I’ve got about 30GB of music files sorted by genre: Rock, Pop, and Dance.
I just downloaded and started using Picard so that these many files can be changed to the [%artist% - %title%] format.
Everything I try to change in the settings results in these files being created in their own folder for [%artist%], subfolder for [%album%], and then being named with the track number and title.
My car stereo has a USB input. If the thumb drive has many folders, it takes 45 seconds or more for my stereo to read the drive whenever I plug it in or switch my source to it. If I can put 80,000 files into 10 folders, the stereo can read the thumb drive in about 3 seconds.
Q1. How do I get my music files to store in the same, flat directory?
The program ran through all of my files, but whenever I try to exit, Picard tells me “there are 854 unsaved files. Closing Picard will lose all unsaved changes.”
I have clicked Save on the toolbar and Save on the “File > Save” menu, but I still get this.
Q2. How do I save my files?
Check Picard’s settings. Under File naming, there are two check boxes: “Move files when saving” and “Rename files when saving”. The first option is self-explanatory. The second one has a box for configuring how files are saved. I don’t know what the default setting is (it may be configured for subfolders), but for your purposes, you can set its contents to %artist% - %title%
Make sure that all files you load in the left panel are matched to releases in the right panel (see the tutorial for details) and save the files by selecting all releases in the right panel and clicking “Save”.
That was the naming style I used last time. Maybe something messed up.
I’ll shut down Picard and launch it again.
What’s with the other fields that come as defaults in the [Name files like this] section?
- $if2 - is that like iff in VB where $if is the standard IF statement?
- $ne looks like Not Equal To?
- $gt would be Greater Than?
Pretty close?
The scripting functions are shown here, and the standard tags/variables are shown here. Hopefully that will help you get started.