ID3v2 tag editing with numbers in track name

June 13, 2005 11:21 AM

Does there exist a free tag editor that will bulk strip track numbers that reside at the beginning of track name tags?

Due to my incompetence and the slick easiness of MP3 Tag Tools, I've managed to improperly re-tag about 2000 MP3s. I've managed to fix the tags that read "01-this_is_the_song_name"

but not the tags like "01 this_is_the_song_name".

In other words, I'm trying to remove the track number from the title tag. This is easy when there's a dash "-", but when there's not a dash, I don't know how to tell the software what to do.

Happy to use other tag editors, and yes, I know that I can delete them manually, but 1000 tags would take a while that way.

posted by Kwantsar to Technology (11 answers total)

I've had good luck with Emusic Tag Editor - it'll allow a space as a delimiter.
posted by DandyRandy at 11:26 AM on June 13, 2005

Move immediately to TagScanner. Sweet.

It does the following:

Features

# Rename files based on the tag information
# Advanced multiple files TAG editor
# Supports MP3, OGG, Musepack, Monkey’s Audio, FLAC, AAC, OptimFROG, SPEEX, WavePack files
# Supports ID3 1.0 / 1.1 / 2.2 / 2.3 / 2.4 tags, APE v1 and v2 tags, Vorbis Comments
# Supports for ID3v2 Lyrics and Attached pictures
# TAGs generation from folder/filename
# TAGs versions conversions
# TAGs case conversions
# Import tag information from an online database (freedb)
# Manual text-search for information in freedb
# Worksheets technology
# Recursive subfolders support
# Powerful Playlists editor
# Write extended playlists like Winamp or Sonique
# Playlists export to HTML, Excel and CSV(e.g. for MySQL)

Enjoy.

And did I mention it's free?

KFJ
posted by kungfujoe at 11:36 AM on June 13, 2005

Tag and Rename
posted by ludwig_van at 11:40 AM on June 13, 2005

No, no, no. If you're a Windows user, use MusicBrainz Tagger. It automatically fills in all the ID3 tag info for your track (right down to album and year) and renames the file according to the naming template you specify.

The best part: the tagging is automatic, based on the acoustic fingerprint of the file. Got mp3s you don't recognize labeled as 1233x32523.mp3? The tagger will look at the music itself and suggest the best match from their massive database.
posted by rafter at 11:45 AM on June 13, 2005

ive had luck with the godfather doing batch renames and edits
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 12:25 PM on June 13, 2005

Tag & Rename
MusicBrainz
posted by matildaben at 12:45 PM on June 13, 2005

If you have access to a Mac and iTunes, this is about a 10-line AppleScript. I wrote one some time ago to take care of pretty much the same problem.
posted by kindall at 1:06 PM on June 13, 2005

Get Mp3Tag -- it has the ability to search and replace from any field using regular expressions, which in this case I believe you could match with the expression \A\d\d\s as long as it is a two numbers followed by a space.

If you do get it, select "Convert|Actions" or click the two "A's" button, click the page with a star button, name the action, click the same button again, select "replace with regular expression", select "title" as the field, enter the expression \A\d\d\s, and leave the replace field empty. Change Mp3tag to the directory that has the files of interest, and either select the ones you want to rename or ctrl-A to get them all, open the Actions dialoge again, and make sure your action is checked and that should take care of your problem.
posted by The Bishop of Turkey at 5:26 PM on June 13, 2005

If the platform in question swings that way, MP3 Rage has an excellent renamer sub-utility that I use to fix crappy filenames like yours. Thou shalt put no naming convention before "Album - 0Track - Artist - Title.mp3"

It's pretty good about going the other way, as well, with filename regular expression backreference to ID3v2 conversion.

"If you're a Windows user, use MusicBrainz Tagger."

There's also iEatBrainz for the Mac, but I've found the MusicBrainz service to be pretty unreliable in general.
posted by majick at 10:57 PM on June 13, 2005

I used Zortam for a little last year to standardize my mp3 library. It seemed pretty nice (search functions, batch renaming, duplicate removal)
posted by Mark5four0 at 8:17 AM on June 14, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone. Tag and Rename takes too many keystrokes (could be my stupidity, thoug), MusicBrainz is way, way too slow, TagScanner threw off all sorts of errors, and EMusic Tag Editor was working all right until I got a bunch of USB errors. Now I have to send my precious Thinkpad back to IBM for a new system board! So I didn't get to the others.

So you're all super cool, and you have my sincerest gratitude.
posted by Kwantsar at 6:01 PM on June 14, 2005