Copy Tags From Old Files to New: Text to Tag Converter

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1

I'm embarking on a journey to upgrade my MP3 / M4A library to FLAC.

Thus far I have tried:

Method 1:
Opening two directories with the same album, one in FLAC the other in mp3 I sort the files so that the FLAC & mp3 files are separate from one another but retain the same order. I then copy & paste in mass.

This method sucks because

  • I have to ensure the files are in the EXACT same order
  • Pasting the old tags overwrites all the data from the new files, some of which have correct metadata that I did not have in my library before

Method 2:
Open two directories same as in method one but I select all the mp3 files & export all the tags to one file. Then I go through the mp3's 1 by one & export their lyrics to a .lrc file with a keyboard shortcut.

(I can't figure out how to export the lyrics of each song to a single file per track if I select multiple files it defaults to putting all the lyrics for all the tracks into one single file)

I then select all the FLAC files & utilize the Converter: Text → Tags which imports the tags to all the flies.
Next I use the import to tag action to import the lyrics to the files

(I also can't seem to get the Converter action to automatically use the filename I've input so I have to manually "open" the file each time)

Screenshot 2024-01-30 140208

Method two has the added bonus of not touching the metadata that I'm not actively importing but I still have to make sure all the FLAC are in the same order as the MP3's.

With all that being said here are my questions:

  1. Is There a way I can export (in batch) the tags of each track to individual files?

My goal here is to export the tags of each song & then have mp3tag import those tags to the new files by finding a file like %Title% Tags.txt

Ideally If i could also export the lyrics in that same file that would be nice but I already have an action setup to embed lyrics from .lrc & .txt files so that's no biggie

  1. Is there a way I can export the lyrics of tracks (in batch) to individual files?
  2. What am I doing wrong with the filename entry for the Text → Tag converter?
  3. Is there a much easier way to do what I'm doing?

I'd just like to not have to match the order of the files to get my data from point A to point B if that's possible I think that would save me a lot of time. I've been reading & re-reading the verbiage on the converters but It's evident I need an in depth tutorial for the mentally burdened.

Any help, much appreciated

2

If you use the function Convert>Text file-Tag then this relies on a single file with all the data for all the files that should be treated.
The file structure is 1 line per record and 1 record has the data for 1 file.
One field in each record should be the filename of the target file.
The individual fields in each record have to be separated by a unique separator which does not appear in the data. So I doubt that "blank hyphen blank" is a good one as this could also be part of the data e.g. in TITLE or ALBUM.

If the target files can be found in a different location than the current working directory, then the filename should contain the path to target file.

If you want to include the lyrics in this collective file you still have to obey the rule of 1 line per record. So you have to remove/replace the line breaks with something else, e.g. three underscores and replace the 3 underscores with line breaks again after the successful import in the target files.