The tags store the relevant information; it should be noted that this information is stored in the music file and not just in the internal database of the DJ program.

For the example above, this would mean:

Interpret: “Francisco Canaro-Juan Carlos Rolon“

Title: “Tangon (1956)“

Year: “1956“

Track: “14”

Genre: “Milonga”

CD Number: “EMI 797878 2”

Album: “20 Greatest Hits“

 

I omitted the addition “y su orquesta tipica” here. I don’t always enter the number, but I do include the label whenever possible. The track numbers are important when importing tag information from external databases; the year should be the date of the recording session.

The singer’s name is added to the performer’s name with a hyphen (here without a space), and the recording year is in parentheses after the title.

 

Here is another CD by Carlos Di Sarli as an example:

Here is the view in the file manager:

 

Here is the corresponding view in the DJ software:

 

This system works perfectly for me; unfortunately, I haven’t tagged all the files in my collection yet. That will probably keep me busy for the next few years.

Greetings,

 

-Richard (DJ Ricardo)