MP3Tag Tips - Remove leading digits from Song Titles

[One and a half]

MP3TAG is about THE standard for Audio File metadata editing, the author Florian Heidenreich, keeps the program updated regularly with welcome additions and improvements. Rarely is there a goof up.

The other day, an evaluation download had a few errors in the metadata, namely the Titles included unwanted leading characters and the Title combined the Artist and Track in the Title field. So searching for an artists is often skipped.

 

File list, there are four CDs for this album only the first one is shown:

 

 

In MP3 Tag, the problem metadata is shown:

For track 1, Berk & the Virtual Band, "Rhythm is a dancer" Title is combined with the Title, Artist and track number. In addition the Artist is incorrect as this is the series of the Album, so there's a few goof ups here.

 

To show the tip, the first track is selected only, to correct the whole album by using CTRL+A first. On the Top Toolbar, select Actions | Quick Actions, then drop down to 'Replace Regular Expression.

 

Click ok and enter the commands as shown. This will remove any of the numbers 0-9 in the leading part of the TITLE field.

 

Results:

 

 

There's still a period in the Title,  run the Replace Regular Expression again, this time, replace the 0-9 with a period, that is:

^\s*[.]+\s*

 

In general to remove leading characters ^\s*[character to be removed]+\s*

 

1st Part is complete, the leading characters are gone.

 

 

Now to split the TITLE Field leaving the TITLE as is, but cast the Artist to the correct ARTIST Field.

Use the Actions | Quick Actions, this time select 'Guess Values' from the drop down

 

 

The TITLE field (%title) is the source where the trouble is, and the guessing pattern needs to match the format of TITLE field. This means add in spaces and characters to match the existing TITLE field.

In this example, TITLE field is Berk & the Virtual Band<space>/<space>Rhythm is a dancer, so the Guessing pattern is the same %artist%<space>/<space>%title%.

 

 

So the Vintage Cafe Artist is given the flick, replaced with the correct artist title.

 

To complete the exercise, the Album Artist Field is filled in using the regular form fields on the left of the MP3Tag Window.

 

 

For some players, the Album Artist field causes some errors, notably with Jriver. It decides by itself to change the Various Artists to Multiple Artists, strange quirk that, if anyone has a cure please tell. For Roon, there's no real problem, acceptance is fine.

 

Further tip, if the Discnumber field is formatted 1/4 (example disc one of four), this is the result in Roon, a clickable link to each disc that forms part of the whole album.

 

 

[Bob Stern]

mp3tag is Windows-only.

 

Good alternatives for Mac include Kid3, Metadatics, Picard and Yate (in alphabetical order).

[One and a half]

3 hours ago, Bob Stern said:

mp3tag is Windows-only.

 

If Wine is tasted, it's possible (sort of). From the author.

[paultaylor]

On 3/24/2019 at 2:12 AM, One and a half said:

MP3TAG is about THE standard for Audio File metadata editing

Its not any kind of standard, just a decent free tag editor. Your example/tutorial is very readable and thorough - but to me it just highlights the problem with manual tag editing, its time consuming and error prone. Generally it would better to use autotagger for this kind of work but you say this was a problem with an evaluation Cd , and online databases are incomplete so maybe that is not a possibility.

 

Adding to the list of Mac taggers are our own SongKong and Jaikoz. Note that SongKong provide manual editing for free, and Jaikoz allows access to all functions but just limits  how many files can be changed for free. These have the advantage over the other mac taggers listed that they also run on Wndows, Linux, Qnap and Synology so you can use one tool on all platforms.

 

[nuwavee4va]

Hi guys!.. I suggest, if you want to remove the leading part of the TITLE field including the PERIOD "." just use this command

^\s*[0-9,.]+\s*

😉

[StandardModel]

I have tried using MP3Tag to remove a leading _ in file names. To do this the file names  look like this:

_A Lover's Question.mp4

 

The code I am inserting into MP3 Tag for search and replace is Replace with Regular Expression

^\s*[_]+\s*

It doesn't seem to work.

 

What am I doing incorrectly?

 

Thanks!