Useful Mp3tag operations

[winxi]

Recently, there has been some discussion about sorting of albums. MinimServer uses alphabetical sorting by default. For example, this results in the sort order

Cantata No.199
Cantata No.2
Cantata No.200

However, mainly for users of classical music, the following sort order may be desired:

Cantata No.2
Cantata No.199
Cantata No.200

Fortunately, MinimServer allows to completely customize the album sort order by setting the Album.sortTags option to a custom tag, lets say MyCustomSort. For the example from above, we would have to copy the Album tags to the MyCustomSort tag. In the next step, we would have to pad the numbers in the MyCustomSort tags with leading zeros to a defined total number of digits to get the desired sort order. For example, for a number of five digits we would want to have the following in the MyCustomSort tags:

Cantata No.00002
Cantata No.00199
Cantata No.00200

To get this kind of sorting for the entire music collection, we would have to copy the Album tags of all files to the MyCustomSort tags, even those which contain no numbers. The second task of zero padding has to be done just for those MyCustomSort tags which contain numbers, of course.

Fortunately, both these tasks can be easily done automatically with the free software Mp3tag for the entire library within a few minutes by doing the following:

1) Copy the Album tags to the MyCustomSort tags:
- In Mp3tag, load and select all files of your music library
- Choose 'Convert' -> 'Tag - Tag'
- Under 'Field' put

Code:

MYCUSTOMSORT

and under 'Format sting:' put

Code:

%ALBUM%

- Click OK

2) Apply zero padding to the new MyCustomSort tags
- In Mp3tag, select all files and choose 'Actions' -> 'Actions' and create a new Action group
- Within the new action group create a new Action of type 'Replace with regular expression'
- Under 'Field:' put

Code:

MYCUSTOMSORT

- Under 'Regular expression:' put

Code:

[0-9]+

- Under 'Replace matches with:' put

Code:

$num($0,5)

- Click OK

3) Configure MinimServer
In MinimWatch/MinimServer add 'Album.sortTags={MyCustomSort}' to the tag options and 'MyCustomSort' to itemTags and restart MinimServer.

Note: If you want to remove leading zeros from numbers in a tag, do what is described under step 2) above, but use

Code:

$num($0,0)

for the 'Replace matches with:' field.

[magister]

Thank you winxi -- this is very helpful!