How to Save File Names with Album Artist vs Who Performed

MusicBrainz Picard
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I noticed that when Picard saves the filenames, it saves it as who performed the song (not to be confused with who it featured)… One example is Pearl Jam who has a few demos out and went previously by the name of Mookie Blalock. I want it to save it as Pearl Jam throughout the whole album. So is there a way to change this with a plugin? Or a setting in Picard?

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Try substituting %artist% in your file naming script with %albumartist%.

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Ok I’ll try that now…

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Thanks a ton. It worked… I have one more issue. Do you know how to get the band names to show up all the same? For example. there may be an album under the smashing pumpkins and another one under smashing pumpkins. Do you know how I can go about changing everything from that artist to what I want? Either within Picard or outside the program?

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I just realized that changed the name to what I wanted but in tag, it didn’t change the name under Artist sort, artists, or under contributing artists as is shown under the band name in Windows explorer.

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I don’t think Windows Explorer understands album artist. You could try with $set(artist,%albumartist%) under Advanced > Scripting in Picard’s options. Here is some information on scripting with Picard.

There is also an option in Picard under Metadata to use standardized artist names.

By the way, the documentation isn’t clear (at least to me) when to use %’s around and when not to. Could someone clarify that? For example I’m not sure if my above example is correct.

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As an aside, if you want to get very specific about your tags/really care about them, i would try using something like foobar2000 to browse your music and pretty much ignore the file browser. Then you’re not butchering ‘correct’ tags to try and force another program to display display things correctly.

Especially if you’re tagging a large collection, this is a good time to try out some new approaches before spending too much time on everything.

But it doesn’t really matter, you can always retag everything quickly with Picard if you change your mind/settings later! :slight_smile:

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