I have a large collection of bootlegs that are mostly untagged. I'm trying to use MP3tag to tag the files as efficiently as possible and wondering if there's a way I could improve upon what I'm currently doing.
Most of the bootlegs I've downloaded are accompanied by a text file describing the contents and listing the tracks. The track listing is often not at the top of the text file. An example is below:
For something like this, I've been manually copying the tracklisting to a new text document and then using Convert > Text File - Tag and applying a mask of %track% %title%.
If I skip the step where I copy the tracklisting to a separate file, MP3Tag will attempt to use the first rows in the file and I'll end up with something like this (which is obviously not what I want):
My question is: Is there any way to tell MP3Tag that the track field must be numeric and that therefore it should ignore any rows that don't start with a number when applying the mask? This would enable me to skip the step where I copy the tracklist to a new file, which is manageable for just a few bootlegs but becomes time-consuming when tagging dozens/hundreds of bootlegs.
In short: no.
If you use Convert>Text file-Tag then the text files has to have the structure of 1 line per record. Each record is terminated by (cr)(lf).
All other data will lead to problems during the import - as you already found out.
Alternatively, you import the whole text file into a user-defined field in each file and then start processing this field with some more actions to extract the relevant information for that file.
I don't think, that this is possible with Mp3tag only.
One possibility would be to first extract only the tracklist itself automatically.
You could use a PowerShell-Commandline like this:
foreach ($file in get-Childitem *.txt) {((Get-Content $file.name) | Select-String -Pattern '^\d+.*$' -AllMatches).Matches.Value | Out-File $file-tracks_only.txt}
This Powershell-Command would loop through all your *.txt tracklist files in the current directory, extract only the lines starting with a number into a new file with the addition "-tracks_only.txt". This file would only contain your lines
1 Intro
...
21 American Girl
Maybe then it is easier to use the Convert "Text File -> Tag"?
Please be aware that this only works if your tracks are the only lines starting with a number.
