Tagging or Filenameing - Change tags or xlobby?

[rhinoman]

I have my entire 17000 track misuc collection ripped via EAC into APE usiing the filenaming convention

%N - %T - %I - %Y

or for Various Artist Comnpilations

%N - %T - %A - %I - %Y

A friend that I introduced to xlobby recently showed me the search by track name feature of xlobby where you can begin to type the track title and it filters the tracks by the charachters typed, a great feature.....

My problem is that all of my tracks appear as

01 - "track title1" - genre - year
01 - "track title2" - genre - year
etc

Unless I know the track number (unlikly) I cannot use the search by track feature.

Do I

a) alter my database so that id tags are correctly read by xlobby (as my friend has done)
b) is there a way that xlobby can read my existing naming struture but ignore the track number in the track title search?

I look forwad to an easy solution.......PLEASE!

[C-moi]

What do you want to do ?
Change all the name of yours tracks or change only the tags ?
i use tagscanner (freeware) to change the tags of my tracks
http://xdev.narod.ru/tagscan_e.htm
and i use Ant Renamer (freeware) to change the track's name
http://www.antp.be/software/renamer
but i don't know if tagscanner can change the tags of the APE files.
Try this :
put 3 or 4 albums with your ape files in one folder (named albums by example)
run tagscanner choose Tag processor / Settings and press Browse
select the folder "albums" so Tagscanner will scan all the tracks of this folder !
Task : Generate tag from filename
Existing TAG : choose Overwrite
Title : %2
Artist :
Album :
Genre : %3
Year : %4

For Album and Artist you cant use the name of the folder ...
by example my albums are named : Artist - Name of album so for album i can use %D2
See the help (in tagscanner)
Press Generate button when you have finished.

[rhinoman]

Thansk for the reply and suggested programs.

What do you want to do ?

I want to be able to use the track search facility but cannot because when you start the search it lists trach numbers before track names.

I guessed it could be done by retagging the entire collection but hoped it may be possible by making xlobby do the work.....metamasks???

[rhinoman]

Anybody know if this can be achieved in Xlobby with metamasks?

[stevenhanna6]

did you tag your ape files with id3v2 or something..you must have? I wonder if xlobby just isnt picking up the tags...if you go into the database editor a track should have the following info for a tack

artists
trackname
tracknumber
trackfilename

[rhinoman]

I read somewhere that ape is not capable of displaying the idv2 info although its there???

If I go into the music databse, edit, click on a track, it comes up with 4 items, tracknumber, trackname, trackfilename, and artist. Tracknumber contains nothing, both trackname and trackfilename both contain the windows filename ie 1 - the king without a crown - pop - 1980
Artist has the folder name from this example ie ABC.

Everything was ripped in EAC with the idv2 supposedly included. I was hoping that we may be able to make xlobby extract the info needed from the trackfilename but if I have to mass retag the database I will.

[stevenhanna6]

Can you send me one of your ape files? a small one if possible nothing over 100mb. I'll take a look at it and see if the tags are there and can be extracted....its better to use the tags instead of the filename for info because there is a limit to a filenam length so you might not get all the info on there. If there is nothing in the file I'll post the metamask info to extract it the info and make sure it works.

mailto:steve@xlobby.com

[rhinoman]

Thanks for resolving this Steve, for anyone else that is having problems with this you now need to download the latest exe and delete and reimport your database to make it work.