I just put together a plugin for Picard that adds a new $writeline() scripting function to allow the user to write lines of text to a specified output file. Before I submit this to the official list of Picard Plugins, I’m hoping that a few of you might give it a try and let me know if it’s working okay and if you have any suggestions for improvements. The current working version can be downloaded from my Picard Plugins repository on GitHub. The preliminary documentation follows…
EDIT: Added additional $sanitize_text() function.
File Writer [Download]
Overview
This plugin adds scripting functions to allow writing text to an output file, and sanitizing text to ensure that it is suitable for use in a file path.
Usage: $writeline(file,text[,reset])
This will write text (followed by a newline) to file. The text will be appended to the file unless reset is set, in which case the file will be overwritten. If the destination file path is not specified as an absolute path to the destination file (beginning with a Windows drive letter and colon or path separator), then the path will be considered relative to the Destination directory specified in Picard’s File Naming Options settings. If the target path does not exist, it will be created automatically.
NOTE: The text will be written to the file with a character encoding of UTF-8.
Usage: $sanitize_text(text)
This will return a sanitized version of text suitable for use in a file path, including applying the Replace non-ASCII characters, Windows compatibility and Replace directory separators with settings specified in Picard’s File Naming Compatibility settings.
NOTE: It is strongly recommended to use the $sanitize_text() function on all tags used in defining the file path used in the $writeline() function to avoid inconsistencies that might occur due to a tag including a directory separator (/) or incompatible characters.
Examples
Example 1
The following will write a text file containing a list of all the tracks on an album. The file name will be in the form “AlbumArtist - Album” and will be written in the main output directory.
$set(_reset,$if($and($lt(%discnumber%,2),$lt(%tracknumber%,2)),1,))
$set(_filename,$sanitize_text(%albumartist% - %album%))
$writeline(%_filename%,$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1)$num(%discnumber%,2)-)$num(%tracknumber%,2) %title%,%_reset%)
Example 2
Similar to Example 1, the following will write a text file containing a list of all the tracks on an album. The file name will be in the form “AlbumArtist - Album” and will be written in a separate Windows directory called C:\Albums.
$set(_reset,$if($and($lt(%discnumber%,2),$lt(%tracknumber%,2)),1,))
$set(_filename,$sanitize_text(%albumartist% - %album%))
$writeline(C:\\Albums\\%_filename%,$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),$num(%discnumber%,2)-)$num(%tracknumber%,2) %title%,%_reset%)
Example 3
The following will keep a log of all albums processed. The file will be written to the /var/log/PicardProcessing file on a Linux system. Note that this should be added to the file renaming script so that the log entry is only written when the release is saved.
$if($and($lt(%discnumber%,2),$lt(%tracknumber%,2)),
$writeline(/var/log/PicardProcessing,$datetime(): %musicbrainz_albumid% : %albumartist% - %album%)
)