11 replies to this topic

[danter]

I am finally cleaning up my Dbase of ripped music. New rips where needed and tidying up the 400gb odd of existing files.
One issue is, a lot of the folder names, file names and files (ie Artist / Album / Track) have underscores instead of spaces.
Purely an aesthetic thing - but one that annoys me. When looking for a freebie program to batch run the lot, I came across a few 'dont do it' comments with regard to it creating problems with searches etc.

So, to replace underscore with space or not?
And if so, a simple program or script (and how to run it for a program-challenged individual).

[gypr1961]

Don't know what problems there would be with spaces unless you're in the command line, jriver etc all seem to have no problem with spaces for me. There are loads of file renaming progs around. Not tried it but have a look here http://www.fastfilerenamer.com/. I've used similar progs before on thousands of files and never had a problem. Try on a sample first though!

[sjay]

spaces cause problems from dos and unix levels, for them to be correctly seen you have to add/to/them or is itiforget....it something though.

this is why you see scene files with_and syntax.like.this

[LogicprObe]

Never tried it on music files.
There's always some little idiosyncrasy in my experience.

[Chickenism]

Hi Danter,

Timely thread, because I'm trying to clean up my own stuff atm, and also clean up and sort another 400-odd gb of stuff for someone else. Brought about because we were trying to find something using his Squeezebox the other night and all we got plenty of "Track 01...Unknown Album" etc. Then, a Ray Charles album came up in "40 Classical Masterpieces." Plus, like you, grammatical errors annoy the bejeebus out of me.

I took the task on because I have the time to do it. I still have the time, but am quickly running out of the requisite patience.

I've ended up forking out for the dbpoweramp 'reference' thingy. It's a wonderful thing to be able to edit/change or add to ID tags. Simplicity itself too, even for me. So, thoroughly recommended for the measly 38 bucks or whatever it cost. Will save you a lot of heartache.

But why, in dear god's name why, does it not change the file/song name. I can change album names, artists, genre, virtually anything except for the bloody song name. So what happens is you end up changing or adding to tags using poweramp, but then having to do all the song names again by 'renaming' the file. Gah! And then I re-did a few of mine, but iTunes didn't pick up on the changes, for some reason. Double gah!

gypr1961 - thanks for the file renaming link; I've downloaded it and it appears to be a handy and simple program to use Word of warning though - if anyone's going to use it to modify file/song names, do any tag editing first. I made the mistake of changing an album's worth of song names using file re-namer, but then I couldn't get into dbpoweramp to add album and artist details. The right-click option had disappeared. Hmmm.

"There's always some little idiosyncrasy in my experience." LP, much more than just one, I think!

Cheers, Dave

[Dan Gravell]

Heh - this is something I've come up against too. It's especially annoying when you purchase new music and find they operate different conventions.

I always convert whitespace to underscores because I am a Linux user and I want to write scripts easily; having spaces in filenames makes this more difficult.

That said, if you are a heavy user of the filesystem for playing/synchronising music folders I can definitely see the aesthetic benefits of spaces in preference to underscores.

[John H. Darko]

(Dan - welcome to Australia, buddy!)

[atomictheory]

After much bastardising of my music collection by various programs over the past 10 plus years - to the point where I swear I had more misspelled, incorrectly named and empty folders than actual music. I tried a number of solutions that either made the problem worse, did half the job or just got me no where.

I recently found the [Delete] button and took with wild abandon to my collection. Problem solved. Now I just have a bunch of ripping to do. Again.

[danter]

Well again, after spending a lot of time getting the files in pretty good order, the Logitec Media Server has again made a mockery of my work. FIle double ups, empty folders, 3 x naming conventions. This is after ensuring all was right with the world. But at least this time I copied the lot over to a different location so that the source file remained intact.

Must be me. I know its me. I hate this crap. Back to CDs maybe. Or just a small digitised library of just stuff I actually play alot. And no Various Artists. This is doing my head in.

[datafone]

I have had issues with players libraries when not separating with either an underscore, or a full stop.

I think there needs to be something as spaces don't work, or at least have never worked for me.

Edited by datafone, 16 April 2012 - 11:16 PM.

[GregWormald]

At the present time I have 17,000+ songs in 1300+ albums and there are only nice readable spaces.
iTunes 10.6.1 on a Mac.

Greg

[cz2000]

I normally just leave them. I experimented with Bulk Rename Utility which was a great software tool. But be careful if you have any cue sheets or playlists, it will break them.