Published 2025-08-24.
Time to read: 2 minutes.

This page is part of the wpmc collection.

Some songs have similar names. Assets (audio and video files) for a song need to be associated with their song easily. We use file and directory name prefixes to quickly know which assets belong with the various songs. If a video or audio asset has a name prefix that does not exactly match a song name, then chaos can occur. The names of DAW projects should also follow this convention.

1. One aspect of the convention is called snake case. Do not combine snake case and camel case.
   
   Programmers call a prefix in snake case format a slug. A file name slug is lowercase, hyphen-separated text derived from a title or resource name. Slugs are used to construct unique and descriptive filenames that are machine-readable and do not include spaces or special characters.
   
   For example, the slug for "My Awesome Song" would be my-awesome-song and could be part of a filename like my-awesome-song-take-1_2025-01-01.mp3.
2. Another aspect is appending a date in the format YYYY-mm-dd. We use this date format because it is easier to sort the dates when they are in that format.
3. Assets such as MP3 and MP4 files must have a filename prefix that matches the song that they are associated with.
4. Notice how underscores and dashes are used. Underscores separate sections of a file name; dashes are used instead of spaces.

The song_create script mostly follows this convention. The only exception is that it uses underscores instead of dashes.

For example, a song called “Be My Baby’ would live in E:\media\songs\be_my_baby and an MP3 for this song might be called be_my_baby_take-1_2025-08-22.mp3. This naming convention makes it easy to recognize all the assets that are associated with a song.

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