[SOLVED] Bulk renaming music files to <songname>.ext

cranon · 12-31-2018, 03:53 PM

I have a bunch of music files. All the metadata tags are correct but the naming of the files is bad. How should i go about bulk renaming all my music files to songname.ext

RandomTroll · 12-31-2018, 09:08 PM

Extract the title from the file's tags with id3tool or id3info or mediainfo (what I use), use that to rename the file.

Code:

for file in *.mp3
do
Title=`id3tool $file | grep "Song Title:" | cut -d: -f2 | tr ' ' '_'`
mv $file "$Title".mp3
done

If you can tolerate spaces in file names you can omit the last step. I don't like either so I capitalize all first letters, which is more complicated.

syg00 · 12-31-2018, 09:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cranon

IHow should i go about bulk renaming all my music files to songname.ext

Veryyyy carefully.
I might be inclined to echo that mv command before committing the deed ...

RandomTroll · 12-31-2018, 11:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by syg00

Veryyyy carefully.
I might be inclined to echo that mv command before committing the deed ...

Yes! I've screwed up in the past. For something like this, I run it with echo first to see what it looks like. I would also use 'mv -n' to make sure I didn't overwrite anything. Maybe I'd make the target another, empty, directory to look at the results first.

Note that the programs I recommend to extract the name have leading spaces, which would leave the target name with a lot of leading _ if you convert spaces to _s. I do this a lot and have a renaming routine that strips leading spaces, punctuation marks, metacharacters (such as ()*?/\), uppercases the first letter of each word, leaving a space-less, punctuation-less, camel-case target name. It also converts UTF and HTML metacharacters to ASCII-closest so all file names are ASCII. (I have classical music and use diacritical marks in tags but not file names.)

lleb · 01-10-2019, 07:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cranon

I have a bunch of music files. All the metadata tags are correct but the naming of the files is bad. How should i go about bulk renaming all my music files to songname.ext

I have used:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

for i in ./*old_string*; do mv -- "$i" "${i//old_string/new_string_here}"; done

doing just want you are looking for. This will leave the extension the same and take a file named:

foo.blah.jusnk.werlqjewrpoyuqewhjqwekrhjk.ext and move it to nice.file.name.ext