Reversing File Names?

[ShadyOrb09]

My dad downloads lots of music and he asked me if there is a way to reverse the names of the songs.

Example:
1. Eminem-Not Afraid
To
2.Not Afraid-Eminem

I didn't think there was a program that could do it.

He has like 500+ songs he wants to rename and manually doing it would be annoying.

Any help would be great, thanks!

 

[USAFRet]

1. Create a folder for each artist
2. Put Eminem files in the Eminem folder.
3. Use something like Renamer to trim the file names down to just the track name
http://www.den4b.com/?x=products&product=renamer


Or, you could do a lot of C# or VBA coding to do this.

 

[ShadyOrb09]

Yeah, that's not really an option for him, he doesn't want to have to make all those folders.

 

[USAFRet]

Well, anything else will be more involved.
I don't know of an application that can automagically turn AA-BB into BB-AA.

And in my mind, that would be FAR more confusing for file navigation. But, it's his system, so...

 

[USAFRet]

Actually, though, you could use ReNamer to more or less do that.

Select all the Eminem files
Remove the "Eminem -" text
You now have "Not Afraid"
Add the text "-Eminem" to the end of the file name.

Repeat for each artiste'.

 

[skit75]

With a library over 200GB.... I found that it was the mouse that slowed me down. 500 tracks is like 30-40 albums/directories? Learn the keyboard shortcuts for creating and navigating directories. It will save a ton of time by not touching the mouse.

 

[McHenryB]

If it was me I would write a quick-and-dirty Perl program to do the job. But, asuming that you and your Dad don't know Perl, have a look at this program: http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php It may take a little experimentation, and you'll need to read the manual, but I believe that it can do the job.

Having said that, I agree with USAFRet; this is not a logical way of tackling the problem. I always store music files in nested folders - one folder per artist and then, under that, one folder per album.

PS Section 3.9 of the manual gives an example of doing almost exactly what you want (not quite but very near). I'm sure that with a little thought it could easily be adapted to your case.

 

[ShadyOrb09]

Yeah he doesn't want to do anything manual :/ So I guess he'll just have to deal with it. Thanks guys!

 

[USAFRet]

Yeah he doesn't want to do anything manual :/ So I guess he'll just have to deal with it. Thanks guys!

There is no automatic way to make crappy file management even crappier.

 

[ShadyOrb09]

Yeah he doesn't want to do anything manual :/ So I guess he'll just have to deal with it. Thanks guys!

There is no automatic way to make crappy file management even crappier.

Yeah, I know it's just he wants it that way I guess.

He tried explaining it a little better to me and he said something more like

"I downloaded the Top 500 Rock Songs and the way the man named the files was odd so he wants to change it without going through 500 songs :/"

 

[USAFRet]

Is there any metadata associated with each file? An id3 tag?

If so, an application like iTunes or Songbird can pick that up and sort/filter by whatever is in there. Artist, rank in the 500, whatever exists...

 

[Darkbreeze]

Having gone through similar scenarios when creating lists for all the songs used in my old DJ business, I can pretty well assure you there is no method for batch renaming those in reverse order. I had to manually rename every song since I wanted the name and artist to remain in the filename. Over 35,000 of them, way over. It took months. Had to do the same thing for my karaoke files as well. Another 20,000. I'd recommend just leaving them as is unless you want to spend a few hours each night renaming.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Is there any metadata associated with each file? An id3 tag?

If so, an application like iTunes or Songbird can pick that up and sort/filter by whatever is in there. Artist, rank in the 500, whatever exists...

The only problem with this is that you're likely to find a lot of them have had the id3 data stripped or never had it to start with.

 

[USAFRet]

Is there any metadata associated with each file? An id3 tag?

If so, an application like iTunes or Songbird can pick that up and sort/filter by whatever is in there. Artist, rank in the 500, whatever exists...

The only problem with this is that you're likely to find a lot of them have had the id3 data stripped or never had it to start with.

Right.

 

[Darkbreeze]

But it could minimize the NUMBER of files that require renaming as surely SOME of them have it.

 

[skit75]

Yeah he doesn't want to do anything manual :/ So I guess he'll just have to deal with it. Thanks guys!

There is no automatic way to make crappy file management even crappier.

:lol:

 

[g-unit1111]

Yeah he doesn't want to do anything manual :/ So I guess he'll just have to deal with it. Thanks guys!

There is no automatic way to make crappy file management even crappier.

Nope, learned this the hard way! :lol: