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Renaming using MP3/MP4/AAC tags

We are all familiar with MP3 and AAC music files, but did you know that these files contain additional information about the song, such as the name of the artist, the album, the song, etc?

This information is stored in so-called "MP3 Tags".

A Better Finder Rename starting from version 7.7.5 supports mp3 tags in the following file formats:

  • mp3
  • m4p (Apple FairPlay encrypted music files from the iTunes music store)
  • m4b (bookmark-able mp4 for audio books)
  • m4a (AAC encoded files most often from CDs ripped in iTunes)

Versions prior to version 7.7.5 can only decode .mp3 files due to restrictions imposed in QuickTime 7.

A Better Finder Rename can read the most common tags, including:

  1. the song's title
  2. the name of the album
  3. the name of the artist
  4. the track number on the album
  5. the total number of tracks on the album
  6. the number of CDs in a set
  7. the number of the current CD in the set

You can use this information to rename your files in a uniform manner.

The "Preferred Pattern:" input box contains the pattern to which the mp3 files will be renamed.

The settings pictured above would result in the following file names:

As you can see the <Artist> text has been replaced with the actual name of the artist, in this case "Garbage" and the same applies for the <Album>, <Song>, <TrackNum> and <NumTracks> texts.

The "Presets" popup menu contains some frequently used patterns, but you can of course create your own, e.g. "<Song> from <Artist>'s new album <Album>", etc.

Here is a complete list of all recognized pattern tags (as of release 7.7.5):

<Artist> The artist's name
<artist> The artist's name is lowercase characters
<ARTIST> The artist's name is UPPERCASE characters
<Artist_sentence_case> The artist's name in sentence case (first letter in uppercase, the rest in lowercase), e.g. "Massive attack"
<Artist_Capitalized> The artist's name in title case, e.g. "Massive Attack"
<Album> The name of the album
<album> The name of the album in lowercase characters
<ALBUM> The name of the album in UPPERCASE characters
<Album_sentence_case> The name of the album in sentence case (first letter in uppercase, the rest in lowercase), e.g. "Beautiful garbage"
<Album_Capitalized> The name of the album in title case, e.g. "Beautiful Garbage"
<NumTracks> The number of tracks on the album
<0NumTracks> The number of tracks on the album in double digits (e.g. 05, 20)
<Song> The name of the song
<song> The name of the song in lowercase characters
<SONG> The name of the song in UPPERCASE characters
<Song_sentence_case> The name of the song in sentence case (first letter in uppercase, the rest in lowercase), e.g. "Nobody loves you"
<Song_Capitalized> The name of the song in title case, e.g. "Nobody Loves You"
<TrackNum> The number of the track on the album
<0TrackNum> The number of the track on the album in double digits, (e.g. 01, 02, 03, .., 09, 10, 11, ..)
<CDNum> The number of the current CD in a set of CDs (such as audio books, compilations, etc.)
<0CDNum> The number of the current CD in a set of CDs in double digits (e.g. 01, 02, 03, .., 09, 10, 11, ..)
<NumCDs> The number of CDs in the current set of CDs
<0NumCDs> The number of CDs in the current set of CDs in double digits (e.g. 01, 02, 03, .., 09, 10, 11, ..)

Dealing with missing, incomplete or inconsistent MP3 tags

One problem that you may encounter when renaming files from mp3 tags is that it is not unusual for hand-ripped music files to have incorrect, inconsistent or simply missing mp3 tags.

Music files that are sold online by a reputable source, such as the iTunes music store, usually do not have this problem because some care has been taken to ensure that the mp3 tag information is correct.

You can avoid this problem by editing the mp3 tags in iTunes before renaming the files in A Better Finder Rename.

A Better Finder Rename itself also provides a mechanisms for dealing with missing tags.

In the screenshot above, you have no doubt wondered about the "Preferred Pattern", "Fallback Pattern 1", "Fallback Pattern 2"... fields.

This mechanism deals with missing tags by applying the first pattern for which all information is available:

When the preferred pattern contains information which is not available for a particular music file, the program "falls back" to the first fallback pattern. If the first fallback pattern requires information which is not available, the program falls back to the second fallback pattern, etc.

Let us illustrate this with a small example:

Say "Metal Heart" is missing the track number and the number of tracks. The preferred pattern will not be applied as it requires both the track number and the number of tracks. The program will fall back to the 1st fallback pattern, which also requires the track number.

The second fallback pattern is the first for which all the required information is available, so it will be applied and the song will be renamed to "Garbage - Bleed Like Me - Metal Heart.m4p".

Dealing with problematic files

Sometimes, you can see the tags in iTunes that A Better Finder Rename will stubbornly ignore. The reason for this is that iTunes appears to have its own id3 tags extraction routines that are much more forgiving than those in QuickTime.

A particular problem (identified by an Apple Engineer) is that Quicktime will ignore meta-data that is not located with the first 96k of the file. Technically this is fine as the parts of the file that identify its content should according to the standard be encoded as early in the file as possible, but in the real-world this is not always the case. In those situations, it's best to use Advanced -> Convert Selection to AAC on the file.

This creates a "properly encoded" version of the file that work fine.