Filenames with double spacing issues

Support
1

I use Convert > Tag- Filename. My preferred format string is %artist% - %album% - %title% because those fields are most relevant to me when identifying a file, or searching for it by artist/album without relying on directories. I don't use 'track' because it's only useful for sorting songs by album order in a directory, and I'd rather have media player software doing that function.

I separate fields using " - " because it's easier to read than "-". Underscores are fine, but a bit harder to read, and "-" is overkill.

Anyway, this would be fine if all files had an artist, album and title field. In reality however, I get left with filenames like "artist - - title" and " - - title". This is a problem for me because the blank/empty spaces and dashes/hyphens aren't useful (unless you don't want to confuse an artist for an album).

Here's my solution:

Action #1
Actiontype 2: Replace
Field ______: _FILENAME
Original ___: - -
Replace with: -

[_] Only as whole word [_] Case sensitive comparison

Before: " - album - title.mp3" (no artist)
After: " - album - title.mp3"

Before: "artist - - title.mp3" (no album)
After: "artist - title.mp3"

Before: " - - title.mp3" (no artist & album)
After: " - title.mp3"

Better, but there is still unwanted spaces and dashes when the artist field is missing. The next action fixes that.

Action #2
Actiontype 2: Regular Expression
Field ______: _FILENAME
Original ___: ^ -
Replace with:

[_] Only as whole word [_] Case sensitive comparison

Before: " - album - title.mp3"
After: "album - title.mp3"

Before: " - title.mp3"
After: "title.mp3"

If all fields are blank, there will still be " - - .mp3" files, but that is not an issue for me because all songs at least have a title.

I hope that helps someone like me who couldn't find an answer.

2

Do you know the feature of the converter to leave out definitions that would to empty strings?

If your mask looked like this:
[%artist% - ][%album% - ][%title%]
then you would get only those parts that actually have contents. THis would then avoid to apply the actions afterwards.

In general I would apply filters that check for
%artist% IS "" OR %album% IS ""
first to make sure that you get complete filenames because you then can fill in the missing parts.

3

I didn't know about that. It looks much more efficient. When I was looking for a solution earlier, I think I did see something about that, but thought it didn't work when I (incorrectly) tried to use it.

Disregard my method then :stuck_out_tongue:

Useful filter, but I have a lot of unknown artist/album files so 'complete' filenames aren't an option.