Is there any way to batch change particular words to something else? (feat.)

[bradmmm]

Heya guys, I'd love some help here. I'm trying to organise my MASSIVE music library and neaten it up a bit. I think 30-40% of my music, maybe even 50%, is hip-hop, so a lot of featuring artists. Some of the tracks are written like "Kendrick Lamar ft. Dr. Dre" and others like "Kendrick Lamar feat. Dr. Dre". There's probably a few other variants as well.

Anyway, I know it's easy to change it manually, but I have almost 50,000 tracks (collected over the past ~15 years, since I was 9, a good 25% ripped from CDs from my parents collection that they spent even more time on!) to go through so it will be very time consuming to go through it all manually. If there's a way to batch change all "ft."s to "feat."s if it's possible.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, I would love some help!

Thanks,
Brad

[frankz]

There is an Additional Tagging and Reporting Tools plugin for MusicBee that can bulk-change text within a tag using RegEx formulas.  I haven't been able to master it as it's complicated.

I always recommend the external application mp3tag for bulk tagging chores like this.  I do things like this all the time with it. After selecting the applicable files, you would...

1. Hit Alt+6 to bring up the actions screen or go to Actions->Actions in the menu
2. Click the "New" icon at the right
3. Name your action
4. Click the "New" icon on the next screen
5. On "Select Action Type" pick "Replace"
6. In "Field" select "Title"
7. In "Original" type "ft." or whatever it is you want to replace
8. In "Replace with" type "feat." or whatever you want to replace it with
9. Check boxes under as needed
10.Click "OK"

If you have more than one variation of "ft." that you want to get rid of, you would just edit the Action you created with the next variation as the "Original" in step 7.
As always, test your methods before doing 50,000 in bulk

[alec.tron]

Hey,
sounds like a mission

The ones that come to mind that could help with this are, for Musicbee:
http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Additional_Tagging_and_Reporting_Tools

If I have to do a lot if tags at once, I do prefer foobar & foo_masstagger:
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Components_0.9/foo_masstag

but in the end, both get the job done, but you will probably need to spend some time tweaking/customizing either option to do exactly what you want.

Churs.
c.

[frankz]

Hey,
sounds like a mission

The ones that come to mind that could help with this are, for Musicbee:
http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Additional_Tagging_and_Reporting_Tools

Damn, I don't know why I keep calling that Advanced Search and Replace.  I've edited my post with the correct plug-in name.  Oopsie.

[psychoadept]

Damn, I don't know why I keep calling that Advanced Search and Replace.  I've edited my post with the correct plug-in name.  Oopsie.

You're not crazy.  Advanced Search & Replace (ASR) is one of the major functions of the plugin.

[psychoadept]

For this particular use case, I don't think you need the plugin.  You can do what you want with the built in Search & Replace plugin, in the Tools menu.

[redwing]

Make sure you use the latest 3.1 version from the link in psychoadept' signature as there was a bug with search & replace command that can be annoying when running with lots of files: https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=23154.msg135425#msg135425