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Topic: Request: fb2k and musicbrainz (Read 1091 times) previous topic - next topic
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Request: fb2k and musicbrainz

While musicbrainz is helpful as a tagger in many situations it also introduces its very own set of challenges. The biggest one for me are their cosmetic rules. Musicbrainz insists on using special quotes, hyphens and other diacritics. This leads to incompatibilities for me when using other software, especially in conjunction with renaming via file operations when the non-ASCII character is passed onto the file name.

I would like to request a way inside of foobar2000 to normalize diacritics in tags, that is, replace non-ascii characters with an ASCII character. Obviously that is not desirable in all situations so may this could be done via a user-defined table of cases. I think someone like that is already happening "under the hood", to liken several characters to each other.

At the very least, I would hope for a user-option that would turn on or off using non-ASCII characters in file names. Thanks in advance!

Re: Request: fb2k and musicbrainz

Reply #1 –
Music databases deal with human-readable titles in natural language with complete punctuation, not filenames. MusicBrainz isn't unique in this regard, exept maybe in that it requires diacritics in French uppercase and Italian too.

You can use $replace() function to define a table when renaming with File Operations, followed by $ansi() to remove all remaining special characters. I use $replace() by default in my collection to avoid compatibility issues with old software, and also save the cleaned "ascii filename" in a tag field for non-English titles, so it can be restored later or searched by. See this example in Mp3Tag for a proposed table for common symbols.

The substitution should really be configurable to permit choosing whether a character is replaced by one or two symbols (ä->ae,å->aa,ā->aa). A tabular GUI for configuring this is something I don't expect to see in Foobar.

Not sure what the maximum number of parameters for replace() in Foobar is. It is sufficient to handle a few languages.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Re: Request: fb2k and musicbrainz

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Sandrine on
especially in conjunction with renaming via file operations

So you got a "big" solution from j7n. Here is a "smaller" solution in that it only takes a few symbols, from user Case at this forum: https://foobar.hyv.fi/?view=foo_renamer . (It will hide under Utilities, not under Move or Rename.)

Re: Request: fb2k and musicbrainz

Reply #3 –
Pointers much appreciated. I had a quick look at foo_renamer - there is no documentation but it seems to do the opposite of what I want: Replace normal characters with their "beautified" versions.

Edit: I found the function under Right-click "utilities". Indeed, it renames characters to the opposite of what I want. Furthermore, the characters in the settings dialogue cannot be changed, "APPLY" is greyed out when I type in a different character.