Changing Titles in Itunes (artist-song title.mp3)

Question

Changing Titles in Itunes (artist-song title.mp3)

Probably has been mentioned a 1000 times before, but I couldn't find anything exactly like this, so here it goes.

I've added thousands of songs to the Itunes library.
They show up like "title.mp3"
I want them to show up like "artist-title.mp3" (like the filename).

Is there any easy way to change a lot of titles at once? Tried retagging with several apps, but no luck so far.

Windows XP

Posted on Apr 4, 2008 5:36 PM

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Answer 1

Chris CA

Level 10

82,434 points

Apr 4, 2008 5:40 PM in response to Big Leblowski

No. You will have to change the tag for the song title.

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Answer 2

Apr 4, 2008 5:51 PM in response to Chris CA

Well, I've tried that. But came to the conclusion that it doesn't work for some reason. Changing the title (in tag&rename, for example) does work. But I don't think it's possible to do that with more than 1 file at a time.

I'm tempted to think there must be some application that makes it easier to change song titles. Can't imagine that it's hard to make a script for it, like "title=filename" or something similar.

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Answer 3

ed2345

Level 9

62,462 points

Apr 4, 2008 6:26 PM in response to Big Leblowski

When you rip in iTunes, the filename is the title, and the only option is to include or exclude the track number.

You can rip with other programs that offer more flexibility. For example, Media Player lets you include the artist and/or the album name in the filename. Make sure to set WMP to rip in MP3, and then the files can be directly added to iTunes.

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Answer 4

Apr 5, 2008 9:33 AM in response to Big Leblowski

Big Leblowski wrote:
Changing the title does work. But I don't think it's possible to do that with more than 1 file at a time.

Right, you can't batch-edit song titles because iTunes doesn't expect multiple songs to have one title. At least you can edit the titles directly in the library pane. Click a song and press F2 (or pause 1 second and click the song again), and now you can type a title. Arrow down to the next song, press F2, and keep going. Once the songs are renamed, you can batch-edit the artist, album, and year in the Get Info window.

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Answer 5

turingtest2

Level 10

272,725 points

Apr 5, 2008 11:34 AM in response to Big Leblowski

You can't make iTunes change it's default file tagging rules, but if you really want to make it harder to read your song titles (10 tracks all starting with "The Sensational Alex Harvey Band" will be pretty indistinguishable on an iPod) then any common tagger should do it... e.g. Tagger, Magic File Renamer etc. The trick is to get iTunes to re-read the tags after you've updated them externally. Apparently all you need to do is to select all the files in iTunes, get info., then click OK without making any changes. Before you proceed just make sure you know how to convert the titles back if/when you find it makes life harder in iTunes & on your iPod.

tt2

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