Is it possible to select just 1 or more cells in 1 column? (=not whole row, not editing)

Support
1

In grid view, any click into a row selects the whole row (which is often wished for, I admit), but how could I just select the cell I have clicked in? (I have tried click, shift/control-click (which would be needed for selection-extension anyway), and alt-click, to no avail.)

I do NOT speak of editing, by double-click, since such editing would mean I'm stuck to the current cell; what I want is to be able to just select (!) the current cell only, then, by shift-click or control-click, select other cells (always in the same column), THEN delete them (=minimum), or even better, then copy them to clipboard (control-c), then select another cell within another column, and paste them (control-v).

How would I do a column-restrained selecting of one or several cells, at least, for then deleting it/them? (Considering that paste-and-copy probably is not available)?

Thank you very much for your help!

2

You can select several complete files.
To manipulate one particular field (column) for all the selected files, either
set the data in the tag panel - where you can also delete the data
or open the extended tags dialogue Alt-T and edit the field there (which is useful if the field is not already visible in the tag panel).

If you want to copy tag data from one (or more) file(s) and paste it to others,
select the source files in the filelist and copy the tags, then select the target files and paste it there.
If it is just 1 single field, copy&paste the field via the extended tags dialogue.

3

Thank you very much for your explanations. Up to now, I have tried deleting at least.

Just some remarks: In the Alt-t dialog (which seems to be necessary), next time, the recently selected column (in that dialog) is not pre-selected, but has to be manually selected anew; then, a click on the "delete" symbol (=before pressing "enter") selects the next (!) entry in the list, so that the user may be afraid to delete the values in the wrong column (which fortunately is not the case). And that dialog seems necessary to use since when in the tag panel, I set the column value (from keep) to blank, then a "Proceed" button is nowhere, and "Enter" (even if the focus is within that "blank" field in the tag pane) has no effect; it's just when focus is set back to the list that I get an additional dialog. All in all, it's quite a lot of unnecessary clicks, even beyond the (understandable) "Apply saves?" security dialog.

4

You have to save the changes explicitly either with Ctrl-S or the Save button in the tool bar.

Still I wonder why individual fields should get deleted. Most keepers of collections are glad to have more data and not less.
If you want to set new data, simply select the files for the new data, enter it either in the tag panel or the extended tags dialogue, save the changes to all the selected files. This leaves out the step to re-write the files to cater for the deleted data.

5

Thank you again for your kind explanations. Deletions in my case are motivated by the following:

I'm ripping my CD collection; as we all know, CD files do not contain any meta data; the ripper tries to get that from dedicated web sites.

For classical music, though, that meta data to be found is more or less bad, often really bad; also, I want all the meta data to be within my file system, in order to be independent of what dedicated "music players" are able, or not, to find / filter...

Thus, I use the metadata from the web/ripper, and the CD leaflet data*, in order to (more or less manually) edit path and filename, and thus, whenever the (correct!) meta data is already in path or filename, I want to delete the meta data; ultimately, I then copy the metadata from the filename back to the "Artist" meta data field, in order for my music player to be able to display the track title (mainly).

*=It goes without saying that I prefer the web data IF it's more or less correct (or at least available to begin with), since for the leaflet data, I have to type it all myself; as alleged, classical-CD ripping is a nightmare...

So, in order to not get visually lost, I need to discard any meta data from the columns which I have already checked and processed, thus my need for quick deletion; as for quick copy-and-insert in mp3tag, I think I "got" this now, too, will share my observations after some practical use.

As for QUICK use of the tag pane, I'll have to do some macros, accessing the respective field*, then sending PageUp (in order to get to ), then sending control-s (thank you for your hint, my bad!), then sending Enter (in order to overcome the "Do you really want" dialog), together with the necessary pauses in-between.

*=Not all of them have an Alt-shortcut (which isn't available but once the tag pane has focus anyway), but gracefully, they are numbered: "Edit3", etc., with title = 3, artist 4, album 5, album artist 10 and composer 11

(I have to say that my files are .wav files, so my choice of tag tools is already severely reduced; then, I discovered a competing tool which allows for both tasks described in my first post above, so that's so much more convenient... but that tool - surprise! - does NOT also allow for editing the path and filename, and if you do that concurrently in some file manager, onto the files open in the tool, you'll create havoc; I tried and had to see what I got in the end, with that "work flow"...)

It's all a bit weird, I know, but classical music, in 2023, has become niche anyway... :wink:

6

You can set the confirmation messages in the options Ctrl-O > Messages.

You can set the label for a field with the Windows syntax to get a shortcut letter by adding a leading Ampersand. A&rtist would be accessible with Alt-r

You know that you can rewrite path and file name with functions from within MP3tag?
See

7
  1. Sorry, I'm a little bit slow here, learning-by-doing.

Thanks for the "Messages" hint; currently I have NO confirmation after save/change/delete, the others WITH confirmation, but with the following macro (I have just done it for "Album Artist", works fine, by AutoHotkey), there is NO confirmation dialog after deletion anyway:

; title = 3, artist 4, album 5, album artist 10, composer 11
n = 10
controlsend, Edit%n%, {pgup 5}, Mp3tag ; set it to
sleep, 200
sendevent, ^s ; save
controlfocus, Button1 ; focus back to listview (sic!)

  1. Is my assumption correct that from within (!) Mp3tag, I can edit the file names, but NOT the path (and, especially, the immediate parent folder of the files? In other words, for CDs, I can edit the .wav (or other) files, but not the CD (folder) title?

Currently, I do this, in order to overcome this alleged miss:

I SORT by Path (then the track numbers come naturally in their correct order, as ripped), then I work some list of 2000 files top-down, and when I encounter a CD for which I need to edit the path (or more precisely the CD title), I do that externally, within a file manager, BUT then I do NOT do any changes anymore within Mp3tag for that CD but scroll down to the next one.

Afterwards, I close Mp3tag, load the same (higher-up) parent folder again with it, and edit anew, on the updated folder hierarchy now; this way, I avoid the above-mentioned sync problems.

2a) (Suggestion) Re closing and re-opening Mp3tag, I had seen that default is "load previously loaded folder" (my wording), but loading thousands of files automatically often is NOT what the user wants; "Favorite" would probably be even worse, in case "Favorite" would be set as the TOP folder of all those sub-folders, and manually re-setting the "favorite folder" to a path which would be "ok next time" would not be optimal either, obviously, since how could I know beforehand? Thus, "Empty" was the only choice left.

BUT where most users would want a "favorite" folder/path indeed, is in the "File - Change Directory" dialog, since the preset path there would then be their top music folder, from which then they would navigate down to the parent folder of all the folders they currently want to edit in Mp3tag; currently, though, that "Change Directory" dialog is reset to some location far, far away from any music.

8

No.
You can set a new folder name, even with an absolute path.
Try an action of the type "Format value" for _DIRECTORY or use Convert>tag-Tag for _DIRECTORY.
This renames the current folder and moves all the files in it to the newly named location.

If you want to access files in a different folder, then either drag&drop that folder from the windows explorer into MP3tag or use the functions from the tool bar or the File menu to either open a new folder or add another folder to the currently loaded files.
There is no need to close and open MP3tag to load another set of files.

9

I am not there yet. :wink:
No need to close and reopen: correct! There is "Change directory" and "Add directory", so for RELOADING the directory, I just do "Change directory" again.

To clarify, and in order to not create false assumptions of fellow Mp3tag users upon Mp3tag: In the other meta data tool, it's possible to continue (sic!) to edit meta data, even AFTER having renamed files/folders within an external file manager; saving the changes in the tool then will create another (!), slightly renamed file/folder (I remember for files, I am not sure anymore for folders, but anyway, it created a pretty chaos)...
whilst in Mp3tag, after external folder/file rename, the files, and the meta data remain visible, provisionally, but any editing then is prevented; in other words, those folders and files are then not available to Mp3tag anymore (before re-load, that is), so that no sync problem can arise, and obviously, that's by far the better alternative here.

10

While trying to rename a parent folder (=the CD title) by the field "Directory" in the "Tag pane", I discovered that that field is a quick way to navigate the subfolders, and/or to "filter", so as to not have all those thousands of loaded files in the grid concurrently.

I admit that I need folder renaming rarer, but of course, in "CD" cases, many files sharing the same path and folder name (same old first, same new then), I would expect to get, after selecting the files in question, a dialog with some input field in which the old path would already be entered, ready to be changed by me, just as we do in file managers; here in Mp3tag that gets really, really complicated instead; ditto for file renaming, with those, more or less inscrutable, "patterns"; unfortunately, the explanations in the help pages are not too evident, so I'll dive into those much more complicated problems later on.

Thank you very much again, and have a nice evening!

11

This is a misunderstanding. The directory field in the tag panel does not have the purpose to modify that property.
See also

_Directory is a technical property that cannot be edited in the tag panel.

I cannot do anything against what you expect.
But there are so many different use cases to treat the filenames that you have to rely on 2 basic approaches:
rename the individual file based on tag data - this may move the file to a completely different location than all the other files in the current folder
or rename the whole folder and move all the files in that folder, even those that are not managed by MP3tag.
I do not think that these functions are too complicated, esp. the functions with a preview are particularly helpful.
Please note also that when a "Format string" can be entered any combination of text constants, scripting functions and tag field data can be used to create a new filename. That makes this function particularly flexible and versatile.