Changing multiple songs' info en masse

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Level 1

9 points

Changing multiple songs' info en masse

I recently added around 2000 mp3s to my iTunes library. There are a couple of problems with the metadata that I could change for each individually:

- A lot of the song titles begin with numbers, such as "016 - Thriller" or "100 - Daydream" etc, and I'd like to get rid of the numbers, along with the spaces leading up to the actual title.

-Some other song titles all end with ".mp3" and I'd like to get rid of this as well.

Is there some third-party application that can change thousands of songs' info in just a few clicks?
I tried using Automator, but that has limited options for iTunes.

Thanks in advance...

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Jul 1, 2009 2:52 PM

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Answer 1

Onceler

Level 4

1,710 points

Jul 1, 2009 3:13 PM in response to peavster

Select all of the songs that you want to edit. Right-click on one of them. Choose "Get Info" from the popup menu. A dialog will appear that will allow you to change settings for all of the selected songs.

Edit: Sorry. I just noticed that you want to change the song titles. The method I mentioned works on info other than the song titles (unless you want the all of the titles to be exactly the same which seems quite unlikely).

Message was edited by: Onceler

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Answer 2

peavster Author

Level 1

9 points

Jul 1, 2009 3:15 PM in response to Onceler

Onceler:

Not even close. I don't need to give all the songs a single album or artist.

In the case of the ".mp3" songs, I need to delete the ".mp3" while having each song retain it's actual title.

With the numbered songs ("009 - Poundcake"), I need to have the first 6 characters of each title deleted, but again, still retaining the individual titles of each song.

The "Get Info" function in iTunes can only assign a single Artist, Album, etc to all the selected songs.

Thanks anyways...
Anyone else?

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Answer 3

turingtest2

Level 10

278,263 points

Jul 1, 2009 3:42 PM in response to peavster

How about TriTag? If you don't like the look of that use your favourite search engine to look for *Mac tag editors*. What you want to do should be covered by *filename > id3 tag* features. Once you've corrected the tags, select the tracks in iTunes, Get Info, then click OK *without manking any changes* to get iTunes to update its database with the current tag data.

tt2

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Answer 4

Jul 29, 2009 3:26 AM in response to peavster

You need something like this Applescript: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=removenchars

"This script lets you delete a specified number of characters from either the beginning or the ending of the Song Name, Album, Artist, Comments or Composer tag of each selected track. For example, delete the initial digits and the space from "01 First Track", "02 Second Track", etcetera."

I've used it a lot and it does the job.

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