blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

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nikos
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blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by nikos »

here's the comment area for today's blog post found at
https://www.zabkat.com/blog/change-mp3-year.htm
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by dunno »

I use Mp3Tag and Foobar for tidying and mass renaming of ID3 metadata for my entire music collection, 32GB, and I have never had a issue with a tag being uneditable. Foobar I use to add Replaygain info to all my music.
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by nikos »

if you have a specialty tool, chances are it uses its own editing methods
so can they change e.g. a YEAR relative to its present value?
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by dunno »

nikos wrote: 2021 Oct 26, 05:12 so can they change e.g. a YEAR relative to its present value?
Not quite sure what you mean by that.

There are two ways of viewing music, Directory/folder view and by Metadata. Folder/directory title can be different to whats stored in the metadata. When using a dedicated Metadata editor the option exists to copy Metadata Artist - Album as Directory/folder name, up to user, there are many ways to tag one's music, depends on preference, decide on what you like and aplly to all. It takes a lot of time to fix crappy Metdata but worth it.

Folder/directory view; The Rolling Wheels - Best of (1981)

Matadata:
Artist = The Rolling Wheels
Album = Best Of
Year = 1981
Track = Under My Thumb
track metadata can have a different year, in the track's year field I place the year the song was created which can be different to album year.

When viewing by Metadata "Artist" each track will have year displayed
When viewing by Metadata "Album" the year the album was released will be displayed.
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by nikos »

I mean like my example you have 3 songs with years
1 - 2000
2 - 1970
3 - 2014

and you want to add one year to each of them (relative to their current value)

it's not something you need to do very often I grant you but it's cool to do :)
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by dunno »

In all my years of editing 100's of GB of Music metadata I have never had the need to do that, I've never come across a artist who has labeled their music in a logical progression as you've described.

I created many custom "Best of" Albums, the grind was to source the tracks realease date and editing the metadata accordingly and not once was there such a sequence required.
Ensuring that a track and Albums metadata is accurate is worthwhile, especially with the Genre field, a accurate description for genre makes it easy to locate types of music as per mood, e.g.

Electronic Ambient
Electronic Rock
Electronic House
Portuguese Soul Fado
Greek Folk Instrumental
Greek Traditional Female
Blues Rock
Blues Instrumental
Rock Insrumental
Rock Ambient
Rock Metal

and so forth....
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by johngalt »

I used to use MP3Tag-it, then TagScanner, and finally graduated to using MusicBrainz Picard as an all-in-one shop for all things music - tagging, album art, folder generation and naming, file naming, and so much more.

And I've arguably done nearly as many as dunno has, and I've also never had to increment any dates - with many tagging apps nowadays, you can fetch actual dates and such from online repositories like discogs, etc. - so I used actual publication dates.

Having the feature for incrementing tag values of any sort that are numerical is not a bad thing, though. While it may be iffy on the date side, one place I see it being immensely helpful would be on track number / disc number, because those are values that I have manipulated manually much, much more often than date fields. Since track ## / disc ## are also part of the tag, then it makes sense to have the ability to increment on the fly from directly in X² also.
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by nikos »

for track # you can usually get away much simpler, using a counter to set tracks in increasing order
as for the "cool" year changer, that's a function waiting for a use case :)
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by dunno »

nikos wrote: 2021 Oct 27, 14:08 for track # you can usually get away much simpler, using a counter to set tracks in increasing order
Some folks prefer metadata Track numbers to be labeled with a leading zero and some prefer without, some prefer to retain artists integrity which can be with or without a leading zero. The standard I complied with was without leading zero and everyone had to comply, reason being was to keep the hashes for the same artist/album uniform, this was for P2P search. search results were plentiful due to standardisation of format.

In Folder /Directory view OS numbering convention is used for tracks (metadata is not read), my tracks when viewed in explorer have a leading zero but the meatdata doesn't which is correct, iBasso Mp3 players (linux based firmware) in their infinite wisdom adds a additional zero to track counting which results in a horrible display of 001 instead of just 01. They don't read Track metadata correctly. I wrote to them and asked them to review this, *crickets*...

Anyway, I'm rambling here.

*returns to hammock* :beer:
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by johngalt »

nikos wrote: 2021 Oct 27, 14:08 for track # you can usually get away much simpler, using a counter to set tracks in increasing order
as for the "cool" year changer, that's a function waiting for a use case :)
Which does no good if I want to change a track number, from say 4 to 5 (04 to 05) because of a missing track / a 'silent' track that was not extracted correctly/ etc. - all niche cases for sure, but the function would still be handy.

Just as niche as the case you say that one lucky X² user in here to come up and say "Finally! I've been waiting for this for years!"

lol.
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by johngalt »

dunno wrote: 2021 Oct 28, 03:11
nikos wrote: 2021 Oct 27, 14:08 for track # you can usually get away much simpler, using a counter to set tracks in increasing order
Some folks prefer metadata Track numbers to be labeled with a leading zero and some prefer without, some prefer to retain artists integrity which can be with or without a leading zero. The standard I complied with was without leading zero and everyone had to comply, reason being was to keep the hashes for the same artist/album uniform, this was for P2P search. search results were plentiful due to standardisation of format.

In Folder /Directory view OS numbering convention is used for tracks (metadata is not read), my tracks when viewed in explorer have a leading zero but the meatdata doesn't which is correct, iBasso Mp3 players (linux based firmware) in their infinite wisdom adds a additional zero to track counting which results in a horrible display of 001 instead of just 01. They don't read Track metadata correctly. I wrote to them and asked them to review this, *crickets*...

Anyway, I'm rambling here.

*returns to hammock* :beer:
100% agree. With sorting being what it is in various OS, particularly in the past, I padded the leading 0s so I would get tracks sorted correctly - but that is because of my overall naming and filing conventions.

\Music\{artist name}\{[year] album name}\ +:

{track number - track title} for single disc releases
{disc number - track number - track title} for multi-disc releases
Is a quick and dirty simulation of half of my music collection, the part that is not collections / soundtracks / DJ mixes with Various Artist contributions. Since the sorting of the files is directly related to the track number / disc number at any given time, to make sure the different OSs would not sort them differently, I included the leading 0s. That point is now mostly moot - but it's what I'm used to so it's what I've stuck with.

And inconsistencies with players and such is now a thing of the past for me as my phone is my music player, and my music is in YT Music (formerly in Google Play Music) - all my uploads, the vast majority being lossless FLAC files. So, I could, if I wanted to, change my formatting - but I'd have to change all the ones I've uploaded over the years to GPM that were then migrated automatically to YTM, and I really don't see the need to.

If it ain't broke....
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by nikos »

What I am trying to do now (which should be more useful than changing years) is to teach declone to regognize similar music, that is find 2 similar versions of a song based on CONTENT (not tags). That could go even as far as detecting cover versions of an original song. Damn interesting and potentially useful

There are tools doing this kind of thing, are you using anything for this job?
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by dunno »

nikos wrote: 2021 Oct 29, 08:09 What I am trying to do now (which should be more useful than changing years) is to teach declone to regognize similar music, that is find 2 similar versions of a song based on CONTENT (not tags). That could go even as far as detecting cover versions of an original song. Damn interesting and potentially useful

There are tools doing this kind of thing, are you using anything for this job?
I have never had use for such a feature, but I guess if folks place music hap hazardly in a single folder it has merit.

Finding similar music can be of use, perhaps if one wants to quickly locate the same track by different artists, but a search by name would achieve the same result. Then there's the issue of remixes of a song. point being that if they show up as duplicates it might not be correct to delete them because they are intentional variants.

Clasiical music is going to be tricky for you. The same piece is reproduced by many orchestras and by the same orchestra but different conductors, heck take one calssical piece, Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, tons of variants out there, I have two versions, original and Interpeted, I prefer the interpreted version.

What I would find useful is a quick method for detecting duplicates in a playlist or when comparing a playlist to several others, I sometimes merge, edit, and compare playlists, I manually scan by text for duplicates.
Another anoyance of playlists is the the variance of the use of "/" "\" by different Os's and types of playlists, a playlist created on windows with the same extention wont work on unix even if the path is identical, yes I know there are playlist converters out there but most do a half arsed job of it, hence one has to manually find and replace the offending syntax and path.
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by Tuxman »

I switched from Mp3tag to beets a few months ago. Properly importing an album to my library - including moving it into my usual folder structure (basically, \\music\ARTIST\ALBUM\TRACK. TITLE) - is done via "beet imp -ma <folder>" now.
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Re: blog: change numeric ID3 tags en mass

Post by johngalt »

nikos wrote: 2021 Oct 29, 08:09 What I am trying to do now (which should be more useful than changing years) is to teach declone to recognize similar music, that is find 2 similar versions of a song based on CONTENT (not tags). That could go even as far as detecting cover versions of an original song. Damn interesting and potentially useful

There are tools doing this kind of thing, are you using anything for this job?
I can't say I have a large use for such features, because, potentially, it could flag the same song by the same artist, one a studio version and another a live performance, as similar, and I'd hate to lose one or the other because I want both.

However, i-DeClone is only being used by me to remove absolute duplicates of recovered files from my formatted spinner because the recovery program I used found (OK, recovered) more than one copy of the exact same file in different directories, and some of them also had my valuable tags removed upon recovery, so I'd have to make my way through around 1.2k sounds that have no tags and names like f667426736.flac in order to actually figure out what it is. Uh, no thanks. Nikos to the rescue.
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