I LOVE THIS PROGRAM. It's rekindled my enjoyment of music.
Some of my tags use characters that are forbidden in filenames. This file, for example, uses a colon and a slash in two of its tags:
Artist: Star Wars Title: The Desert / The Robot Auction Album: Episode IV: A New Hope Track: 04 Year: 1977
When using the "Tag - Filename" command, I get a filename that looks like this: Star Wars _ Episode IV A New Hope _ 04 _ 1977 _ The Desert The Robot Auction.mp3
It replaces the colon found in the Album tag and the slashes found in the Title tag with double-spaces.
Is it possible to get the program to substitute a " : " with a " - " and a " / " with a "+" when using the "Tag - Filename" command?
Desired Filename: Star Wars _ Episode IV - A New Hope _ 04 _ 1977 _ The Desert + The Robot Auction.mp3
You could enclose the whole expression that you normaly use in Converter>Tag-Filename into the scripting command $replace()
Like $replace(%artist% _ %album% _ $num(%track%,2) _ %year% _ %title%,:,-,/,+)
But how will you difference later on a real + from a substitute one when seeing such sign in FILENAME?
Or if you catastrophically loose your TITLEs - how will you properly recreate them form FILENAMEs when they will have multiple occurrences of - sign, each possibly meaning something else?
Hey there. The conclusion I arrived at was to assign substitute characters for each illegal character. Prior to this, I wrote a bunch of rules for how songs are to be titled, so I don't expect too much issue. I'm on the last leg of re-cataloging 12,000 songs and I haven't found anything glaring. Here's what I'm doing:
(in tag) becomes (in filename)
: becomes ~
/ becomes +
? becomes ^
My Tag - Filename code looks like this: $replace(%albumartist% _ %album% _ $num(%track%,2) _ %year% _ %title%,:,~,/,+,?,^)
Some examples:
Artist: Star Wars Album: Episode IV: A New Hope Track: 04 Year: 1977 Song: The Desert / The Robot Auction Filename: Star Wars _ Episode IV~ A New Hope _ 04 _ 1977 _ The Desert + The Robot Auction.mp3
Artist: AC/DC Album: Live [Deluxe] Track: 105 (I use "100s" to note disc number on multi-disc albums) Year (in this case, of performance rather than publication: 1991 Song: Who Made Who? [Live] (performance date) [performance venue] Filename: AC+DC _ Live [Deluxe] [Live] _ 105 _ 1991 _ Who Made Who^ [Live] (1991-08-23) [Birmingham N.E.C.].mp3
The only thing I'm at risk of losing is my comment info, which contains precise live performance info (date, location, venue, festival name). I need to find a way to output that.
I have pretty much the same approach - but just different replacement signs
I chose mine on the basis that I have not seen them in titles and band names and are accessible from keyboard. But of course I had to adjust and unify all naming scheme so that system would not brake upon encountering some very rare cases; and more than once had to adjust parts of it