Slashes, Underscores and Dots

Not currently possible specifically for slashes AFAIK; see http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=1319

You could remove/replace all underscores with .s though (including legitimate underscores in names/titles); which is what most people seem to be doing at http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=514

Is that only a problem when moving files? If so, there may be a workaround. Add a replace on underscore and don't auto-move the files when renaming. Doing that, I can replace anything and it works fine. When moving, success varies. Isn't it the backslash that has problems then? Anyway, here's my naming strings if you want to give them a try.

File: (note it's all one line, no line breaks)
$if2(%artist%,%albumartist%)\\\\($left(%date%,4)\) $replace($replace($replace($replace(%album%,?,),/,-),_,),:, -)\\$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),%discnumber%.)$if(%tracknumber%,$num(%tracknumber%,2).,) $replace($replace($replace($replace($replace(%artist% - %title%,?,),/,-),_,-),*,x),:, -)
When moving it creates this structure: Artist\(date) AlbumCD.Track. Artist - Title (Subtitle) [remix].ext
Ex: Kelani\(1996) Firesprung\1.01. Kelani - Intro.mp3

When just renaming it does this:

1.01 Kelani - Intro.mp3

Multiple Artist:
$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)\\\\($left(%date%,4)\) $replace($replace($replace($replace(%album%,?,),/,-),_,),:, -)\\$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),%discnumber%.)$if(%tracknumber%,$num(%tracknumber%,2).,) $replace($replace($replace($replace($if2(%artist%,%albumartist%) - %title%,?,),_,),*,x),:, -)
Same thing, just checks albumartist first.

I just tested it on a song I named and saved in Picard:

Artist: AC/DC AC\DC?
Title: ABC\DEF/GHI?
Track: 1
File was renamed to:
01. AC-DC AC-DC - Blue-Red-Yawn.mp3

Yeah, I know how you feel. It definitely is a pile 'o script in such a tiny box. :)  We basically have the same format with the date moved and a few other minor differences, so it's just a matter of moving stuff around.

The underscore and other replacement happens inside all those $replace($replace($replace($replace statements. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way in Picard to condense it into one $replace() It can be done, just not sure about in Picard. For some reason, I had the replacements duplicated in there. No idea why. Sleep deprivation, probably. No matter, I'll rewrite it to match what you wanted.

[elapse 10 mins]

OK. Try this:

Single Artist:

$replace($replace($replace($replace($replace($if2(%artist%,%albumartist%)\\$if2(%artist%,%albumartist%) - %album% [$left(%date%,4)]\\$num(%tracknumber%,2) $if2(%artist%,%albumartist%) - %title%,?,),/,-),_, ),*,x),:, -)

Various Artists:
Only one difference: $if2(%artist%,%albumartist%) is changed to $if2(%albumartist%,%artist%) in both places it's used.  So:

$replace($replace($replace($replace($replace($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)\\$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%) - %album% [$left(%date%,4)]\\$num(%tracknumber%,2) $if2(%artist%,%albumartist%) - %title%,?,),/,-),_, ),*,x),:, -)

Output: F:\mp3\scrounged\The Beatles\The Beatles - Help! [1965]\07 The Beatles - Ticket to Ride.mp3

This one does the following replacements:

?  to  <nothing> 
_  to  <space>   
*  to  x    (To note unreleased/demo tracks: 01. SomeBand - SuperSecret Track [x].mp3  )
:  to  <space>-
/  to -
In my version I had underscores replaced by nothing, to help avoid double spaces, but I changed it for ya.

If you want to alter any of the replacements, just look for the character,replacement) at the end of the string: ,?,),/,-),_, ),*,x),:, -) 

Each $replace( has one ,foo,bar) and that's where they do their magic...one at a time.

If you want to add more replaces, just add a $replace( somewhere with the others, and add the replacement stuff at the end of the string:

$replace($replace($replace($replace($replace(blahblahblah %title%,?,),_, ),*,x),:, -)!!!,!)

(That'd replace !!! with !)

Anyway, it worked for me. Hopefully it should work for you as well. Let me know if not. :)

Kel

Kelani, I can't thank you enough, it's formatting the albums perfectly now, just the way I want it :D

You're a forum superstar :)

edit: only issue I have now is that some albums have the wrong date in musicbrainz i.e. Diana Ross & The Supremes - The No. 1's was released in 2004 but it replaces it with 1965!  This also happened on Aretha Franklins greatest hits, replaced a 200x release date with a date a couple of decades ago.

I'm using the lastfmplus, with the default settings.  Just installed it and hit "reload defaults" and that's it.

To step back a bit - it's worth noting that using the lastfmplus script to set original release year completely circumvents MB's data and is not a properly supported mechanism to use MB's data set. The data for that doesn't even come from MB, so if you get bad results, I'm not surprised at all. I think most of us are aware of how crap Last.fm's objective data is.

But I'm also confused by zan5hin's complaint. If you have a Supremes compilation and you're complaining that the year isn't "2004" then it means that you don't actually want "Original release date" in your tags; you want the actual release date, which is what MB stores. THe "original" release year of the tracks on such a compilation is obviously the 60s.

So perhaps the problem is actually that you don't seem to be able to control this lastfmplus behaviour to disable the setting of originalyear/originaldate?

I've just played around with lastfmplus and have replicated what has happened - I'm still not sure it's behaving as expected; only RifRaf would know, probably. I can see that it's changing the date to 1965 on all tracks; I've have expected the original year to be different for each track, given it's a compilation but for it to not have changed the true release date as well as the original year. Hmm.

Anyway, if you don't want the dates mucked around with from the lastfmplus plugin, remove all the the filter entries from the plugin options > Tag Filter Lists > original year tags box. That should stop it from interpreting any last.fm tags as dates; thus stopping it overriding MB's data.

There are a couple of saliant points here:

1) Picard doesn't contain the logic, across ID3 versions to write the tag, AFAIK. That's why RifRaf has to hack it with the special ~ID3:TDOR tag, rather than relying on an internal metadata value.

2) The reason Picard has never really supported this is that MusicBrainz itself cannot currently supply the data reliably. While tracks and releases can be linked in MB to their earliest releases; to link and maintain the data currently is unscalable, unwieldy and too time consuming for all but the most fanatic editor, so there are probably all of about 5 releases in MB linked correctly. To provide this data accurately and efficiently and on a wider scale requires a different database structure (which the long heralded "NGS" will hopefully provide).

Now that MB has release groups (as of May 2009), it'd be possible to get this data from MB for re-releases of albums. It'd be possible to code a plugin that finds the earliest release of an album inside the same RG and takes the date of that. But it wouldn't really work at the track level for compilations.

Sure, but I don't think the regular "date" metadata should be changed by the plugin, which it is in the above case. I think the originaldata from last.fm should always just be in the additional oridinaldate/TDOR field.

I'd have thought it'd just take the top tag from the "original year" filter list for each track individually (assuming you have "use track tags" enabled) but I concede I haven't spent a lot of time with the plugin.

You're still going to be using a match on the artist/track name to do that which would be difficult. If you're thinking about doing that, IMO you'd probably be better to try and write a plugin to query MusicBrainz's web service itself. It's not that MB doesn't have original data (often); its just that the track<->track links aren't there for it to be reliably retrieved from later releases.

Yes, I specifically referred to this here.

I believe the coded logic of Picard is this.

1) Retrieve metadata fields from MB server
2) Build up ID3/WM/etc tags
3) save tags to file
4) Prepare for file renaming. Replace all / or \ from tag variables with _ to be used in file rename string.
5) Insert variables into String
6) Evaluate tagger script
7) Split result into directories/files as appropriate

It must do the replacement of the slashes before inserting variables into the String currently because otherwise it would not know which /es are intended as folders/directories and which are part of metadata. There is no way this can be changed except by changing the code.

That's why I say that you must replace all _ with some other character. By the time #6 is done, there are no /s left in your metadata for it to replace; they have already been converted to underscores. So you can replace all of the underscores.