Best method for "firstname lastname" to "lastname, firstname"

[DavidHB]

(03-08-2017 10:17)jcdrisco Wrote:  Thanks, all, for your responses. I have thousands of files and am looking for a way to do a batch change, supplemented by editing for special cases. I may try creating a composerSort tag from my current composer tag, batch changing that tag to reverse order, and then manually edit the exceptions.

My idea was at first very similar, but I came to the conclusion that it wasn't really worth the effort of developing and testing a script that would really only be used once. Rather, putting the effort into creating a workflow that would work as well for additions to the collection as for the initial bulk tagging process was what paid off for me.

Quite a bit of the effort was making sure that I was using a folder structure that would make it easier to work on sensible groupings of folders in the MP3Tag grid. The top layer of my folder structure is a set of very broadly-based Genres (Classical, Pop, Jazz, Folk, World etc.), within which there can be different sub-categories. So the second level division of the Classical genre (much the biggest in my collection) is by composer; in the other genres, artist is the second level.

All of this made it much easier to use the techniques I have already described. The process of making sure that composer names were consistent and creating the corresponding ComposerSort tags, for a collection of several hundred albums, was largely complete in a single evening. Errors and inconsistencies are easy to spot in the MinimServer browsing sequence, which identifies missing or mis-spelt names and the like. The standard workflow can then be used to go back and fix the errors, something that may not be quite so easy with a bulk tagging script.

David