Many times when I download digital files (mainly FLAC), I want to edit the metadata to remove extraneous strings from the TITLE field of multiple files. For example, each TITLE field may end in " (Remastered)" or " (Live at BLAH BLAH 2023)". And, of course, the string varies every time.
In mp3tag, I can use Actions to do this, which takes multiple steps: Actions > Actions > Edit Action Group > Edit Action .... etc etc
In foobar2000, I can use MassTagger but again, it is a multi-step process and the last time I tried it, I had to make sure to escape certain punctuation characters to get the results I wanted.
Does anyone have a workflow that they can recommend to easily remove a string from multiple files? I'm probably missing something simple. If it requires different software, so be it. (I'm on Windows.) Thanks!
I think you can make a hotkey for an action in Mp3tag ...?
But anyway, in foobar2000, assuming both the two following hold:
* it is a given field like TITLE (not just "do this to any field")
* you know that everything after the first occurrence of a given string is to be removed, like " ("
Mark all, go into preferences, right-click and automatically fill values, populate from %title% and give the string
%title% (
Then the new TITLE will take the old TITLE from the beginning and up to but not including first occurrence of " (". It doesn't have to be escaped.
Next time you want to do this, you can hit the arrow to the right of those text fields and select the previous one.
Does anyone have a workflow that they can recommend to easily remove a string from multiple files?
This is what I would do:
- Use MP3Tag to export all tags for all tracks to a text file;
- Use a text editor or word processor to perform global substitutions (eg find all... delete);
- Import the altered tags file into MP3Tag.
If the export is formatted with <tab> separators, it is also easy to read into a spreadsheet and perform more complex manipulations using spreadsheet string functions.
Thanks y'all. I was hoping for something simpler but I can work with those solutions.