Categorizing by Decades

[MallyV]

Hey!! I have purchased the Standard Version of SongKong to help me organize my music libraries, however unfortunately I am having a difficult time navigating the interface.
My DJ library consists of around 10,000 songs and my hope was to run the metadata on all songs and have the tool create folders such as 1990> Pop/ or 2010> House… etc

I have watched the video tutorials on YouTube and used ChatGPT to try and guide me but I am still lost on how to implement this. I was wondering if you could please give me a little guidance? I believe this tool is fantastic, but my understanding is not…

[paultaylor]

So basically there are two stages:

• Run Fix Songs to improve the metadata within the files
• Run Rename Files to reorganize the folders/files based on the metadata

It is generally best to run Fix Songs first, check results and maybe do some manual editing for albums not identified before worrying about renaming the files.

When you do want to run Rename Files you need to decide/create on a rename mask to do what you want.

If you want more help the thing to do is run Fix Songs and then Create Support Files and I can review your results, and then help you with creating a rename mask if ready for that.

[MallyV]

Hi Paul, thanks so much for the very prompt response. I run a sample folder through ‘Fix Songs’ and proceeded to ‘Rename Files’ and this is where I get lost. I don’t need the tool to rename files, just use the Year/Genre from Metadata to create folders from this group of files based on Year/Genre only… I don’t see where I can create a rename mask. Please see the screenshot attached. Also I’m not sure where the ‘Create Support Files’ is located…

[paultaylor]

Hi, okay so we split filepaths into three parts Base Folder, Sub Folder and Filename

e.g

• Base Folder /Music
• Sub Folder U2/The Joshua Tree
• Filename U2 - Without or Without You.mp3

Options on the Rename Files tab applies the Rename mask to the your path to replace the Sub Folder and Filename part (whereas the Move Files tab replaces the Base Folder)

You can use the Rename filename part only option to only modify the Filename part of the filepath, but what you want to do is only modify the Sub Folder part and we dont currently have a simple option for that.

However, not a problem we can still do this because you can create a rename mask that refers to the existing filename. So go to Preferences:Filename Masks and select Add to create a new mask

and then enter the mask.

I’m not clear if you want to keep existing subfolders but just add Year/Genre before them in which case use

(albumyear.length>4 ? albumyear.substring(0,4):albumyear) + '/' + genre + '/'+ filepath_subfolder + '/'+ filepath_filename

or if you just want Year/Genre subfolders in case use this

(albumyear.length>4 ? albumyear.substring(0,4):albumyear) + '/' + genre + '/' + filepath_filename

Then select OK to save it.

You can then start Rename Files and select the mask to use as the Rename mask (and possibly Compilation Rename mask)

But if you set Rename Files based on metadata to Yes, for all files then please note if Genre or Year metadata is missing then those subfolders will not be created for those songs as the example screenshot above shows.

Create Support Files is available from the Admin menu