To Help Speed Things Up
I Import Only One Folder, in A Temp Library Then Do Editing.
That's not quite what I mean by slow....
For example, when naming TV show episodes in my database, I use this format for the [Name] field: [Season #]e[Episode #] - [Episode Name]. That's a simple (and somewhat standard really) method of naming the files so that they sort properly in my various view schemes and all I need to do is sort by name.
Now, say I've just finished ripping/recording/encoding the entire series of HBO's "The Wire" (actually, I'm just
almost done -- about 7 episodes left). Quite often, I have files that are named similarly, but not quite right. For example, those Wire episodes are currently named like this:
The Wire-10-(Misgivings)-2006-11-21-0
The Wire-12-(That's Got His Own)-2006-12-03-1
There's currently no effective way to batch rename these files, I have to manually select each file, click to edit the tag, select the text that's wrong and type in the info I want. That's no big deal if there's only one or two, but when I have a few hundred to do, it quickly becomes tiresome. It's easy to get the other tags to show up how I want ... I already have the files marked with:
Artist = "The Wire"
Album = "Season 4"
Track # = Episode Number (which is easily done once the files are tagged with the Season, I just use the Fill Track Number from List Order tool)
Why can't I put in a Find and Replace that searches for:
The Wire-*-(<name string>)
(where the * matches any character or characters and the <name string> extracts what it finds in that pattern). And tell it to automatically reformat them to:
04e10 - Misgivings
Which is what I want?
I know that it's possible to do things like this with Regular Expressions (though it might be hard to code it -- and it might end up looking like a line of Perl).
Either way, just the ability to add a prefix or suffix to a batch of files all in one fell swoop would save tons of time. I can't tell you how often I've had a set of 20-30 files all named (in the [Name] tag, not the Filename):
01 - Boys of Summer
02 - Soft Eyes
03 - Home Room
(etc, etc, etc)
and I want them to be:
4e01 - Boys of Summer
4e02 - Soft Eyes
4e03 - Home Room
Currently, if there's nothing to "Find" (because you want the text added to the beginning or end or middle of what's already there), you can't use the Find and Replace tool and you have to do it manually!!