cataloguing artist names

[DavidHB]

(15-02-2014 12:27)simoncn Wrote:  Thanks for this very useful guide. The tip about greedy and non-greedy regular expressions is very helpful.

As you kindly describe my previous post as a 'Guide', I'll not produce a separate tutorial, unless someone feels they need it.

I'm glad that you are still considering the "automated name reversal" idea, but I do wonder how well it can work in practice. As I indicated in my previous post, the point at which names are split for reversal can be determined somewhat arbitrarily. Some names should not be reversed at all. Getting things right would seem to require a fair amount of user intervention.

The other concern that has not been addressed in the thread so far is consistency; if you are indexing on the Artist field, you will typically need the name in that field to be consistent for the same artist. There are often variations in spelling, especially when the names contain accented characters and the field has been populated from an on-line database.

MP3Tag can again help. First you need to decide which of the different spellings you are going to use. Then use the folder selection dialog in MP3Tag (which has an option to select sub-folders) to list a set of tracks containing the Artist 's name. Note that if you select the whole of a large collection, MP3 will take a long time to read the metadata and display the list. However, the time you will save may make the wait worthwhile. Once the list appears, you can use the filter command (F3) to target your artist entries. For instance, if you were looking for differently spelt instances of "André Previn", you might use the filter expression "artist HAS prev". Adjust your filter expression so that only tracks containing your target name are displayed, then select all the filtered track entries.

At this point, MP3Tag gives you options. If the Artist field contains only the name you wish to make consistent, you will find that there is a drop-down list of all the artist entries in the selection, plus <blank> and <keep>. If you want just one of these entries to appear in all the selected tracks, select that entry, and press the Save icon. Alternatively, you can do a Search and Replace (Alt-6, then Replace gives you the dialog) on any field in the current selection. Press Save. When all the Artist fields are consistent, if you are using ArtistSort as described in my previous post, you can use the Actions previously described to make the ArtistSort entries consistent also.

Once again, the point of all this is to show that cleaning up metadata is not necessarily as labour intensive as is often thought. Learning MP3Tag, or another program with similar capabilities if there is one, is well worth the effort.

David