Writing a File Naming Script

Writing a script to organize and name your files is actually not that hard – just don’t get intimidated by all the ‘$’, ‘%’ and parentheses. If you can write down a pattern like “ARTIST - (YEAR) ALBUM NAME/TRACK - SONG TITLE” of how you want the files and folders named, you can quite easily translate this to the proper script.

To get started, first open the File Naming Script Editor, either by selecting “Options ‣ Open file naming script editor…” from Picard’s main menu bar or by clicking the Edit script… button on the File Naming Options configuration page. From this screen, you can start a new script for your work.

Note that the use of a ‘/’ in the formatting string separates the output directory from the file name. The formatting string is allowed to contain any number of ‘/’ characters. Everything before the last ‘/’ is the directory location, and everything after the last ‘/’ becomes the file’s name. In our example, we only have one ‘/’ character, meaning that we will have one directory level for the album which will contain the songs for that album.

First, let’s have a look at what we need. You see a list of the available tags in the Basic Tags section. We want the ARTIST name, so available tags for this could be albumartist or artist. This should be the name for an album folder, so albumartist sounds like what we need. To get the actual value for a tag you need to enclose its name in percent signs. So let’s start:

%albumartist%

Now we want the YEAR. There is no year tag, but there is date. Let’s use this for now. If we want to add extra text like the “-” just write it down. We need to be careful with the parentheses, because those are special variables in scripting. We need to prefix them with a backslash. Let’s add this all:

%albumartist% - \(%date%\)

Now we want the ALBUM NAME. That’s simple, just use album:

%albumartist% - \(%date%\) %album%

That takes care of the directory portion of the renaming. The next part is the TRACK number and SONG TITLE. The track number is available as tracknumber and the title of the track is simply title. Adding these to our script we get:

%albumartist% - \(%date%\) %album%/%tracknumber% - %title%

You can see that this looks nearly like the pattern that we said we wanted at the start. It’s not perfect yet for a few reasons. What if there are 10 or more tracks on the album and they don’t sort properly in the directory listing? Also, we get a full date instead of just the year. Finally, sometimes if you tag existing files they might not have the albumartist set, just artist.

Let’s fix the track number first. We can take care of that by using the $num function to add a leading zero to the number shown for tracks 1 through 9:

%albumartist% - \(%date%\) %album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%

Now let’s fix the ARTIST. We can fallback to using artist if albumartist is not available by using:

$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%) - \(%date%\) %album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%

The $if2 function uses the first value that is not empty, so if albumartist is empty it uses artist instead.

For the date tag the dates from MusicBrainz are always formatted as YYYY-MM-DD. We only need the year, so let’s get just the first 4 characters with the $left function:

$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%) - \($left(%date%,4)\) %album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%

What happens if there is no date tag information? Sometimes MusicBrainz does not have the release date of an album set as it is not yet known or hasn’t been entered into the database. It would be great to omit the entire date with the parentheses in this case. Let’s use the $if function to check whether the date is set:

$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%) - $if(%date%,\($left(%date%,4)\) )%album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%

Alternately, we can enter a placeholder such a “0000” if the date is missing:

$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%) - \($if(%date%,$left(%date%,4),0000)\) %album%/$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%

And there you have it – the final script for naming your files developed from the pattern that we used as our starting point.

See also

For additional information about the available tags and variables please see the Tags & Variables section. For information about the script functions available please see the Scripting Functions section.