i am attemting to clean up tags in my files. here is the issue:

in the ARTIST field, my tags are currently written as follows:

WHEN THERE IS A YEAR IN THE DATE TAG

2006 - The Ereaser
2006 - Sam's Town
2005 - The Way Up

WHEN THERE IS NOTHING IN THE DATE TAG

_ - Landmarks
_ - In The Name Of
_ - Idiot's Rule

so, the current format was written as:

%date% - %album%

what i am trying to do, is remove all of the text (either the date or the "_ - "), before the actual name of the album.

is there a way to trim the text?

thanks...

Hi schnittlich, I think this should work:

Format value from other fields...

Destination field name: ARTIST
Formatting Pattern:



This assumes you currently have 7 prepended "junk" characters in the artist field for those files with %date%, and 4 for those without (I based this on the examples you provided). 100 is just an arbitrary long number - I assume you don't have any artist fields greater than 100 characters!

This may be obvious but try it on a few test files first before running it on your whole collection.

edit: you mention ARTIST field at the beginning of your post, though it sounds like you're really trying to clean up ALBUM instead (?)

thanks!!!

you are correct - i meant ALBUM.

is there a simpler script that just says:

remove the first 4 characters of the ALBUM tag
or
remove the first 7 characters of the ALBUM tag

can i just use:

$substr(%artist%,5,100)
or
$substr(%artist%,8,100)

Use "Guess values from other fields"

Source format: %album%
Guessing pattern: %% - %album%

... or %date% - %album% if you want to keep the DATE field.