About Metadata Best Practices

You DO NOT need to follow these metadata rules inside your Reprtoir account, but if you ever want to prepare your metadata to deliver your products to iTunes, you must follow specific rules. Because the iTunes style guide is respected by most distributors and serves as their reference for metadata formatting, you will usually have to apply most of these rules if you ever want to prepare your products for digital music stores.

Nonstandard Capitalization

Titles must not be in all capitals, all lowercase, or random casing.

Abbreviation of Part and Volume

The words "Part" and "Volume" must be abbreviated with "Pt." and "Vol.".

Titles should be formatted as "Title, Vol. x" and "Title, Pt. x" where x is a number.

Examples:

Rare Jazz Pieces, Vol. 1
In the Still of the Night, Pt. 1

English Title Casing

The first letters of each word must contain a capital letter with a few exceptions:

"a", "an", "and", "as", "but", "for", "from", "nor", "of", "or", "so", "the", "to", and "yet".
Prepositions of four letters or fewer ("at", "by", "for", "from", "in", "into", "of", "off", "on", "onto", "out", "over", "to", "up", and "with"), except when the word is part of a verb phrase or is used as another part of speech (such as an adverb, adjective, noun, or verb).

Examples:

In the Still of the Night
(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman
To Be, or Not to Be
Lost in a Pair of Eyes

Spanish and Portuguese Casing

Here you can apply the same rules as the English title casing rules, so capitalizing the first letters of each word with a few exceptions:

"a", "à" , "ao", "aos", "as", "pra", "ou", "para", "das", "de", "do", "dos", "e", "pro", "um", "uma", "nas", "no", "nos", "o", "os", "às", "da", "pela", "pelas", "pelo", "pelos", "por", "em", and "na".

Swedish, French, and Italian Casing

Swedish, French, and Italian titles must be formatted in sentence-case format. In other words, you only capitalize the first letter of the first word in the title but leave all the other lowercase.

Examples:

L’amour dans la rue
För sent för edelweiss
Sur les monts d'Auvergne
Kärlek är ett brev skickat tusen gånger

German casing

German titles must use sentence case, and the first letter of every noun must be capitalized.

Examples:

So ist das Spiel
Dicke Mädchen haben schöne Namen