I've been using the same string to move and rename folders via the File Operations menu for quite some time. I basically made it to suite my needs and music collection. Following:



The resultant display would be something like 2008 - Some Blood (-aps LAME3.90), or in the case of an album with a '/' in the tag, like in the case of split 7" records, it will check for the existence of a slash, if so then it will append '- VA' after the date portion, and put a '-' were the slash would be in the album name. In the preview dialog this is what happens, but when I actually run it the '-' is a '_'. I imagine that the $replace function cannot be used in this context for some reason. So my questions are two:

1. Is this on purpose, or something that's an oversight/bug?

2. Is there any other way around this? Aside from retagging my collection.

It's not a huge problem to have to manually change the '_' to a '-', this is just something that I've been wondering about for a while now.

Thanks for any help!

There is a bug in the old version of the file operations commands that are implemented in the masstagger component: The preview will not always show exactly what the actual output will be. This problem does not exist in the newer foo_fileops.

In both components, if tag fields contain characters that may not be used in file names, then these characters will be replaced by an underscore before your title formatting code sees them. This is done intentionally to avoid the accidental creation of directories or invalid file names. Otherwise, every use of a tag field would have to be enclosed in a $replace() expression. This feature cannot be disabled.

Ahhh, that makes perfect sense, and is pretty intuitive on the devs part. Thank you for the reply and explanation...I guess that I'm stuck editing it manually!