I have thousands of FLAC files ripped from my CD collection over the years. For a long time, I renamed everything to "last, first" convention for alphabetical sorting. Now with media players, that's not only not important ("just search on Bruce") but not attractive, either.
What I would LIKE to do is export the tag data for my whole collection (tens of thousands of files over thousands of folders, folder hierarchy up to 5 or 6 deep) into some CSV file that I can import into spreadsheet, find all unique instances of people or band names, then create a table of changes to be made. Use that to run a global search and replace on my export file to clean everything up. I know everything I need to do to accomplish this, other than dealing with the headache.
What I do NOT know is how to then re-import those tag changes, where needed, to the files. I'm assuming MP3tag can do this, but haven't been able to find out how. Has anyone done something like this, do you anchor on the full path and file name?
and yes, the main_converter item you point to appears to be exactly what I'm looking for. I'd seen that before but didn't have enough of a clear mindset on how it had to work for me to realize that the " %_filename_ext% or %_path% are used to ensure the correct file gets tagged. Use %_filename_ext% if you have lots of files in one folder. Use %_path% if you have many folders each containing files" is the key that I need.
I'll peel off a subset and test with it this week.
Perhaps the option to export only one occurrance of each piece of data may be of interest (e.g. $loop(%artist%,1)
Like that you get a list of all variations but not all repetitions of each field.
Probably, you need a second export where you see all files.
When you export data with the target "Excel" or "Access", use $char(9) (the tab character) as field separator. Like that you do not fall into the trap of comma separated values when an artist also has commas as part of the data.