Often I don't want (Remaster) or (Live) to remain in the title tag of my files. Removing those is easy with regex replace. I then rename all the songs via "convert -> tag-filename" to the pattern and folder structure of my choice.
Which leaves me with a bunch of .lrc files that have different names than the songs they belong to, breaking the connection between them.
I would love to be able to use mp3-tag to recognize when a song and an .lrc file have the same name and to link the .lrc file to the song, meaning when the song is renamed/moved through mp3-tag, the .lrc file gets renamed/moved as well and ends up in the same folder with the same name as the song it belongs to.
Is that possible? I've been moving and renaming .lrc files by hand for quite some time now and I'd love to be able to automate that step.
You could embed the external lyrics in a field like UNSYNCEDLYRICS or LYRICS.
Also, you could include the lrc-files as files that are also displayed in the files list and treat them there just like the audio files - if you modify the _FILENAME directly.
See File>Options>Tags which files are included in the files list.
I've added " *.lrc;" to the "Restrict incoming files to:" list and dragged a folder containing both .lrc and .flac files into mp3-tag. The .lrc files did not show up in the file list. Am I doing something wrong or is there another setting preventing the .lrc files from showing up?
I have now *jpg; *.png; *.pdf; *.txt; *lrc; in the list and they all apear.
All these filetypes naturally have no tags and only some columns (like a column for the filename) will show anything.
Maybe there is something wrong with your confugration file.
You can test it if you close Mp3Tag and rename the mp3tag.cfg-file in your %appdata%\Mp3Tag-folder so that Mp3Tag has to create a new cfg-file if you start it again. Later you can rename it back.
edit:
I thought so at first but that was not it.
Turns out that dragging and dropping the contents of a folder (the .lrc, .flac and .jpg files) into mp3-tag leads to it only displaying the songs (the same goes for opening the files in mp3-tag through the context-menu).
Dragging the folder itself into mp3-tag on the other hand leads to .lrc + .jpg files also showing up.
Is that expected behaviour?
I prefer using .lrc files which I can easily edit in notepad++ so that is sadly not really an option for me.
I just tried that. For the example of:
01 Court And Spark (2022 Remaster).flac
01 Court And Spark (2022 Remaster).lrc
I can use Action -> Replace with regular expression
Field: _FILENAME
Regular expression: \s(\d{4}\sremaster).lrc
Replace matches with: .lrc
And it yields
01 Court And Spark.lrc
as expected.
But that means that I have to redo the same steps that I use on the songs themselves on the lyrics separately. Depending on how complex the operation is that I use on the songs (for example if I split a multi CD album that was numbered from 1-70 into individual disks), that might be more time consuming than manually copying the names of the songs and pasting them to the .lrc files later on.
Is there no way to test if filename.flac == filename.lrc and if that's the case to link the .lrc file with the corresponding .flac file and to treat both exactly the same except for the extension in respect of renaming and moving?
It works for CDG files.
[2020-11-22] NEW: CDG files are now renamed with corresponding FLAC files.
If you look at other threads in the forum that deal with lyrics in flac files then it always circles around embedding the lyrics.
And that works.
So it is up to your workflow to either keep the external files and loose the link occasionally or embed the data and get the full support in MP3tag.
If you shorten that to
Action -> Replace with regular expression
Field: _FILENAME
Regular expression: \s(\d{4}\sremaster)
Replace matches with:
The it takes any filename and removes the string described by the pattern.
I noticed this some years ago and so I expect this behaviour.
I don't know if this behaviour is intential, but I have no problem with it and take it as it is.
I did not take it in account for your problem because you wrote folder and not files:
Thanks for the info. So the logic is already there.
I know that I could avoid the problem by embedding the lyrics but so far everything else in my workflow creates, reads from and writes to .lrc files instead of the LYRICS tag. I'd rather not have some semi-automatic lyrics plugin mess with my metadata. If it creates garbage lyrics I can search for .lrc, sort by creation time and simply delete the .lrc files. I like having them separate.
I noticed that as well. My bad for being inaccurate. Since I never added other files to the allowed list I never noticed a difference between dragging in the contents of a folder vs. the folder itself prior to yesterday.
Sure, but I still have to do it twice. Once for the metadata and once for the .lrc filename. I included the .lrc extension in my regular expression because there's no need to change the filename of the flac files. My tag-action removes that part of the title from the tag and once I run them through Convert -> Tag - Filename they end up with the correct new filename anyways.
If the regular expression does not find a match, it returns the input string.
If you modify your data with an action group you could call that modification with just a single step.
On a more philosophical side:
Separating data that really belongs together into several files proves to be a volatile step in the long run.
The forum is full of threads where pictures that have "always" been there, suddenly disappeared - because they were not embedded but files in the file system. And when the audio files got moved to different locations, the picture files usually stayed in the original place.
The same would apply to other files like e.g. the lyrics files.
The superior move for the covers is to embed them.
And I would think that the same applies to lyrics as well.
You can filter for files with lyrics,
you can sort by modification date.
And you don't have to leave MP3tag to delete the lyrics in a file when the lyrics are embedded in field.
OK. You know now the options that are currently available. It is up to you to adopt them or partially use them or cling to the customary workflow if you see too many obstacles for you.
Well I don't do that either. I like having high resolution artwork, often multiple MB per image and multiple images per album (cover, back, booklet etc.). My collection has 709.585 tracks currently. If I embedded the high resolution art into each song that would mean wasting literally hundreds of GBs of space (I know because I removed all the embedded artwork when I had around 250.000 songs and saved like 150GB with that step). I am extremely careful with my folder structure and ensure that all files that belong together, stay together.
I haven't had a major loss or misplacement of files in the >15 years I've been doing this. I'm well aware of the pros and cons of embedding files vs. keeping them separately.
My question was merely if it is possible to link flac + lrc if the filename is the same and to treat both equally in terms of moving/renaming which would make my workflow easier. I wasn't looking for information on how to embed them or whether or not it should be done. Which doesn't mean that I don't appreciate you sharing your knowledge.
As you pointed out that ought to be possible since it's already implemented for CDG files, but I guess only the dev can really answer my question.
