Hi.
I have a huge collection (more than 16,000 songs) distributed in hundreds of folders, and I need to extract Artist Tags, Year, Album and Track number from the file and folder name,
The routes are almost always:
I understand that I can use variables to get the Tags, using the full path of each file, but I do not know which command I should use, and how.
I would like to avoid having the Album name have year numbers, special characters, text in parentheses, etc.
Always the 2nd level folder is the name of the band, the 3rd is year and album, and inside the name as in those 2 songs.
In that example I would like to be able to obtain:
Artist: Iron Maiden
Album: Powerslave
Year: 1984
Track number: X
Song Title
I have used MusicBrainz, but only correctly places the Artist and Title names. Almost always the track numbers also put them well. But the name of Album fails a lot.
So see what fits.
Select at least one of the tracks to try the following:
Use function Convert>Filename-Tag
Format string: %artist%\%year% - %album%\%dummy%__%dummy%_p_%track%__%title%
There is a preview in that function that shows you which field gets filled with which data.
Play around with the number of underscores until it looks right.
%artist%\%year% - %album%\%dummy%__%dummy%_p_%track%__%title% works only for that example file. Because the "p" is a "Powerslave" abbreviation. Other of the thousands of files has other abbreviations.
Maybe theres a way to cut some part text of the file name, and the folder name for the special characters.
Insert a %dummy% for anything that you do not want.
You can evewn create user-defined fields with the %-notation, e.g. if you need the "P"
for
then create a field called %powerslave%.
If you have a track, lets say with the filename
Aces high (recorded 1984-04-03)
then you can extract the TITLE and the RELEASETIME like this:
%title% (recorded %releasetime%)
Interesting.
But folder names that are Album can include very varied text between [], () and {}. The content between these characters does not have a fixed order or fixed amount. It can be text and numbers in different orders and text quantities.
Like this:
1996 - Crimson (VICP-5683)
1996 Elegy [2005 Russia IROND CD 01-69]
At War With Reality (Limited Edition Artbook) CD 1 - 2014
Winter's Gate (Japanese Edition) - [EAC-FLAC]
Did you know that once you have all the data nicely standardized in the tags that you can rename the folder and all the files in it on the basis of the tags?
Use an action of the type "Format value" for _DIRECTORY
Format string (e.g.): %year% - %album%
Or, an absolute one path like
Format string: C:\Music%albumartist%%year% - %album%
Like this you get a easily maintainable naming pattern.
Renaming Files/Folders is already done before because my naming scheme is for place the music ordered with folders, or simply all together in one unique folder. In both manners.
Folders are for sharing / catalogin.
Filename with all relevant data (band_year_album-abbreviation_track-number_title) are for my personal use and random playing. Browsing across thousands of folders to find a song or album is a insane process with a very big collection in wich you alredy known the bands.
My collection is formed by more or less 19.000 music files on 1.800 folders, complete discographys and so.
