Adjust Naming Structure

MusicBrainz Picard
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1

I’ve completely got my files all sorted the way I thought I wanted, but now have a tweak I’d like to make. Is there a way in MBP to make such an adjustment without manually clustering/scanning/etc?

The change I had in mind is:
My current naming structure used:
%albumartist%/%date%/%album%/%artist% - %title%

But that doesn’t provide useful information if I look in an artist’s directory, just a list of dates. So I was thinking:
%albumartist%/%date% - %album%/%artist% - %title%
or maybe use the square brackets I see used a lot:
%albumartist%/[%date%] %album%/%artist% - %title%

I’m assuming this won’t upset my player software (My Media and Alexa) as they should work purely on whats in the file tags.

So the change I want to make requires no changes to files/tags, just the naming of directories.

Thanks for any suggestions/input :slight_smile:

2

By default Picard will write the MusicBrainz IDs to the files and if you load already tagged files into Picard again it will automatically load the corresponding releases and match the files. Make sure you do not have the option to ignore existing MB IDs activated (it’s a checkbox in the general options that must not be checked).

This way you can easily apply tag changes and renaming. If you know you don’t want to update the tags and just rename just disable the"Write tags to files" option. This way the tags will not be written, which also saves some time when saving. Moving and renaming files needs to be active of course.

2 Likes
3

Many thanks :smiley: