Yellow, black, and recTAGular.

September 8, 2010 11:16 PM

OS X-based ID3 tagging programs that have comprehensive expression string options?

I've tried Tag, TriTag, ID3 Editor, Jaikoz, and ID3X. It appears that none of them will allow me to create an ID3 tag pattern (%A - %N %T, etc.) from the filename while ignoring or omitting a certain part of it.

Media Rage comes closest, but its "Convert Filenames to Data" option doesn't seem to have an ignore character, and it seems to be a little quirky in the way it handles spaces.

Doug's "Filenames to Song Names" AppleScript isn't what I want, since that (obviously) only accounts for song names. He doesn't seem to have another one that fits the bill.

I'm at my wits' end. Am I missing anything (aside from mounting a Windows emulator to run something)?

posted by mykescipark to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Could you rename or symlink the files first and remove the part you want to ignore, and then run Media Rage on them?

What about assigning the part you want to ignore to a tag you don't use, like Grouping? You can later update the Grouping tag on all files to be blank.
posted by stereo at 12:23 AM on September 9, 2010

This kind of thing is pretty trivial to program: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?MP3::Info

And a reasonable, free slightly out of date, but good enough for your purposes beginners book.
posted by singingfish at 1:58 AM on September 9, 2010

If you're up for some bash scripting the id3v2 command line utility might fit the bill.
posted by usonian at 4:33 AM on September 9, 2010

I use EasyTag on Linux. There's an OS X package too.

I don't really know exactly what you want to do though. If I want to do something weird I rename by tag first, then use the rename command to tidy up. Not had a problem yet.
posted by devnull at 4:46 AM on September 9, 2010

This is a long shot, but in the world of scanf(), an asterisk after the percent means to suppress assignment of something. It will still be consumed in the parsing, but the value is not stored anywhere.

Your character after the percent is not a type specifier, but a storage location for the value, so I don't know how this would work.
posted by cmiller at 6:26 AM on September 9, 2010

Does Tune-O-Tag do what you need? I've successfully used it to do things like remove HTML from embedded song lyrics that were snarfed from lyric web sites via some other automated tool.
posted by kimota at 8:04 AM on September 9, 2010