Foobar2000:Components/Masstagger (foo masstag)

picmixer's "The Unofficial Guide to FB's Masstagger"

FB's masstagger tends to be quite a convenient tool when editing the information of tags in multiple files. I will first briefly list the options you have using it. Basically you can choose to either use it to edit tags or to rename files from the FB2K context menu. Here I will go into details of the first option. Although the second option should become quite self explanatory after reading this.

Basically there are several actions you can choose from to perform.

Actions to perform:

Set value Sets desired tag field (artist, album,custom,etc) to whatever you enter in the masstagger input window. Add value Adds desired tag field and sets it to whatever you enter in the masstagger input window. Remove value Removes desired tag field.

Remove all values Removes all tag fields (who would have guessed) Copy value Copies one tag field to another.

Guess values from filename Guesses values from filename and lets you enter a certain fromatting pattern for it. For example if your files are named artist - album_title.

Enter %artist% - %album%_%title as formatting pattern.

Format value from other fields This is where it becomes interesting. This option lets you enter a specific formatting pattern for any tag field you wish to edit or create.

Note that when using complex formatting patterns I would recommend to first format a temporary %temp% tag with the desired pattern and then copy that one into the value that you wish. Afterwards you can remove the temp value. When processing a large batch of files you could probably just do a test run on one of the files and then do the rest in one go. Think about what you are doing beforehand though. After all I don't want to be held responsible for messing up anyones music collection.

I will explain how to create formatting strings for different situations further down .

Remove all values except for... Does just as it says, removes all values and lets you specify wich ones not to remove in a second field in the following pattern ie.:

%artist%;%title%;etc

Auto track number Haven't really tried out this one in depth, guess it does kind of what it says.

Split multiple artist field Same thing goes for this one. Never really used it yet.

Note that it is possible to perform several of these actions at once and in that case the order of those actions can be very important. So removing field A before copying it to field B is probably a bad Idea and should be performed the other way around, etc.