2025 newbie here. I'm trying to do the same think but can't seem to get the regex right to strip OUT the artist name from the title where present. about half of my 5122 song library has this issue. How can I query with Formatstring to search through all titles, remove any numbers at the start and remove "- artist name" from title.
Current song titles:
Song Title: 01 Dear Angie - Beatles
Artist: Beatles
Desired Song Titles:
Song Title: Dear Angie
Artist: Beatles
Is the source really the title-tag or is it the filename?
If it is the title:
Define an action.
Field: TITLE
Action type: Import Tag Fields
Format String: %track% %title% - %artist% (if you want to fill the track-tag too)
Format String: %dummy% %title% - %artist% (if you don't want the track-tag filled)
After cleaning this up, is there some way to get iTunes to pick up these file name changes or re-sync the metadata in the player? Hoping to avoid using dougscripts for setting filename to track title...
Ah I see it changing the title as I was hoping for thanks @poster. However it's also pruning the first brackets from song titles.
Original:
Title: (Love You) For Sentimental Reasons - Sam Cooke
Using action above:
Title: Love You) For Sentimental Reasons
Desired:
Title: (Love You) For Sentimental Reasons
Any way to prune the artist like you have in the action above without losing the first "("?
Video here: Untitled - Easily share public links
Your example was:
In this example there is a tracknumber (01) followed by a space in the title.
If you have other files without a tracknumber in front you can't use the same format string.
You have to use instead
%title% - %artist%
That means
Import the present content of TITLE up to " - " to the title-tag and put the rest to the artist-tag.
Anyway there is an easier way to do the job:
Because I see in your screenshots that the filename is identical to the title and has all necessary informations you can use Convert → Filename - Tag instead of an action. This gives you a immediate preview of the results so you can learn how to build the format string.
If you want o change the filename with the new content of your tags you can use
Convert → Tag - Filename.
This also gives you an immediate preview.
Build yourself a new filename with the placeholders of the tags, for example
%artist% - % %title%
It its not advisable to concentrate on filenames and only change them. You should rather see that you put your tag contents in order. "01 Dear Angie - Beatles" is definitely not a proper content of a title. The title in this case is "Dear Angie". Once you have your tags-contents in order it is very easy to build a new filename like shown above.
To update the contents of iTunes see here:
