Wednesday, January 26, 2022

How to Clean Up a MP3 Mess

I'm still mucking around with my music files from the CD to MP3 project I began on 6-5-2016. It's unreal. I have so many messed up file names. For example,
  • 03_Touché [Acoustic]-Acoustic_Godsmack_The Other Side.wma
  • 03_Touché [Acoustic]_Godsmack_The Other Side_Stragglers.wma
  • 03_Touché_Godsmack_The Other Side_Stragglers.wma

The problem? I want one file named the following: 

  • 03_Touche-Acoustic_Godsmack_The Other Side_40000.wma

My issues are as follows:

  1. I don't want the é in the file name
  2. I don't want the brackets
  3. I want to use a dash to separate any information, such as if it's a live version of the tune or, in this case, if it's an acoustic version of the tune.
  4. I don't want the word "Acoustic" both in and outside of the brackets
  5. I don't want the _Stragglers at the end
  6. I use the naming convention: TT_TI_AR_AL_CO 
    1. where 
      1. TT = Track Number
      2. TI = Title
      3. AR = Artist
      4. AL = Album
      5. CO = Composer
        1. I actually use the "Composer" property to store the location. Where I want to end up is to have 
          1. either 10NN_Spindle, to indicate the numbered spindle the physical CD is located on 
        2. or
          1.  40000
        3. 40000

But I also have junk like this to deal with:

  • 23_Sensitive Guys Don't Go Home Alone Live_Michael Nichols_Home Alive-The Art of Self Defense Disc 1_1053_Spindle.mp3
  • 23_Sensitive Guys Don't Go Home Alone [Live]_Michael Nichols_Home Alive The Art of Self Defense Disc 1_1053_Spindle.mp3
  • 23_Sensitive Guys Don't Go Home Alone [Live]_Michael Nichols_Home Alive- The Art of Self Defense Disc 1_1053_Spindle.mp3
  • 23_Sensitive Guys Don't Go Home Alone [Live_Michael Nichols_Home Alive-The Art of Self Defense Disc 1_1053_Spindle.mp3
  • 22_Sensitive Guys Don't Go Home Alone-Live_Michael Nichols_Home Alive-The Art of Self Defense Disc 1_1053_Spindle.mp3
  • 23_Sensitive_Guys_Don't_Go_Home_Alone_[Live]_Michael_Nichols_Home_Alive_The_Art_of_Self_Defense_Disc_1_1053_Spindle.mp3

There's spaces, brackets, and underscores. What I really want is the following:

23_Sensitive Guys Don't Go Home Alone-Live_Michael Nichols_Home Alive The Art of Self-Defense-Disc-1_1053_Spindle.mp3

Additionally, there are several files which lack a track number, an artist, the album, and the Composer tag at the end. Many of those files do not include that information within the properties of the file. For example, what artist and album should be in the file name?, such as this: [Your Love Keeps Lifting Me] Higher and Higher [A Tribute to Jackie Wilson].mp3

All of that leads me back to a macro I have used in the past. The purpose of the macro is to identify the unique strings and provide a count. However, it ignores numbers so I will need to create some sort of masking to replace numbers, underscores, and dashes with a letter in order to use the macro that is described more fully than what I wrote in this post on this page: https://wordribbon.tips.net/T010761_Generating_a_Count_of_Word_Occurrences.html.

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