I'm starting to use expressions for "Directories" and "Hierarchy" in the "Rename, Move & Copy" dialog box and have a question for all you expression experts...
I wanted my [album artists (auto)] saved in a 'grouping folder', for example 'A-C', 'D-F' etc... and was able to do this using FORMATRANGE in the 'rule' box of "Rename, Move & Copy". For example:
FORMATRANGE([Album Artist (auto)]3,0)\etc...
But then I found that all my 'The' bands (i.e., The Beatles, The Doors, etc...) were grouped in a T folder (i.e., G:\S-U\The Beatles\etc..). After digging around I found the nifty CLEAN expression:
FORMATRANGE(CLEAN([Album Artist (auto)],2),3,0)\[Album Artist (auto)]\etc...
Using CLEAN as shown above results in The Beatles folder being saved into an A-C folder which is what I wanted. Yeah!
But now I think I would like to try and take this one step further and eliminate the article from the artists name when doing the Rename, Move & Copy, but not from the name in MC itself since MC can be set to ignore articles.
In otherwords instead of:
G:\A-C\The Beatles\etc..
I would like:
G:\A-C\Beatles\etc..
... but I would like to keep the name in MC as 'The Beatles'.
I thought of creating a new custom 'album artists' field that populates with the artist name minus the article and then using that field in the expression, but I'm hoping there's something not too complicated that I can do in the expression instead.
Any suggestions? Thanks!!!
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My "Rename, Move & Copy" "Rules" expression so far:
FORMATRANGE(CLEAN([Album Artist (auto)],2),3,0)\[Album Artist (auto)]\etc...
Reference (great page btw, thanks to the contributers!):
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Center_expression_language--------------------------------------