naming conventions in file sharing networks

Play with your ripping software to ensure that the filenames it generates are useful. This helps avoid the need to hand-rename files yourself.

Recommended

Music

Album - Track# - Title.extension
Artist - Title.extension
Artist - Album - Track# - Title.extension (mp3,ogg,etc..)

Movie and Tv series

Standard naming conventions

• A filename may not contain underscores.
• A filename may not consist solely out of capitals.

Standard naming convention 1

example

The 3rd Rock From The Sun - 6x19 - The Thing That Wouldn't Die - Part 1.avi
|________________________|  |__|   |__________________________|  |_____|
     
     section 1            section 2          section 3           section 4   

Section 1

Name of the tvseries

• Words are considered lowercase
• The first letter in all words are uppercase.
• Words are separated by single white spaces.

Section 2

Episode number

• The first part of an episode number starts with a number indicating the tvseries season.
• The secton part is separated with an x (lowercase) and has a number indicating the episodes follow-up number.
• If the episode follow-up number is < 10 then a 0 is added left from the number.

Section 3

Episode name

• Words are considered lowercase
• The first letter in all words are uppercase.
• Words are separated by single white spaces.

Section 4

Part indication

For the indication of the part of the episode.

• Start with Part #
• If there is no part, this section is skipped

Standard naming convention 2

Extending convention 1

The 3rd Rock From The Sun - 6x19 - The Thing That Wouldn't Die - Part 1.dvdrip.xvid.auth0r.avi
|________________________|  |__|   |__________________________|  |_____||__________________|
     
     section 1            section 2          section 3           section 4    section 5

Convention 2 adds another section for type, encoding and author of the movie file.

Section 5

Type, encoding, author

These are separted by single dots. And author is OPTIONAL.

type.encoding1.encoding2.encoding3.author.fileextension

Type

lowercase

• dvdrip
• screener
• telesync
• cam

Encoding

lowercase

multiple encodings are separted by dots

xvid.ac3

• xvid
• divx

Author

case-insensitive

May only contain letters a-z and A-Z. Underscores, dashes etc aren't allowed.

Not Recommended

Music: Artist/Title - When someone ends up downloading a file like 06 - Title and does not know the artist name, it's quite frustrating.

Artist_-_Album_-_Title - This is annoying and would need to be renamed by most downloaders.

OTOH, spaces may be standard for Win32 users due to the way the Windows shell extensions process filenames, but tend to be rather uncomfortable for users of POSIX systems (and most playing software, most exemplarily WinAmp and clones, knows enough to substitute the underscore for whitespace when displaying the title).

Commonly Argued

"Artist, The" versus "The Artist"

---

Try something like:

Artist [yyyy, Album #nn] - Title

Artist = Each word capitalized

yyyy = year

Album = Each word capitalized

nn = Song number

Title = First word capitalized

Notes may be added to a filename in brackets at the end (Radio remix), (live @ Woodstock)

---

Characters to avoid:

• Fat32-illegal (such as Windows):

\ * ? "

• ext2-illegal (and others, such as Linux):

/

This article is based on a public domain infoAnarchy article: Using_File_Sharing_Networks/Naming_Conventions

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