Last night I spent a few hours catching up on tagging some of my new files (both audio and video) and again and again I ran into an extremely frustrating experience. My complaint is that MC doesn't allow you to add, remove, insert, and replace characters and text in field names in an automated fashion. It seems so much like this should be something that MC would handle easily, considering all of the other tagging tasks it excels at and capabilities it has, but it doesn't
at all, and in some cases, it caused a specific tagging job to take an hour when it should have been minutes.
Here's an example:
I had a bootleg U2 album, double disc, that -- for whatever reason -- had showed up when ripped with it's name tags like this:
U2 - New Year's Night In Dublin 89-90 - Disc 1 - 01 - Presentation Intro 845692
U2 - New Year's Night In Dublin 89-90 - Disc 1 - 02 - Where The Streets Have No Name 647845
U2 - New Year's Night In Dublin 89-90 - Disc 1 - 03 - I Will Follow 946527
U2 - New Year's Night In Dublin 89-90 - Disc 1 - 04 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For 645287
And it went on like that for 36 consecutive files. I have no idea where the weird numbers at the end of the name tag came from, but they showed up in the tag. Either way -- I set about fixing them.
So here's what I had to do:
1) I first did a
Rename Files from Properties, filling the filename with the contents of the [Name] tag. This was needed because the file names didn't match the Name tag, and I can't "search" one field and separate it into other properties like I can on the file name, so I had to jump through the hoop of actually renaming my files. Annoyance #1: Why can't I do the equivalent of the Fill Properties from Filename tool, but instead of using the Filename as the source, use the Name field (or any other field)?
2) Next, I did a
Fill Properties from Filename. My search was [Artist] - [Album] - [Name]. This filled the Artist and Album tags properly, but left me with "Disc # - ## - Blah blah blah ######" for every file in the [Name] field. I did it that way, because I initially couldn't figure out how to "fill" the disc number, since it included the word "Disc". It dawned on me after finishing that running the Fill Properties using "[Artist] - [Album] - Disc [Disc #] - [Track #] - [Name]" probably would have worked, so my mistake there. Still -- what if half of them had been "Disc" and the others "Disk". There's no way to specify "skip over 5 characters" or "ignore 3 number characters" or anything like that. Either way, the last step remained the same...
3) So, assuming the previous step had worked, I'd still have been left with:
Presentation Intro 845692
Where The Streets Have No Name 647845
I Will Follow 946527
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For 645287
In the Name field. None of those serial numbers matched, and none of them were useful or desirable to me in any way. So, since I had no way to "trim" the extraneous 7 characters (the 6 numbers plus the extra space) off of the end of the [Name] tag, I had to manually edit them one at a time 36 times.
I have hundreds of other examples. Retagging Video files can be an exercise in frustration. So often, because of the way Apple's Compressor works, I have sets of 40-50 video files all named like this:
[Project Name]-[Clip Name]-[Codec]-[Setting]-[Date].MP4
The Project Name part of the filename I want to end up in the [Album] field, and the Clip Name in the [Name] field. The rest of the info isn't useful though, and doesn't match each other other than they are generally all the same length (number of characters). I'm constantly manually editing the last extraneous 25 characters off of the [Name] field after I've extracted the useful info from the Filename. Find and Replace can only go so far, and only helps if the stuff you're searching for matches exactly. It has no wildcard or character matching capabilities!
I've recently started using a wonderful utility called
Better File Rename which provides a lot of "brute force" renaming capabilities to renaming files. The linked page shows a list of all of the tools it has. It's very frustrating that MC doesn't provide any of these capabilities when working with it's fields! If it did, it would have saved me at least 2 hours last night, and countless hours on countless other nights!
What say you all?