Searching for an artist

[DavidHB]

(07-01-2015 17:56)mightyoakbob Wrote:  Don't fancy changing the tags much as I *think* they are reasonably correct and the amount of work would be huge.

This is an understandable view, but it is not necessarily correct. With a grid-based tag editor (such as MP3Tag on Windows or Metadatics on the Mac), changes of the kind Simon suggested can be made in a very short time.

Here is an example, using MP3Tag. Suppose you have a music collection in which All AlbumArtist tags are populated but some Artist tags are empty. You want to copy the AlbumArtist names to the empty Artist tags, but leave the populated Artist tags alone.

Begin by using recursive selection (i.e. including sub-folders) to list in the grid as much of your music collection as you are comfortable with changing in one go. You can do the whole lot at once, though with a large collection things will get a bit slow. Then filter the list on 'Artist MISSING' to show only those tracks where the Artist tag is empty. Select the whole of the filtered list.

Using the 'Copy tag to tag' function, copy all AlbumArtist values to their respective Artist tags. Press the Save button to ensure that all the changes are saved. Job done. Repeat as necessary to work through your collection, which would have to be enormous for the whole job to take more than an hour or so.

David