How do I do this (renaming lots of MP3 files)?

Phantasee · Post by **Phantasee** » 2008-03-21 08:52pm

How would I rename a large number of MP3 files, specifically, changing square brackets "[ ]" to round brackets "( )" in the title tag (ID3)?

I hear there's such a thing as a batch file that does this quickly, but I don't know how to do something like this. Any help?

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2008-03-22 12:32am

http://easytag.sourceforge.net/ , or for autotagging , http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger

TithonusSyndrome · Post by **TithonusSyndrome** » 2008-03-22 12:34am

The Godfather has served me well.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2008-03-22 12:40am

The nice thing about picard is it'll fingerprint and look up the song in a database. The problem is older versions on Linux liked to crash a lot (apparently they rewrote it, unfortunately with QT which makes it look inconsistent w/ my GNOME mostly-GTK-only desktop, but I use it infrequently enough that the eyesore is acceptable).

Phantasee · Post by **Phantasee** » 2008-03-22 07:05pm

Hrm... Okay, they all look pretty nifty, except that I don't want to rename the files themselves, just the ID3 tags for the title. Sort of like, using Find/Replace in MS Word to change all '[' for '(', and the same for closing brackets. I have something like 300 songs to do this to, right now. Does the Godfather or Picard do that?

All my music is organized by iTunes so I can put it on my iPod easily, so the file name will reflect the ID3 tag.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2008-03-22 08:08pm

Pu-239 wrote:The nice thing about picard is it'll fingerprint and look up the song in a database. The problem is older versions on Linux liked to crash a lot (apparently they rewrote it, unfortunately with QT which makes it look inconsistent w/ my GNOME mostly-GTK-only desktop, but I use it infrequently enough that the eyesore is acceptable).

Is there a way to force it to fingerprint the FILE, and ignore the tags? I found the lookup totally useless if any tag fields 'disagree' with what it really is (and what it finds in the db).

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2008-03-22 10:38pm

Phantasee wrote:Hrm... Okay, they all look pretty nifty, except that I don't want to rename the files themselves, just the ID3 tags for the title. Sort of like, using Find/Replace in MS Word to change all '[' for '(', and the same for closing brackets. I have something like 300 songs to do this to, right now. Does the Godfather or Picard do that?

All my music is organized by iTunes so I can put it on my iPod easily, so the file name will reflect the ID3 tag.

Bam.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2008-03-23 03:31am

Stark wrote:
Pu-239 wrote:The nice thing about picard is it'll fingerprint and look up the song in a database. The problem is older versions on Linux liked to crash a lot (apparently they rewrote it, unfortunately with QT which makes it look inconsistent w/ my GNOME mostly-GTK-only desktop, but I use it infrequently enough that the eyesore is acceptable).
Is there a way to force it to fingerprint the FILE, and ignore the tags? I found the lookup totally useless if any tag fields 'disagree' with what it really is (and what it finds in the db).

[EDIT]

Just set minimal similary for file and cluster lookups to 0 or something under options->advanced->matching. I'd be careful about this though to avoid false matches (haven't had any w/ just PUIDs matching, but I've done more with name matches which have mismatched).
[/edit]

And Phantasee, yeah, I don't think picard allows you to custom modify what's in the tags outside of what's listed in the DB, unless you manually edit which defeats the purpose. Easytag does that though, under scanner->process fields. I don't see the point though, consistency of tagging with what most people tag it with is a good thing.