Fun with mp3 tagging: A success story

[Eos]

Like most normal people, I fret if the case is not exactly correct on my song files. a, an, the, and, but, or, nor, for, yet, so, as, at, by, for, in, of, to, and from need to be lower case, unless at the start or end of a title.

I have Bulk Rename Utility, but I couldn't figure out how to achieve what I wanted, so I turned to Mp3Tag.

I did have to fix maybe 5% by hand, but these are unique cases. Compilations, etc.

Here's how I fixed every song. These five actions had to be run consecutively:

Action type: Replace with regular expression
Field: _TAG
Regular expression: ([-({\[\]}) _",./+&@:;*])(\l)
Replace matches with: $1$upper($2)
[x] case-sensitive comparison

Action type: Format value
Field: _FILENAME
Formatstring: $regexp(%_filename%,'([-({\[\]}) _",./+&@:;*])(\l)',$1\u$2)

Action type: Replace with regular expression
Field: _All
Regular expression: ^(\l)
Replace matches with: $upper($1)
[x] case-sensitive comparison

Action type: Replace with regular expression
Field: _ALL
Regular expression: (?<![/\-:;\(\)\[\]{}])\s(a|an|the|and|but|or|nor|for|yet|so|as|at|by|for|in|of|to|from)(?=\s)(?!\s[\-\(\)\[\]{}])
Replace matches with: $lower($0)
[ ] case-sensitive comparison

Action type: Replace with regular expression
Field: _ALL
Regular expression: (^|\s|\(|\[|/)'(.{1})
Replace matches with: $1'$upper($2)
[ ] case-sensitive comparison

 

[radhak]

That is interesting - so this MP3Tag allows search/replace with regular expressions? That should solve a bunch of my tagging issues... stuff that I gave up on believing not possible!

 

[Eos]

That is interesting - so this MP3Tag allows search/replace with regular expressions? That should solve a bunch of my tagging issues... stuff that I gave up on believing not possible!

Yeah, I was surprised as well. Bulk Rename Utility is easier to use, and covers 99.9% of cases, but this one was simply not possible with BRU.

Good luck!

 

[Hugh Jass]

Thanks for this...it will come in very handy for cleaning up the tags on my huge MP3 collection.

 

[JimKiler]

How To Geek just had a article on cleaning up MP3 tags, http://www.howtogeek.com/110642/what-you-said-how-you-organize-a-messy-music-collection/

This site always informs me about something new or not new but I never heard of.