Hello,
I was a little picky about the song and album titles of my whole library (27,000 songs)
What I did was to find & replace apostrophes, brackets etc. with more proper ones.
So as an example,
Thru’ These Architect’s Eyes → Through These Architect’s Eyes
Po’ Boy → Poor Boy
Livin’ On A Prayer → Living On A Prayer
Prayer '94 → Living On A Prayer (1994 Version)
Susie & Jeffrey → Susie And Jeffrey
Untitled #1 → Untitled No. 1
Plus I removed all the commas, question marks etc.
(Album) Bigger, Better, Faster, More! → Bigger Better Faster More
It was fun for a while but it’s hell when it comes to syncing it with Apple Music Cloud Library etc.
I know auto-tagging the whole library is a bad idea
But in my case, all the albums have at least one non-modified song plus every album title is somewhat matching
What I’m trying to is to make it modify just the song titles according to the album/folder name (so no Acoustic ID etc.)
And for the album titles, find the closest one and then modify.
OR
Plex does autotagging quite well, is there any chance of making it write the metadata into the file?
You would keep the files loaded into Picard in the left pane of unmatched files and use Tags From File Names to only update the album and title tag. Afterwards the metadata view at the bottom would show whether the tags changed or not. You can then save the files. I’d recommend to disable “Rename Files” and “Move Files” disabled in Options, and just enable “Save Metadata”.
Whatever you do, please have a backup of the files and test with a handful of files first to see how it goes before mass changing the entire library.
As an alternative MP3Tag offers similar functionality. Though you’d have to ask someone else on how to use it, I don’t know MP3Tag that well
If all that is being attempted is copy Filename => Tags on a pattern without touching any other tags. Then yes, MP3TAG is good at this as you can describe your own filename pattern to decode.
Well, it’s not as simple as changing the titles according to the filename.
I’m trying to make it grab the folder name as the album title and retag the titles according to the online database, my filenames are changed as well.
Nearly all the albums are original masters but some are reissues or contain Japan extra tracks, even unofficial Chinese bootlegs woth extra tracks
e.g.
Music/Morrissey/Your Arsenal (2014 Reissue)
I have ripped the DVD as a second disc.
It doesn’t really has to know it is exactly the 2014 release with the DVD. I mean if it can, that’s great but I’m not sure it can get along with my titling patterns (Unofficial Chinese Release, 2004 DVD Release, Japanese Fan Club Pressing etc)
But it should at least know that Sister “I Am” A Poet (Live) has a close match, Sister “I’m” A Poet (Live) in one of the releases (Or from the pool of all the songs combined from any of the Your Arsenal releases) and modify that.
I mean it should only use the track title / file name to take a clue, and the folder name to filter or limit the matching track titles. It shouldn’t completely rewrite the titles according to album’s track ordering and modify the songs that it can’t take the clue.
I know that’s a lot to ask for, and I’m a little hopeless at this point
Basically that is what Picard does if you use the Cluster → Lookup workflow. Clustering groups the files together based on the “album” tag (and to a lesser degree also albumartist / artist tag) into what Picard thinks are files from one album. Lookup on a cluster searches for releases that match by album title, album artist and track count.
Depending on whether your folder names or the album tag in the files offers the better title you can combine this with Tags From File Names as described above. So when you want to use the folder name for the lookup run Tags From File Names to set the album tag from parent folder. Then cluster the files and run lookup on the clusters.
The above assumes you are tagging complete albums. If you only have individual files you would need to skip the clustering part and run the lookup directly on the files.
Also you can tweak the results with the options in Metadata > Preferred Releases, e.g. to prefer albums and singles over compilations. This is taken into account if more then one release is found with matching tracks.
Thank you, right now I am trying the AcoustIc option while preserving everything except the track titles. It seems to be working fine. Then I will take a look into the method you’ve written for the album titles as they’re a little different too
