Cleaning up (YYYY Remaster) or (Remastered YYYY) in titles

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1

Hi,
I'm doing a long-overdue cleanup of my music library before re-syncing it to my iPod and I'd like to clean up a lot of track titles but I'm really struggling to figure out the regular expressions for what I want to accomplish.

I'm trying to remove anything with "[year] Remaster[ed] [year]" with either () or [] in the titles, but I have no idea where to even begin!

Some example songs I would like to retitle:
-"Beethoven (I Love to Listen To) [2018 Remastered]" to "Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)"
-"Black Dog (Remaster)" to "Black Dog"
-"Dark Chest Of Wonders (Remastered)" to "Dark Chest Of Wonders"
-"Brainstorm (1996 Remaster)" to "Brainstorm"
-"Breaking Down Barriers (Remastered 2003)" to "Breaking Down Barriers"

I don't want to just remove all parentheses because that'll remove any subtitles; some example songs I would like to keep as they are, like if they have a subtitle, or year in the title:
-"2112: Overture / The Temples Of Syrinx / Discovery / Presentation / Oracle / Soliloquy / Grand Finale"
-"(She Was A) Hotel Detective"
-"Awake (2012 Version)"
-"Awake (2013 Version)"

So I'd like it to:
-Match "Remaster" or "Remastered" anywhere in the title
-Match years if they're remasters
-Remove any empty parentheses () or brackets [] this creates
-Skip any titles without some variation of "Remaster" in its title

I tried to match something along the lines of "[any year] [Remaster or Remastered [any year]" but i didn't really know what I was doing and messed up some titles and had to undo it.
I then attempted to use a regular expression tool online too but couldn't figure that out either.

I'm aware that even this will leave some tracks I have to manually hunt and peck at, but it'll be much easier to get through my 10,000+ track library with a lot of the chaff removed.

Can anyone help me with a regular expression (or set thereof) that will allow me to match and remove as much as I can? I'm happy to do this in several passes, I don't necessarily want a single expression that'll match everything, I just don't want to go through over 10k tracks manually because otherwise I will literally go insane lol.

I've always really struggled with regexp as I find it extremely confusing, especially as I have learning difficulties and concentration issues (thanks, unmedicated ADHD!).

Thanks in advance for any help I can get,
Maia

2

You could try Convert>Tag-Tag for TITLE
Format string: $regexp(%title%,'(\(|\[).*Remaster.*(\)|])',)

3

Thanks, I actually already did that one manually because there was only one album with "Digital Remaster" in the titles :sweat_smile:

4

My suggestion should work for all files with Remaster in brackets.

5

I was just going to confirm that this works for every example above when I test it. Except the first one with the mixed round and square brackets.
Beethoven (I Love to Listen To) [2018 Remastered]
becomes
Beethoven

Perhaps with some creative filtering and limiting the regex to be more distinct for the round OR square brackets you can get better results in just a couple of sweeps.

BTW - I am always amazed by the regex solutions that @ohrenkino and @LyricsLover can share so quickly that seem to hit the mark right out of the gate!

6

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here but this isn't matching anything :cold_sweat:

remaster
remaster450×355 12.8 KB

7

You use the action of the type "Replace with regular expression"
and I said:

8

Ah! That's done it. Thanks.

I just manually scrolled through and deselected anything that might behave weirdly, I guess I'll go through anything with (parenthetical subtitles) manually.

Thanks so much for your help!

9

What about a filter?
Like
%title% HAS Remaster

10

I meant for things that are like "Beethoven (I Love to Listen To) [2018 Remastered]" that apparently became "Beethoven" Instead of "Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)"

11

another filter?
NOT %title% HAS "(" AND NOT %title% HAS [

12

Sorry, I feel like I'm being unclear. My examples above weren't entirely comprehensive, there are still things like "Song Title (Live) (Remaster 2010)" and such. Some titles have parentheses that don't have the word "Remaster" in them and I don't want all parentheses removed, just the ones that state the track has been remastered.

At any rate, there are few enough now that I've gotten rid of the bulk of them that I can go through manually and spend an hour or two just renaming the files individually. I really appreciate the help!

13

The problem is that the brackets are no unique indicators for just 1 type of data and that the data inside is not structured in a unique way.

14

Yeah, it can be frustrating because different publishers/metadata creators make collections pretty inconsistent. At any rate, being able to rename the bulk of these automatically made it way more manageable to rename the handful of ones I had to deselect. I've renamed them all now, and it only took a fraction of the time thanks to your help! I really appreciate it. Thanks so much :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: