Faster ways to create/edit ID tags?

[John Philpit]

Just bought dBpowerAmp because Windows Media Player kept losing the metadata on WAV files that I entered in WMP. Microsoft tells me the only way to ensure saving metadata is to save it in tags, not in the WMP database. Because WAV files do not have tags editable from File Explorer (in Windows 8.1), I'm converting them to lossless WMA files. Doing a batch conversion of the audio format is wonderfully easy, but so far some of the ID tags are slow. For tags that are the same on every file in a folder (Composer, Album, Artist), the UI for adding tags is easy and quick. But for track-specific tags (*, Title), I'm hoping to find a faster way before I tackle the next 300 files. (I do see that the UI has a "Multiple" setting, which saves at least a few mouse clicks per song.) For example, is there any way to tell the Edit ID-tag program to assign consecutive numbers based on the alphabetical order of the files names (using the ordering that goes 1, 2, ... 9, 10, 11 and not the one that goes 1, 10, 11, 2, ... when ordering numbers)? Or maybe to look for a number in the file names starting at a specific place, for example, at the 4th character in "Alk1" and "Alk2" and so on up to "Alk23"?

For the song titles, can they either be read from the tags in another set of files that I point to, or from a .txt file, or from the Internet? I use my own formatting of movement names (e.g., "Sonata 23: 2. Adagio molto, Più mosso"), but taking the text that's formatted to the standards of each label might save me time, even though I'm not willing to live long-term with their higgledy-piggledy assortment of formatting.

Thanks for what looks like an excellent resource. I just need to make a very few tasks more efficient.
John

[Spoon]

Re: Faster ways to create/edit ID tags?

There is a Tag from filename codec which might help you. We have no automatic tagger currently, however you should be able to tag the wave files directly with dbpoweramp (select whole album of files (not folder.jpg if one) >> Edit ID Tags do the shared tags, then uncheck multiple to walk through the individual files.