Hi,
On MacOS, you can select multiple files and then choose “Rename”, with find and replace options. I use that a l lot for renaming mp3 files. I like to replace all _ with regular spaces, for instance. It’s no default option with KDE/Dolphin, but is there an easy way to achieve this?
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Something like Krename, perhaps… also GPRename works.
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Exactly what I was looking for.
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For the record, you can do simple renames in Dolphin, select files context menu > Rename (or F2) and you can rename them following a pattern of your choosing (but without find/replace feature).
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Yes, I found that option. It’s good to have, but for this task it wasn’t appropriate.
I needed it for renaming the mp3s in a folder (the album).
I like those names to be without underscores, capitalized, and only the name of the song, not the album and performer (since that’s the name of the containing folder).
The default renaming would be useful if I had 10 files that I wanted named song 1 to 10, isn’t it? Which will come in handy sooner or later, I hope I remember this functionality 
Yes, with the same prefix and suffix.
Having more built-in options might be useful.
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As someone that has been collecting music since the 90:ies in a huge library, let the artist name remain in the filename, so you can search the files with the artist name, not just the tags (tags are obv more important than filenames).
There are also “music tag software” that can do both tagging of the files AND renaming at the same time.
That’s how I do it when adding new music to my +20k mp3 collection.
I would actually recomend the windows software tag&rename (just run it with wine) instead of “picard”.
VERY powerful software when it comes to managing mp3:s. Adding album art (directly from the internet), checking for duplicates, renaming schemes (from tags, filenames, manual, scripting etc)
Picard rules my collection - I’m not a Windows or Wine fan.
I import music to my /mnt/Music folder, then Picard moves anything it tags into /Music/Picard - which is the collection I add to Strawberry player.
Looking at MusicBrainzPicard vs Tag&Rename, we get Automatic Tagging, Extensions and plugins, Acoustic fingerprinting, AcoustID fingerprints, Autotag, Fixing missing information, and a ton of other advantages.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend Tag&Rename or anything else running in Wine.
I realize I posted the wrong link, tag&rename is good, but Tagscanner is even better.
I have, and I repeat, Tagscanner beats picard with miles.
It’s just a single directory (get the portable version) so if wine is setup properly, you can even just double click the file to run the program.
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Multiple choices of online databases, not JUST music-brainz.
Discogs is just SO much better anyway imho. Tons of albums that does not exist on music brainz.
But that is choice, and I like to have it. -
Generate tags from the internet (all the different databases), from other tags, by scripting, batch renaming, from filename etc etc.
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Generate filenames from the internet (all the different databases), from other tags, by scripting, batch renaming, from filename etc etc.
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Multiple ways to store image art (by grabbing them in the application from the internet OR selecting a file you already have) and define resolution for the art. Inside the mp3 file or separate img file.
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Extract album art from embedded mp3 files into other mp3:s or img files.
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Supports almost every single tag format on the planet and simple to convert old tag formats into whatever tag format you want now.
The ONLY thing I can think of is automatic fingerprinting, and to that I say “no thanks”.
The few times I tried it picard could not differentiate between all the special releases I have on my albums. I rather do this by clicking “search” and selecting the correct release from all the releases that exist.
I can go on but I think I made my point.
And since I have used both, I can HIGHLY recommend tagscanner over picard any day of the week.
Edit
LMAO, I just downloaded the latest version, but that one fails so disregard everything.
My older version still works though.
I’ll see if I can ask the dev, he fixed stuff before to make it work with wine when I contacted him, I’ll see if I can convince him again.
You mean well, but I’m happy with my own naming-system.
This was not my question.
Renaming for music is but one use for the renaming, I have different files as well, where I need that function.
I rename MIDI files daily coming from DooM wads. And upon export they all have the default names which mean nothing to anyone just wanting to listen. What I found works best and is simple with a plenty of options, is Bulk Rename which is part of Thunar. So the actual program name on my Arcolinux Plasma system is thunar-bulk-rename. It does everything that the MacOS rename does, and a bit more with the ability to insert and search & replace as well.
This would be perfect for your use-case, where you can add the album name to each track, or even the year. So for example track 01 could become Artist [year] - album - song name.mp3.
EDIT: Also! I just found out myself just now, that apparently Thunar has an audio-tagging plugin.
Additionally, for music tagging I’ve always used Kid3, however [MusicBrainz] Picard appears to be substantially more powerful and comprehensive, so I’ll be switching to that myself.
Thank Human-Being. That sounds interesting. Would it work to replace Dolphin with Thunar? Doesn’t KDE rely for all kinds of things on Dolphin as a default?
For renaming my ID Tags I also use Kid3. I don’t like automatic tagging, I want to choose myself sometimes.
EDIT: Thunar is not in “Discover”, I see…
I still use Dolphin as my primary file manager. I only use Thunar for the Bulk-Rename feature.
You can have as many file managers as you want on your system, and choose one to be the default, but still use others for whatever reason or use-case. Which is why I have a few other file managers installed (PCMan FM, Vifm, Ranger, Files)
Regarding installation of Thunar itself, I would suggest to just use the AUR:
yay -Ss thunar
That will get you a list of everything available based on your current enabled repos on your system. The ones relevant to this topic would be:
**extra/thunar** 4.18.10-1 (1.5 MiB 8.6 MiB) [xfce4]
Modern, fast and easy-to-use file manager for Xfce
**aur/thunar-git** 4.17.7+66+gc710d268-1 (+13 0.00)
file manager for xfce
**aur/thunar-media-tags-plugin-git** 0.3.0+106+g8a66300-1 (+1 0.00)
Adds special features for media files to the Thunar File Manager (git checkout)