Hello, in the “multiple titles / splits” section of Style / Titles - MusicBrainz the / (slash) character is used for two songs that are in one track.
For me, it is okay to tag the files like the style guide says, but the / character doesn’t play well on Unix filesystems because the / is used as a separator in paths. So, at the filesystem level what character do you guys use to separate two such titles?
01 - Title1 ? Title2.flac
Thank you.
I use a hyphen. I’m also on Linux. I use Puddletag, and I created a pattern so it will make that change for me when I use Tag to Filename command.
Hypen on the filesystem and slash in the metadata of FLAC files?
MP3s as well. Seems to work well.
Thank you. I appreciate your time.
I’m using the same naming scheme as yours with “0x - Track Name.flac”
I’ve been using ⧸ Big Solidus
That is big indeed 
I like the ‘low line’ or ‘spacing underscore’ character [ _ ] (U+005F) used in file and dir names. as yourself and others mentioned I not only do not mind using the slash as a separator in tags, I prefer it. It’s usually directories (release titles & artists) that I encounter in my library requiring a separator, and unfortunately I’ve been stuck in my ways with a renaming pattern that uses a [SPACE][HYPHEN-MINUS] scheme tor represent the slash which results in the following pattern:
[TITLE A][SPACE][SPACE][HYPHEN-MINUS][SPACE][TITLE B]
I hate the double space, as this only makes it even more of a pain in the arse trying to escape the spaces along with the square brackets i enclose the release year in on the command line. because I’ve standardized this for a large library I’m now just “stuck in my ways” and I’m extremely hesitant to touch any config options, let alone even open up the renaming scheme tab in the options panel for fear of breaking what ain’t broken with a careless “fat finger.”
I would really, really love to have picard use a single “_” though as the slash when renaming/moving as I use the hyphen-minus as the field separator for [##] - [ARTIST] - [TITLE].[EXT] but I think the underscore only used for colons (i think) which even if so are a rarity to be seen in any titles in my library.
+1
If you’re going to replace it with something then you might as well replace it with something that looks like it.
Using Unicode characters in the filename might be unsafe on less sophisticated platforms. For instance, if you want to make an MP3 CD for the car, the primitive player in the car stereo might get confused by Unicode filenames. The minus sign is definitely safer.
I like Underscores as I rarely see them in an actual track name, and it still means I can easily search for the file from a standard keyboard. Also the car MP3 thing is covered without funky reaction, though usually you just get a square block on the display with stuff like that.
Personally, in filenames I swap out all the unusual unicode dashes and apostrophe’s and swap them to standard ASCII versions. I do this to help me when manually searching for a file. And it stops me getting confused by inconsistent file sorting. Can be a bit confusing when seeing the same folder name twice side by side due to different dashes in use.
Does anyone actually even look at the file/folder names?
I use discnumber.tracknumber for the files themselves, and have often thought about using MusicBrainz id’s for the Artist and Album folders. I like the discnumber.tracknumber approach because you don’t have to worry about invalid characters, titles too long for the filesystem e.t.c. and I can easily verify that they’re named correctly (based off the metadata).
Any interaction with my master files is through foobar and copies get pushed out from there, so who cares what they’re called - as long as they’re valid.
Absolutely, I organize my music (classical especially) into a deep directory tree on linux so the forward slash needs to be dealt with, in my case simple space.
It looks like since this is a problem on linux only, folks are savy enough to deal with it.
Picard does replace slashes with an underscore. Actually people most often ask for a different character to be used and so far this is not yet configurable in Picard (you can work around it with scripting, but it’s a bit tricky), but if you actually want to use the underscore this works out of the box.
Slashes are not a valid character on all major operating systems, that’s nothing Linux specific. All the Unix systems, including macOS, use the slash as a directory separator; even on Windows (which uses backslashes as the directory separator) the forward slash is not allowed in file names and in many places interpreted as a directory separator as well.
Did not know that Windows does not allow it also, thanks for that.
If this is the case, is it still wise to have it as a major separator for Release titles which quite often is used to create a directory or a folder ? Or any other separators that are not allowed ? I think “:” is one of them.
If the question is about how you organize your files, that’s up to you. You can obviously not use such characters in the file name, but there is no problem with using them in tags. File systems can have some arbitrary restrictions like this, I don’t think you gain something by applying the same restrictions to your to your file tags. But if you want to, you can of course use the same filesystem compatible delimiter in your tags.
If the question is about MB in general, the answer is definitely that file system restrictions should have no impact on how things get named. Filename generation is something software can handle.
My thinking too. A lot of people don’t like them because it sticks out. But that’s the point imo. “Something else goes here” is what I want indicated.
Anyway, luckily we don’t have to deal with this question in the, less flexible, database itself or we’d be here forever!
