Renaming string

[faedrus]

Hey all, I’m trying to get a maximum-flexibility renaming script set up before tackling a large (huge?) music collection. The collection is predominantly oriented towards original release albums, but includes enough oddball stuff that I can’t rely on that assumption.

As a basis, I like the script tincanfury made ala celes, last year:
http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?pid=31986#p31986

however, there are a couple things it does which I dislike, and I find it absolutely bewildering to edit. Any change I seem to make has either no effect, or somehow invalidates the whole string.

The string is creating separate folders for each artist, but only under certain circumstances. So, for example:

1. the 2Pac album “Greatest Hits” (1998) is identified properly as a 2Pac album, and placed in Pac’s folder; similarly, “Still I Rise” (1999) is identified as 2Pac & Outlawz, and given it’s own folder.
2. the compilation album “In His Own Words” (1998) is identified as having 12 tracks by Pac, which are dropped in his folder; but the tracks by Outlawz are placed seperately in their folder, and same for Naughty by Nature and Trapp;
3. the compilation album “Rose That Grew From Concrete” (2000) is identified as a Various Artists album, and placed in it’s totality there

Point 2) is the thing I’m most worried about right now; ideally, any folders containing actual tracks would contain the entirety of the album (insofar as the album is complete in the collection).

My pipe dream is to be able to feed an iTunes-style folder structure in to Picard, and have it shift the files about such that the folder structure afterwards respected album completeness.

Any suggestions for me?

[outsidecontext]

First thing is that I would suggest you think about if you really need a script as complex as celes’. If you find yourself struggling with making any changes to it you will probably not be very happy in the long run. If you can explain what you actually require and how you want your file naming to work we can probably assist you in creating a script that does just what you want and which you actually understand and can edit yourself.

@faedrus

2. the compilation album “In His Own Words” (1998) is identified as having 12 tracks by Pac, which are dropped in his folder; but the tracks by Outlawz are placed seperately in their folder, and same for Naughty by Nature and Trapp;

Looks like the script does not deal with albums like In His Own Words which have a proper release artist but contain tracks by other artists. To keep releases together the variable %albumartist% should be used instead of %artist% for folder names, maybe check how the script makes use of this.

Sorry that this is probably not the answer you expected, but I won’t dig through this IMHO overly complex script to do any changes.

[Rovastar]

I agree this is a complex script and it sounds like the behavior you desire is actually fairly far off what you desire.
Giving example of what you want (and if you can link to actual releases the Musicbrainz all the better) often a more simple script is require rather than the complex (or even over-engineered) ones.