Hi guys! It's Sellyme here. There's been a lot of confusion over our tagging system, and rightfully so: right now it sucks. I'm currently renovating the whole tagging system and archive, so I figured I'd give you guys an explanation of every single detail of our tagging system in the upcoming archive so you know exactly what you're getting.

$ext - The file extension. This should be .mp3 for every song in the archive.

$artist - This is the name of the artist who created the .mp3 file. This is NOT the original artist in the case of remixes. The $artist in the case of Tomb's remix of Discord is "The Living Tombstone", not "Eurobeat Brony". This is the only artist name listed in the file name.

$oartist - This is the original artist(s). In the case of multiple original artists, they are listed separated by semi-colons (";"). For instance, when Bagpipe Brony remixed Tomb's remix of Discord, the $oartist would be "The Living Tombstone; Eurobeat Brony".

$cartist - This is any contributing artists. Due to a flaw with naming and tagging systems on most major Operating Systems, we can't properly list more than one major artist in filenames. Any contributing artists beyond the main artist as listed in the filename are listed under $cartist. This is for collaborations, and people who supply vocals or mastering to a track predominantly by another musician. In a few songs with very large group choruses (The Massive Smile Project by Forest Rain, The Long Way From Equestria Project by BassBeastJD) only the solo or duet vocalists are listed in this tag. Multible contributing artists are listed in the same way as multiple original artists.

$ocartist - This is a combination of $oartist and $cartist, listing contributing artists in the original work for remixed tracks. Not actually a tag used in the creation of the archive due to the complexity of combining three different tags, but it's listed here for clarity and completion.

$fullsongtitle - This is the name of the song. Often this will differ from the way the musician publishes it in formatting (e.g., removing artist attributions from the title, adding/modifying "(Remix)" to maintain consistency, correcting spelling errors and adding possessive apostrophes), but we will only modify these meta pieces of information, and never the actual title of the song. For instance, the file "Expy - DreadSabre - What Binds Us (Expy Remix).mp3" would be changed to "Expy - What Binds Us (Remix).mp3", in the format "$artist - $songtitle $ext". More on that later.

$songtitle - You may notice that I used "$songtitle" instead of $fullsongtitle above. This is because the $fullsongtitle tag can include special characters like colons (":"). Many Operating Systems (including Windows) can't have colons and other special characters in the name of any file, so $songtitle is just $fullsongtitle with these special characters stripped, and (if necessary), the title structure modified slightly to flow better. This is mostly done at the discretion of the archivists.

$year - This is the year the song was released in. If a song was released, removed, and then released again (as in the case of a lot of Archie's stuff), we use the year it was first released in (that we know about). If a song was made in one year, then published in another, the year it was published is what is recorded. This value should almost always be 2011 or 2012 (or future years, when we get there), as the first ever fan-made song for G4 was released on January 26, 2011. There are a few G1-G3.5 songs (mostly official ones) scattered around the archive though.

$ogenre - We decided not to mess around with genre tagging. None of us are particularly musically minded, and that makes our definition of genres even more subjective than that of someone who actually knows the dictionary-defined definitions of each genre. We decided against tagging every song's genre because it's both time-consuming, and we have encountered literally THOUSANDS of users deliberately avoiding all songs tagged with a specific genre (mostly dubstep and rap). When you remove this tagging, the listeners will almost always enjoy the song they "hate" just because of the genre. We've done lots of experiments and research on this, with damning results. However, that being said, we've left the genre tag made by each individual musician on .mp3 files that have a genre tag, as we believe that they're perfectly equipped to say what their own music is, even when the tag is something as simple as "Pony" or a seemingly-random number. We're aware that many DJs also use the MLPMA to find tracks to use in mixes, and as such have left those tags there to accomodate those users.

$length - This is just a junk tag, not actually used. It's the length of the song, in milliseconds. All Operating Systems and Media Players fill this in automatically.

$bitrate - Again, a junk tag, that's filled in automatically. This should be 320kbps, and failing that, as high as possible (320kbps being the maximum bitrate of the mp3 format container)

$size - The third (and final) junk tag. Filled automatically again.

Okay, that's all of the tags we use in every file. But we also have a few others for albums:

$fullalbumtitle - The name of the album. Pretty simple. If the song wasn't released in an album, we add an album tag that corresponds loosely to the genre ("My Little Medleys", "My Little DJ Tunes", "My Little Mashups", "Rapping is Magic", and "Rocking is Magic"). This is so we're able to provide some nice album art for you, without having it be too general or time-consuming.

$albumtitle - Again, the name of the album, but with special characters stripped. See $songtitle.

$albumartist - The artist of the album. This can often differ from the artist of the song, such as with StormWolf's remix of "Nightmares and Night Mares", which was released on Icky's album "Operation Icky". In cases of albums that were specifically released as part of a group collaboration (the Remix Wars, Balloon Party and all its derivatives) the album artist is attributed to the group that organised it. In almost all cases this is "My Little Remix". In the cases of the above five "default" albums, the album artist is listed as "MLP"

$albumnumber - This is the number of the song in the album's track listing. Not every album has a tracklist, and as such the $albumnumber tag isn't utilised on every single song in an album. Notably, the five default albums don't have album numbers. This is listed as a number between "01" and "99". Numbers between 1 and 9 always have the leading 0 in the tag, but this is not displayed in the "#" tag on any Operating Systems or media players. It's listed for a reason, more on that later. In the EXTREMELY unlikely circumstance that an album is made with over 100 tracks, numbers between 1 and 9 will have two leading zeroes, and numbers between 10 and 99 one trailing zero, but for that track only. At the moment, all albums have a two digit $albumnumber, even if they have less than ten tracks.


Okay, that's all of the tags we regularly use, now for some examples. We have three different types of filename tagging systems:

SONGS NOT IN AN ALBUM
$artist - $songtitle $ext

This tagging system is for songs not in an album by the musician who made it (excluding the 5 default albums). Songs that would come under this include:

Eurobeat Brony - Discord.mp3
StormWolf - Nightmares and Night Mares (Remix).mp3
&I - Cowbell is my Savior.mp3

Note that the last two listed are in fact in albums, but as they're in albums with multiple different $artist tags, and as such aren't in a dedicated album folder in the file system, the album and album number aren't listed, so as not to cause a disrupt in readability while browsing via filesystems. The metadata is still representative of the album, however.


SONGS IN AN ALBUM WITHOUT TRACKLISTING
$artist - $album - $songtitle $ext

This tagging system is for songs that are in an album, but don't have a specified order of tracks, and as such, no track number. Again, this doesn't apply to songs in an album by multiple musicians. Examples of songs listed like this include:

Baschfire - Luna Orchestral - For Luna.mp3
Baschfire - Pony Emblem - Battle Theme.mp3
Bartekko - Just A Little Pony - Believe To Win.mp3


SONGS IN AN ALBUM WITH TRACKLISTING
$artist - $album - $albumnumber $songtitle $ext

You should be able to work this one out. This is the exact same format as Bandcamp, let's see some examples:

Not a Clever Pony - Princess Luna as Imagined - 04 For The New Lunar Republic.mp3
All Levels at Once - The Pony Way - 11 Changeling.mp3
Aviators - Equestrian Revolution - 08 Luna (Remix).mp3

Pretty simple, no? That's the file names out of the way... Now comes the slightly confusing part: id3 tagging.

Here are the id3 tags we deal with, and their corresponding tags via our system:

Contributing artists - $artist; $cartist; $oartist; $cartist
Album - $fullalbumtitle
Genre - $ogenre
Length - $length
Year - $year
Size - $size
# - $albumnumber
Album artist - $albumartist
Title - $fullsongtitle
Bit rate - $bitrate

Apart from the contributing artists tag, that's all fairly straight-forward. Let's take a closer look at that one with a few examples:


BassBeastJD - The Long Way From Equestria Project.mp3
Contributing artist id3 tag: "BassBeastJD; St. Pinkie; Silvertongue; Lance Arrow; FreewingGlider; Magma15x; DJSmell1; Peak Freak; ATRaddi; Callipotech; MslkariShipper; Torgera; GigglyMaria; Alioopster27; Megaphoric;"

BassBeastJD was the $artist; the rest were in the $cartist tag as they supplied solo or duet vocals.


Forest Rain - The Massive Smile Project.mp3
Contributing artist id3 tag: "Forest Rain; Cyril; Decibelle; F3nning; Glaze; Jenny Nicholson; Kryptage; The Living Tombstone; Mic the Microphone; Osoth; Spectracle; Ashfire; Equestria Dude; Poni1Kenobi; Daniel Ingram;"

Forest Rain was the $artist; everyone from Cyril to Spectracle were solo or duet vocalists and in the $cartist tag, Ashfire, Equestria Dude, and Poni1Kenobi played Clarinets, Electric Guitar, and Bass Guitar respectively, and were also in the $cartist tag. Daniel Ingram was the producer of the original song (Smile, Smile, Smile!) and was in the $oartist tag. Note that while Shannon Chan Kent should theoretically be in the $ocartist tag, as she sang as Pinkie in the original song, we've decided not to credit the voice actors for their parts in (official) songs to reduce clutter. You all know their names by now, anyway. At the moment, the only musicians on the show that are listed in the tags are Daniel Ingram (for the main music) and William Anderson (for the background music). If we get some angry tweets from @orchetect we might add him too, but that's something for the future, as finding out who created the official tracks is notoriously difficult.

We've also listed the main composer(s) for previous generation songs, and songs in other languages when they are different to the compositions by Daniel and William (such as the Italian opening theme by Maurizio Bianchini).


Well, I think that covers everything to do with our tagging system. This is now about 2,000 words long, so congratulations if you've read this far. I'm pretty sure most of the other MLPMA staff quit reading about 8 paragraphs up, so I'm going to take this opportunity to say that roflcopter572 is a poop-head. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.