Category: Music

I reset my playlists in Nextcloud. During the rescan, as it imported them, the Music app sorted them into their genre. This might be useful. But one author’s genre was Folk, and really, I’d prefer if it were Instrumental.

I tried changing them from the command line, but id3tools trashed the tags. Really, it was a problem with UTF-8 versus something else. All I really know is that when Nextcloud scanned the files, it got Chinese characters instead of anything useful.

Turns out, I used kid3 and EasyTAG to solve the bulk search and replace problem. Why both? Because kid3 let me see what I wanted to change, but EasyTAG would let me (bulk) change them.

kid3 let me change tags just fine. The problem is: only one file at a time.

The kid3 interface is rather nice, otherwise. If I hit Ctrl-A, it selects all and reads all the files and all the tags. I had added Genre to this list of columns at the top, so then I could sort on that.

EasyTAG wouldn’t let me change the main page displayed columns, so that was less-than-ideal. But, it does have a Find feature, and everything I selected in the Find window remained selected in the main window.

What EasyTAG has (which is great) is in the genre field for any song, there are two buttons: a drop-down to select which genre, and an Apply All button for everything selected. Excellent! Apply All is precisely what I wanted.

Also, it turns out that if the predefined list of genres doesn’t match what I want, I can just type in my choice. The Apply All button still works for something I typed. EasyTAG didn’t have a Flamenco genre, but I have 85 Flamenco guitar files. That I can type my own genre makes this a trivial problem.

So after doing an Apply All in EasyTAG, I’d go back to kid3 and do a reload, followed by another Ctrl-A. Then I sorted by (whatever). I’d find something that matched all the songs I wanted to alter, and copy that to the clipboard. Then I’d switch to EasyTAG, unselect all, and go into the Find screen, and paste in the identifier and search I’d select all in the find window, and close the find window. Then I changed the genre and hit Apply All in the EasyTAG main window.

I think I re-tagged close to 800 songs in about fifteen minutes. Woo! Now, the bulk of my music files are in eleven genres, which becomes a playlist without the manual playlist editing. There are 331 songs in the Instrumental genre list. I would have so hated having to manually make a change 331 times.

Another exiftool operation: suppose you have a bunch of files named something like this:

01 - String Quartet in B flat Major, 1st movement "Allegro".ogg
02 - Sonata, K. 310, 1st Movement (Mozart - Alfred Brendel).ogg
03 - Asturias_Leyenda (Albeniz - Alirio Diaz).ogg
04 - Massenet: Meditation from Thais (Mischa Elman).ogg
05 - La Coulicam - Rondement (Rameau - Harnoncourt, Lars Fryden).ogg

11 - Sonatine en trio "Modere" (Ravel - Orpheus Trio).ogg
12 - Preludes - La cathedral engloutie (Debussy - Sviatoslav Richter).ogg
13 - Eili, Eili (Mischa Elman).ogg
14 - Simple Fugue (Gr. 1, D. 1) (Bach - Gustav Leonhardt).ogg
15 - A Felicidade from Black Orpheus (Paula Robison).ogg

But really, you want the files to just be named after the Title of the song. You don’t want the leading track number, and if there are any characters in the file name that would cause Windows heartburn (like slashes, colon, asterisk, question mark, etc.), you would like those stripped out too. For example: Massenet Meditation from Thais (Mischa Elman).ogg

Here’s a handy command:

exiftool '-Filename<${Title;}.%le' *.mp3

So we have exiftool which is the utility that does the work. Thank you to Phil Harvey for doing the work to make this easy.

Then we have two parameters:

'-Filename<${Title;}.%le'

*.mp3

The second parameter says to work on files with the filename extension of .mp3

The first parameter breaks down like this:

-Filename<

Note that the non-change-making version is -Testname< (for testing, obviously)

-Filename tells exiftool that it will be updating the file name. The < symbol says that the replacement for the file name will be incoming from the rest of the parameter.

What follows after the < has two pieces: ${Title;} and .%le

${Title;} is the processed text from the metadata variable Title. The leading $ and the { and } with the ; before the closing curly brace serve to strip out any invalid characters found in the title that wouldn’t work as a file name.

.%le appends a file name extension. Technically, .%e is the file name extension, but adding the l makes it lowercase. So we get the Title as the first part of the file name, and the last part of the file name is .mp3 (because we told exiftool only to look at .mp3 files).