[kps]

No, I'm serious. There's no portable filesystem metadata, and while a few kinds of media files have facilities for internal metadata (e.g. EXIF and ID3), most don't. A file name is the only non-content that is easy to keep associated with any kind of file.

The syntax is definitely an imperfect compromise, but most of the things I use this for have titles that frequently contain spaces (books, papers, music, etc.) so quoting would be necessary anyway, and I made myself a Python package to help with escaping and do other utility tasks like normalizing ISBNs.

[jabroni_salad]

that's a good idea, especially if you don't want to keep a database to manage your library. In the piracy side of things we just make sure to name files something that can be used to look it up in the database and get metadata from that.

Although I have to warn you that ISBNs are not a perfect guid and they sometimes get reissued. Good enough if you aren't hoarding the world I guess.