NOTE: I appreciate any advice you can give me, but I just want to let you know that retagging the mp3s is not an option. Please don't suggest this to me! The files are read-only from a networked share. Thanks!

I am having a lot of fun customizing fubar2000. I have a few questions that I am stuck on. I am wondering what I should do if %tracknumber% returns a 0 most of the time. Rather than reading the ID3 tag, which was obviously not set correctly, is there another method I can use? Such as seeing what number line the track is on in the m3u playlist, or the order of the files when sorted alphabetically?

Once I get that figured out, I'll need to figure out how to determine if a disc is Various Artist or not. I plan on having the Various Artist albums below regular albums. %various% will not work because I do not want to retag. I'm clueless here. Once I get it figured out, I will use the custom playlist sort plugin for this, I guess? I vision having a playlist sorted like this:

first these
[Artist A] [Year A] [NON-VariousArtist Album A] [Track Number A]
[Artist B] [Year B] [NON-VariousArtist Album B] [Track Number B]
[Artist C] [Year C] [NON-VariousArtist Album C] [Track Number C]

then these
[Various Artist Disc Title A] [Track Number A]
[Various Artist Disc Title B] [Track Number B]
[Various Artist Disc Title C] [Track Number C]

then finally, these
[untitled/bad tag A]
[untitled/bad tag B]
[untitled/bad tag C]

And finally, if anyone can be so kind as to email me their foo_playcount.dll to sauce*at*notamused/dot/org, because the website that hosts it is down. Its a small file and I will rehost it temporarily once I get it.

The only way any tagz script can format your songs into albums is by using tracknumber, and it also needs a way to tell if its various. There is no way to know what song is before after or even near a given song with tagz. Most people use %album artist% or %various%
Unless you use a particular (and consistant) file naming scheme, like
Artist/Album/tracknumber - title
and Various Artists/Album/tracknumber -title
then I think you are out of luck, sorry.

I'd say 90% of my filenames are formatted like this:

01-artist1-track1.mp3
02-artist1-track2.mp3
03-artist1-track3.mp3

Therefore, this string works fairly well.

$num($cut(%_filename%,$sub($strchr(%_filename%,-),1)),3)

It cuts out the information before the first "dash"

This does prove a problem for the other 10% of the collection, which may appear like this:

artist-01-track_title.mp3
01_artist-track_title.mp3
001-artist-track_title.mp3

I suppose a more complicated string could work. Maybe I'll mess with it later. Is there any way to determine if the result of my string is a numeric?

I have an idea. It would only work if I can read information off any %_playlist_number. If I can't do that, just say no, if yes, please read on...

Am I able to do something like this?
Compare the current %artist% to $add(%_playlist_number%,1) artist. Then compare the current album to $add(%_playlist_number%,1) album. If the album is the same, but the artist is different, then it will be tagged as Various Artist.

**// edit // **
Nevermind. I just realized this would never work because %_playlist_number% is definitely not valid for an album sorting function

you could just have a "various artist" directory with the album folders in that and use something like

What a great idea! Thanks.

I added another directory, OST

Is this how it is properly formatted?

$if($stricmp($directory(%_path%,2),'Various Artists'),'Various Artists')$if($stricmp($directory(%_path%,2),'OST'),'OST') - %artist

Wouldn't it be


You do want it like