MP3 Tags From Filenames

If you have all necessary information about songs from your music collection either in tags or in filenames, there is no need to download any information from the internet. In the first case, you can rename files using information from their tags and get nice descriptive filenames. When there are no tags, but all information is available in filenames and folder names, you can easily extract the details and save them into tags. Both renaming and extracting information can be done with mp3Tag Pro.

Let's consider a simple example:

There are no ID3 tags in our files, as shown on the screenshot. On the other hand, we can easily see that filenames consist of track numbers and titles. Not enough? Well, take a look at the "Folder" field at the top of the screenshot above.

Our folder structure gives us further information:

• Release year.
• Name of the album.
• Name of the artist.
• Genre.

So, in fact, we can fill out all basic tag fields: track number, title, artist, album, year, genre.

Select all files and click the "Generate tags" button below the list. This will open the "Generate tags" window:

On the right, the "Tags generator" tab is selected. Just below the tab name, make sure that the "Fields from tags" is set to "Overwrite" and check all fields that you want to import. In our example: track #, title, artist, genre, album, year.

Now everything is about entering the correct format into the "Format" field in the upper left corner of the window. There is no pre-installed format that would extract information from our filenames, so we should enter it manually. How?

First, our filenames look like "01 - Dancing Queen.mp3". So, the general pattern is "track# - title.mp3". Filename extension can be ignored, which gives us "track# - title".

Let's translate this into the language that mp3Tag Pro would understand. Instead of words, we should use variables. They are listed next to the "Format" field.

"track#" translates into "%#", "title" can be replaced with "%T". As a result, we get: "%# - %T".

This was easy.

A small test: would this format work, if our filenames were like "01 _ Dancing Queen.mp3"?

The answer is: no. We would need to enter "%# _ %T" instead.

And what about "01 Dancing Queen.mp3"?

Answer: try "%# %T".

Some further information is available in folder names. To notify the program that we intend to extract information from folder names, we use the backslash character: "\". If you do not use this character in your format, no folder names will be processed. Using several backslash characters in our format, we can go as far up as the root of the drive, if necessary.

Take a look at the path on the first screenshot once again. We could use this part: "Pop\Abba\1992 - Gold - Greatest Hits\". Basically, it's "Genre\Artist\Year - Album\". Now, if we replace words with variables, looking them up on the list, we will get this: "%G\%A\%Y - %L\".

Combine that with the first part:

%G\%A\%Y - %L\%# - %T

This is exactly the format we need. After entering it, we can see our future tags in the preview area. Click "Generate tags" to save the tags into the files.

mp3Tag Pro closes the window, and now our files are properly tagged:

This example shows tagging a single album. However, this method can be applied to thousands of files at once. They only need to follow the same filename pattern.

Tags: mp3Tag Pro

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