Repository for cool file naming parameter strings (Page 1 of 4)

I decided to sticky this in case other people have good suggestions as well.

This is what I use right now.

$replace($left(%albumartist%,1)/%albumartist%/%album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) %title%,_,)

The results are...

In addition it also removes the underscores from filenames and folder structures. I added it because the Windows incompatible character replacement is underscore. It's not perfect of course, because obviously it will also remove underscores that for some reason need to be there. Can't think of any examples, but I'm sure there are some.

Hi iTor,
a little search in the forum ...
you find both informations you had asked for in this topic: http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?pid=3445

$left(%date%,4)
and for the same directory you use "."
cheers

Required Plugins
Disc Numbers
Bonus Disc

TaggerScript

$if($eq(%album%,[non-album tracks]),$set(tracknumber,0) $set(totaltracks,0))
$if($ne(%album%,[non-album tracks]),$if(%discnumber%,$noop(.),$set(discnumber,1) $set(totaldiscs,1)))
$if($eq(%releasetype%,soundtrack),$set(genre,Soundtrack))
$if($eq($right(%subtitle%,8),Last.fm),$unset(subtitle)$unset(comment:))

File naming format

$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/$if($ne(%album%,[non-album tracks]),%album%/)$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),$if(%discsubtitle%,$num(%discnumber%,2) %discsubtitle%,Disc %discnumber% of %totaldiscs%)/)$if(%bonusdiscs%,Bonus$if(%discsubtitle%, %discsubtitle%)/)$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %artist% - %album% - %title%

Notes
You will still have to set the totaldiscs variable yourself, but you can select all the the tracks and set them all at the same time, so it is not so bad.

Results

Beangrowers/Not in a Million Lovers/01 - Beangrowers - Not in a Million Lovers - Quaint Affair.mp3
Red Hot Chili Peppers/Stadium Arcadium/02 Mars/02 - Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium - Tell Me Baby.mp3
Loreena McKennitt/Live in Paris and Toronto/Disc 1 of 2/04 - Loreena McKennitt - Live in Paris and Toronto - Marco Polo.mp3
Various Artists/Brother Bear/01 - Phil Collins - Brother Bear - Look Through My Eyes.mp3

A better way to remove "The " or move it to the end would be to use MB's sort names; %albumartistsort% and %artistsort%.

It would of course change "Nick Cave" to be filed under "Cave, Nick" unless you added a "$if($eq($left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),4),The ), .....) type of condition though.

Hi folks,

I've taken some of your ideas and customised them for my own purposes and, for the most part, it works great. One thing I can't seem to get to work quite right is the $replace() function. I'd like to get rid of any and all underscores that get introduced into the folder and file names. This works in all cases except for when a folder name ends in a period (.) that gets automatically replaced with an underscore. The $replace() function doesn't seem to recognise this underscore. How can I make sure it replaces this underscore along with all the others?

Here is my code:
File Naming Format

$replace($if($eq($left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),4),The ),[-=$left($right($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),$sub($len($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)),4)),1)=-],[-=$left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),1)=-])/$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/$if(%date%,[$left(%date%,4)] )%album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%,_,)

Multiple Artist file naming format

$replace($if($eq(%albumartist%,Various Artists),[~Various Artists~]/,$if($eq($left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),4),The ),[-=$left($right($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),$sub($len($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)),4)),1)=-],[-=$left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),1)=-])/$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/$if($ne(%albumartist%,Various Artists),$if(%date%,[$left(%date%,4)] )))%album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %artist% - %title%,_,)

Preview Results
File name:
C:\My Downloads\NewlyTagged\[-=B=-]\The Beatles\[1965] Help!\07 - Ticket to Ride.mp3
Multiple artist file name:
C:\My Downloads\NewlyTagged\[~Various Artists~]\Explosive Doowops, Volume 4\05 - The Fantasys - Why Oh Why.mp3

For example, for the artist W.A.S.P. the folder's name would come out as "W.A.S.P_" instead of the "W.A.S.P." or "W.A.S.P" formats that I'd prefer. Same with Andrew W.K. or Big Wreck's In Loving Memory of... album which gets written as "In Loving Memory of.._" Worse, Sixx:A.M. comes out as "Sixx_A.M_" -- Argh!

I'd appreciate any feedback you can provide. Thanks!

Edit: Added the Picard preview results for my code

UllicPendragon: I had a look, the trailing period gets replaced only on windows, as it seems to make problems there. This replacement happens after the scripting was applied to the filename. The only thing you can do about this is replacing the trailing period yourself with something you prefer. You might want to use the $rreplace(text,pattern,replace) function, with a pattern like "\.$" for this. See http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/PicardScripting for details.

Or you could disable the "replace unsafe characters" option in Picard, this will disable the replacement, too.

The backslash and dollar sign are special character in tagger script and must be escaped, so $rreplace(%album%,\\.+\$,) should remove all trailing periods from the name.

I suggest moving further discussion to a separate thread, as this is rather off-topic here.

UllicPendragon (and everyone else in this thread), thank you so much for sharing your code! This is a mod of the Single Artist File Naming Format code posted above by UllicPendragon.

For personal preference, when moving files, I wanted the folders named slightly differently than what was posted above:
1. I wanted the "Artist's Name" folder to be the first in the folder tree, and do away with the first-letter-of-the-artist's-name folder.
2. I didn't want the year to appear in the Album Name folder

Thus, I just deleted the parts of the code I didn't want, so all the credit for this code goes to UllicPendragon, and the only reason I'm posting this is just in case anyone else whose as clueless as I am wanted a copy/paste solution for this particular modification since this seemed to work for me.

$replace($if($eq($left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),4),The ),)/$rreplace($replace($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),...,…),\\.\$,$noop(.))/$rreplace($replace(%album%,...,…),\\.\$,$noop(.))/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - $replace(%title%,...,…),_,$noop(.))

Example folder structure before:
[-=B=-]\The Beatles\[1965] Help!\07 - Ticket To Ride.mp3

Example folder structure after:
The Beatles\Help!\07 - Ticket To Ride.mp3

Hope it works!

A friend asked me about adding the genre to the file naming format, so I did some web searches and tests.

You have to enable the “Use folksonomy tags as genre” option on the “Metadata” tab in the Picard Options window. That option does two things: 1) tells Picard to actually tag the files with the “folksonomy” tags in the MusicBrainz database. 2) tells Picard to use the folksonomy tags when moving/renaming files where %genre% appears. The folksonomy tagging system is like the tagging system used at Last.fm, where a single song can have multiple tags. When you use %genre% in Picard, it takes all of those tags and builds one string with all of the tags separated by semi-colons. For example, one I got was “Usa; Electronic; Disco-Punk; Dance-Punk; Dance And Electronica”.

If you have already tagged a bunch of folders with Picard, then they will need to be re-tagged by Picard in order to use genre, but the files will already be identified, so it’s no extra work for you. You will, however, see the asterisk in the Title column on the right-hand pane, indicating that Picard has some information the file doesn’t have, and that that information will be added to the file when you click “Save”.

One drawback of using %genre% is that many files don’t have tags in the MusicBrainz database (I know, we should all go in and add tags when we see that). If you simply put %genre%/ at the beginning of your file naming string, indicating that you want the first folder to be the genre, followed by sub-folders for artist name or whatever, Picard will use the tags for any files that have them, but for files that don’t have the tags, it will put the artist folder in the root folder along with all of the genre folders, so you will end up with folders like “Trip-Hop; Electronic” and “The Beatles” in the same root folder. I figure it would be preferable to have something like a “No Genre Information” folder for the files that don’t have tags. You can do that using Picard scripting; it looks like this: $if2(%genre%,No Genre Information)/

So, here are my modified file naming formats that include genre information:

File naming format:
$if2(%genre%,No Genre Information)/$if($eq($left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),4),The ),$left($right($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),$sub($len($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)),4)),1),$left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),1))/$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/$if(%date%,$left(%date%,4) -- )%album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2). %title%

Muliple artist file naming format:
$if2(%genre%,No Genre Information)/$if($eq($left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),4),The ),$left($right($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),$sub($len($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)),4)),1),$left($if2(%albumartist%,%artist%),1))/$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/$if(%date%,$left(%date%,4) -- )%album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2). %artist% - %title%

Here are the previews in Picard:

File name:
E:\Music\Picarded\No Genre Information\B\The Beatles\1965 -- Help!\07. Ticket to Ride.mp3
Multiple artist file name:
E:\Music\Picarded\No Genre Information\V\Various Artists\1999 -- Explosive Doowops, Volume 4\05. The Fantasys - Why  Oh Why .mp3

I don’t know what would happen with multiple artist albums. I haven’t tried tagging any.

Hello,
I'm trying to switch to picard from easytag.
Is there a way to convert: "The Beatles" to "Beatles, The" ?
Thanks

I have this now:

$if2(%albumartist%,%artistsort%) - [$left(%date%,4)] %album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%

But the preview still shows:
/Mp3/The Beatles - [1965] Help!/07 - Ticket to ride.mp3

I want it to look:
/Mp3/Beatles, The - [1965] Help!/07 - Ticket to ride.mp3

But I don't want "Cave, Nick" as said previously, only artists with "The".

ok, thanks!! that works.
and sorry for hijacking, I thought it was somehow related to this thread.