I just recently installed foobar2000 and find it quite usefull for sorting my playlists and tracks. But I have a 'small' problem

I want my mp3s to be formatted like shown below.



The problem is however, that I keep all my mp3s without ID3 tags. But I imagine due to foobar's large customizibility this can be overcomed. My /mp3 folder structure looks like this:

Artist - Album
(i.e. Gorgoroth - Destroyer)

My files are titled as follows:

Artist - Track# - Title
(i.e. Gorgoroth - 01 - Destroyer)

Now I would really like to know how it would be possible for foobar to automaticlly format them as shown in the screenshot (those have ID3 tags btw). I imagine it could be done so by setting foobar's 'Title formatting' up so it would look up a folder name and put everything before a '-' (minus) under Artist and everything after it under Album. For tracks it could be similar; everything before the first '-' is artist, between two '-' is the track number and after the last '-' is the title.

I am struggling to find out how this could be done but am not familiar with foobar just yet so any help would be appreciated.

However if anyone knows of a program that could be configured the same way as I explained and would put that data into ID3 tags instead, that would be helpfull.

btw, renaming them by hand is hardly an option as I have a large music collection.

Thank you.

EDIT: Is there a way to display the track time anywhere else besides the bottom. As it is tough to notice right now.

Use the Masstagger plugin.

Select a bunch of files in your foobar playlist.
Right click > Masstagger > Edit tags (brings up Masstagger dialog)
Add action > Guess values from filename

You could try
%artist% - $num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%

It should interpret proper ID3 tags from there. Then (well, you should have done this anyway), read the title formatting help page included with foobar's install. Spend some time reading it, it proves to be very helpful.

If you don't want to mess with ID3 tags, you'll have to develop a guessing scheme, which is far harder to script, especially if you're new to formatting.

Or use:
%artist% - %album%\%artist% - $num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%
as the scheme so it will pick up the album name as well.

Note: by default, foobar writes to MP3s in a tag format known as APEv2. This should be ok for you, since your files don't have existing tags anyway, but not all other players support APE (for reading/writing tags that is, they will still play the file just fine). If you'd like to write tags in some other format (or a combination of formats), you can fiddle with the options in the preferences under Playback -> Input -> Standard inputs -> MP3 tag writing.

Thanks to both, that worked.

I would still like to know if there's a plugin or something that displays the time elapsed/remaining somwhere else than the statusbar.

Also, some files I drag onto the playlist don't display the Artist, are different color or screw something up. What I would really like is if someone can help me out here, because I really don't have the time to study this formatting thing.
I would like to set it so that I have a playlist that displays the album name/year/etc. but for the default playlist and others I just want it to display the regular Artisti/Title. The roblem arrives when I put some random songs in the playlist and it really messes it up. Some Artist aren't even shown, some have different color,...

Will paste a screenshot if you don't understand what I mean.


If someone can help me out that'd be great. Thanks!

Main window title supports...
%_time_elapsed% returns elapsed time
%_time_remaining% returns remaining time until track ends
%_time_total% returns total length of track
%_time_elapsed_seconds% returns elapsed time in seconds
%_time_remaining_seconds% returns remaining time in seconds
%_time_total_seconds% returns total track length in seconds
%_ispaused% returns '1' if playback is paused and empty string otherwise
...also.


http://pelit.koillismaa.fi/fb2k/index.php
Tons of well written strings there.

OK, that helped, thanks!

One more thing though. Is it possible to set the 'Album Art panel' so it would look inside a folder (i.e. C:\covers\) and display a cover with the same name as the folder name with mp3s.

i.e.: for mp3s in 'Artist - Album' it would like for 'C:\covers\Artisti - Album.jpg'.

Try adding this as a source in the Album Art panel preferences:



If it doesn't work, the first thing I would try is removing all the single quotes.

Thanks, that worked. Thanks everyone.