Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tom Russell]

Hello. Tom here, in Dallas.

I downloaded JRiver last week. I did a manual entry of one file containing about 8,000 titles. About half of these found their proper place on their own. I manually added cover art and JRiver works with, and plays, those titles  perfectly.

The other half of the titles are a mess. I understand that this is due to the way I improperly wrote the titles of the files. Now is as good as any time to fix this. There are thousands of individual songs shown in alpha sorts of tracks 01, then another alpha sort of tracks 02, followed by another alpha sort of track 03s, etc. I understand these will have to be line by line edits. There are also thousands of different groupings, albums with no artist, artists with no album, etc. My point is that there is stuff all over the place in all sorts of different sorts. (humor sort of intended). My problem, my question, involves batch, or group moving of these files. Some of these files could be easily moved as larger groups. I have tried, and I have searched, and I haven't found any way to do this. Specifically what I want to do is 1) mark groups of files and move them as one, such as mark fifty Chris Whitley titles from here and there and drag them to the Chris Whitley file area as one. I can then sort out the albums one at a time. 2) click and drag individual files from here to there. I need to move individual files from here to there, all over the place. I can't make a click and drag work. And, 3) Again marking a group of files, then adding the artist or album name in a list, filling in data as a group. I've been doing some of this line by line and, well, there are thousands of lines here and life is only so long.

And, of course, if there is an easier way to do this that I have completely missed, I'd love to know that. Anything that could make moving these files quicker would be great.

Thanks for any and all help.

Tom

[JimH]

Welcome to the forum.

MC has some tools that may help.  Look under the Tools > Library Tools menu.

Fill properties from filename
and
Rename Move Copy

Try them on a few test files.  They can do a lot but they also will make sweeping changes, so you want to understand them first. 

The tool called "Clean properties" might also help.

You can do things like remove the first 3 characters from a name.

Expressions may also help.

Some of these are documented on the wiki, some in the forum.

[blgentry]

There are some techniques that can make this easier on you.

First, do some of these files have the information you want in their file names, or their directory names?  If so, MC can read these and populate Album, Artist, or whatever info is in the file and directory names.  

Highlight a few files > Right click > Library tools > Fill properties from file name

Then fill out the template for directory and file name and it will show you what it's going to fill in.  Once you get it right, press OK and MC will fill in those fields.  You can do this for many files at once, even across different albums.

The second technique/tool is a fundamental part of MC.  It's the Tag Action Window:

Highlight some files > Edit > Tag

Now the Tag Action Window will open on the left.  Any edits you make here will affect ALL highlighted files.  So you can do whole albums, whole artists, etc.  Song names have to be done individually of course.  But this is still a very very useful tool.  It's very powerful once you incorporate the expression language into it.  If you don't see the fields you want at first, pull down the gear menu at the upper left and you can get more fields to show up.

If you give us some specifics about what's going on, we might be able to suggest ways to speed this up even more.  If your tags are extremely messy, you might consider an automated program to help you look up all the info and add it to the files.

Brian.