Tweet
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (or at least a much earlier version of dbPoweramp)I started ripping my CD collection. I put that aside for awhile, and just returned to it, and found that I no longer like my earlier scheme for tags. To start with, there weren't many (any?) sort tags then. So I need to do some fairly significant editing of tags - particular artist, album artist, conductor, etc, and there seems to be two ways to do that, both using batch conversion. Plus a third, not using dbPoweramp.
The first is using scripting, and it seems like this uses VBS as its scripting language - is that the case?
The second is using rule based manipulation. For example, one of the things I want to do is change artists of the form "Foobarbaz, The" to "The Foobarbaz" and add a sort artist "Foobarbaz, The". So can I do that by with rules like:
IFCONTAINS Artist=", The"
SET Artist="The "[REPLACE]", The","",[TRIM]Artist[][]
IF Artist=[anyvalue]
SET Artist Sort=[IF][GRAB]1,4,[TRIM]Artist[][],=,"The ",[GRAB]5,,[TRIM]Artist][][]", The",Artist Sort[]
IF Artist Sort=
SET Artist Sort=Artist
Or syntax to that general effect. And the same for Album Artist, Conductor, etc.
Assuming the rules are processed in order, does this (more/less) work?
But the rule-based manipulation seems rather limited. For example. in the first step I would like to check for ", The" as the last 5 characters of the string, but the condition testing seems limited to testing tag equality, non-blank, blank or contains. Is that the case? And of course, the dbpoweramp naming functions, while fine for constructing path names, are also limited.
Which leads to option 3 - scripting. I was just going to build/install metaflac on my Linux box and then do a find/do script on the exported NAS audio filesystem, that reads the tags with metaflac, manipulates them with bash and then writes them back. (All my audio files are flac.) This is certainly the more general option - has anyone tried metaflac?
Another option for scripting is mp3tag, but it seems to be yet another scripting language, although being task-specific, that would be preferable to VBS. Again, has anyone tried mp3tag (or both mp3tag and metaflac) for updating tags with scripts?
Btw, this isn't intended as a criticism of the tag updating options in dbPoweramp - they're fine for most purposes. And I won't even get into the issue of why there isn't a single great tag database instead of 4 (or so) crummy ones. This shouldn't be so hard.
Thanks,
Doug
The first is using scripting, and it seems like this uses VBS as its scripting language - is that the case?
The second is using rule based manipulation. For example, one of the things I want to do is change artists of the form "Foobarbaz, The" to "The Foobarbaz" and add a sort artist "Foobarbaz, The". So can I do that by with rules like:
IFCONTAINS Artist=", The"
SET Artist="The "[REPLACE]", The","",[TRIM]Artist[][]
IF Artist=[anyvalue]
SET Artist Sort=[IF][GRAB]1,4,[TRIM]Artist[][],=,"The ",[GRAB]5,,[TRIM]Artist][][]", The",Artist Sort[]
IF Artist Sort=
SET Artist Sort=Artist
Or syntax to that general effect. And the same for Album Artist, Conductor, etc.
Assuming the rules are processed in order, does this (more/less) work?
But the rule-based manipulation seems rather limited. For example. in the first step I would like to check for ", The" as the last 5 characters of the string, but the condition testing seems limited to testing tag equality, non-blank, blank or contains. Is that the case? And of course, the dbpoweramp naming functions, while fine for constructing path names, are also limited.
Which leads to option 3 - scripting. I was just going to build/install metaflac on my Linux box and then do a find/do script on the exported NAS audio filesystem, that reads the tags with metaflac, manipulates them with bash and then writes them back. (All my audio files are flac.) This is certainly the more general option - has anyone tried metaflac?
Another option for scripting is mp3tag, but it seems to be yet another scripting language, although being task-specific, that would be preferable to VBS. Again, has anyone tried mp3tag (or both mp3tag and metaflac) for updating tags with scripts?
Btw, this isn't intended as a criticism of the tag updating options in dbPoweramp - they're fine for most purposes. And I won't even get into the issue of why there isn't a single great tag database instead of 4 (or so) crummy ones. This shouldn't be so hard.
Thanks,
Doug
Comment