File renaming of MP3

Question

I have a huge music collection and a good majority of it is Billboards Top 100. The Tags on the files are incorrect and the file names are similar.

• 15-Kay_Kyser-Woody_Woodpecker.mp3
• T#-Artist_Name-Song_Name.mp3

What would be the best way to rename the files so they would be like this:

• Artist - Title.mp3

I'd rather not do this by hand because each CD, as the name indicates, has 100 tracks and I have about 5 or 6 of the CDs.

I have tried using MediaMonkey but the software insists on trying to retag the files as if the song was performed by Kay Starr (no idea who that is) or 3 Doors Down.

This is extremely annoying as you would imagine.

Any ideas??

Answer 1

Try MP3Tag. It is free and allows you to set the tags from the filename.

For your example, you would select all of the songs and use the 'Filename-Tag' command. Enter '%track%-%artist%-%title%' and click OK. This will fill in the track, artist and title tags with the correct information. The album and other tags can be entered manually once per set of selected files. You could then use the 'Tag-Filename' command to rename the files if you needed to using a similar method.

You can also download album information including cover art for most CDs.

To remove the extra underscores ('') from the names, you could use a bulk file renaming utility such as Bulk Rename Utility. You will want to remove the underscores from the file names before you import the tag information. Browse to the directory where the files are. Under the 'Repl. (3) section, enter '' (without the quotes) in the Replace text box and a single space in the With text box. Select the files you wish to rename (the New Name column will show you a preview of the new file names). Click the Rename button in the lower right corner of the form. Now all of your file names will be free of those pesky underscores.

Answer 2

I've been using EasyTag for several years now. It can work on single files or batch process files. It is an FOSS project hosted at SourceForge, and is available as source and prebuilt for some platforms (Windows & Linux).

One of the features I really like is that it can auto-tag files based on a set of rules. For instance, if you keep your music directories/named in a specific way, it can extra from that and rename stuff.

For example, I name/organize my music in a form "//-". I can tell EasyTag to update the info based on the form I choose. So if I have "Sting/All This Time/08-Dienda.mp3", it would tag the file as Artist: Sting, Album: All This Time, Song: Dienda, Track:8.

Similarly, EasyTag can also rename/move your files by applying the reverse process. If I just had the file 08-Dienda.mp3 sitting in a directory and properly tagged, it would create the subdirectories Sting and Sting/All This Time and move the file there. I often use this feature when my wife purchases MP3. First I properly tag it, then I have it moved into the correct directory.