File Name and Tag Coordinator Options

File Name Format: Now there are four main parts to that people like to include in their MP3 filenames (not including the .mp3 extension) – Album, Track Number, Artist and Title. The File Name Format box allows you to define how the resulting file name will look, such as the separator between these different parts, and whether there should always be two digits for the Track Number if it is less than 10, or just one digit (i.e., 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12 as opposed to 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12). The following key shows the symbols to use to represent the constituent parts of the file name:

File name formats are defined by placing these symbols in the order that you wish them to appear in the output file name complete with any separating characters such as hyphens. The difficulty with including these extra characters, however, is that if one of the constituent parts of the file name does not exist for one particular MP3, the separators end up either being adjacent to each other or at the beginning or end of the file name. To help alleviate this, colons may be used to separate parts of the file name that should not be included if the variable(s) within it is/are empty.

**Table 4.0** File Name Format symbols.
Symbol	Part
%L	Album Name
%A	Artist Name
%T	Title Name
%N1	One-Digit Track Number
%N2	Two-Digit Track Number

Let's take the following file name format being used with Imagine by John Lennon as track 7 on a compilation album:

%N2 - %A - %T

This will produce:

07 - John Lennon - Imagine.mp3

Now, what would happen if either of both of the Track Number and Artist were not available:

- John Lennon - Imagine.mp3

07 - - Imagine.mp3

- - Imagine.mp3

Rather messy. Now, let's introduce colons:

%N2 - :%A - :%T

The same situation produces much more appealing results:

John Lennon - Imagine.mp3

07 - Imagine.mp3

Imagine.mp3

Separators: This is where you may specify what AINES should look for as a possible separator in the file name when Simulating. The parts of the file name separated by these characters will be considered as possible candidates for any or all of Album, Track Number, Artist and/or Title. These constituent parts will then be used for the ID3 Tag and constructing the new file name according to the File Name Format specified – see above. There are two user-defined separators allowed here for the case when a particular set of MP3’s you may have use an unusual separator, say an ‘@’ sign for example.

Simulate Rules: Specify here Rules to use when Simulating. This Rule will be applied to the file name (excluding extension) before all other formatting options. Now, these are a little complicated in their application, and will probably be used only in very special circumstances, but are there for when you have a particularly awkward set of MP3’s to work with. These are to be used in the case when you have a set of MP3’s with a text string within the file name that should not be there or you do not wish to be there, and it affects the successful extraction of the Album, Track Number, Artist and/or Title detrimentally.

Let's say the ripper of the MP3 has inserted their name or e-mail address (for advertising purposes) at the start of the file name:

joe@theripper.com; The Beatles - Hey Jude.mp3

By using the Simulate Rules, you can instruct the program to truncate this part of the file name before processing, thus not considering the unwanted text in its derivations. There are two ways to go about this:

You may specify to truncate using character positions in the file name (inclusive)
Or by using separator positions (using the separators specified – see above).

The following example Rules will work equally as well for the above file name:

Note

Simulate Rules work in the order of the Rule numbers. So Rule 1 will be applied first... then Rule 2 will be applied on the result of Rule 1... etc.

Order: This is the order that the different parts of the file name should be expected to appear in in the source file names. For example, if your source MP3's are generally in the format <Album> - <Artist> - <Title>.mp3, then you should select this order, like so:

By specifying the order before Simulating, this will help AINES extract the names much more accurately.

Note

Selecting a particular order does not restrict AINES to thinking that the Album, Artist and Title are always going to be in that order. This is merely an aid, particularly in cases where there is no ID3 Tag to use as further reference.

Reliability Preference: This selection helps AINES decide which source of information to use when at least two of the following contain information about each of Album, Track Number, Artist and Title:

Detect double-barrel words: Check this box to not consider hyphens that separate two parts of a double-barrel word as separators.