Tagging an Album List on foobar2000

[RainDawg]

I was asked to give some information on how I tag and setup my files with foobar2000, so here goes. This is, by no means, a definitive tutorial, but just some samples to get people stepping in the right direction. It would take several days to put together a really foolproof guide for all of these, but I wanted to get this out to some people, so I made it quick and chockfull of pictures. It might take some time to get used to all of this, but I just spent two hours making this guide, so I fully expect everyone to devote equal time to figuring out this program....once you do, it will be worth it, I promise.

First, put a list of files that you want tagged into the foobar2000 playlist window. Right click on them, select masstagger, and then "edit tags"



The script that I have made, shown in the screencap below, shows all of the necessary tags to get my album list window to work properly. You can, of course, add or remove any of them as you see fit.

Artist = The main artist for this album
Albumartist = The artists you'd like this to show up under in the albumlist. You cannot add multiple artists in this dialog, we'll cover that in a minute (a weakness of masstagger here...)
Album = album
Date = YYYY-MM-DD...my album list sciprt sorts by this, so you'll want to set this properly
Genre
Input Data = I use this to add the song titles. Each track will get one line, sequentially. I copy/paste the setlist data into this window, and then edit the string above it to tell masstagger how to interpret each line.
Format "TITLE" using "$caps($trim(%title%))" = This will capitalize the first letter from each word in the title, and trick leading and trailing spaces. Makes editing the text in each line easier
Auto Track Number = self-explanatory for multidisc sets, I number them sequentially from 1-xx...technically you could wrestly with giving each track a disc# and a track#, but that's more shit than it's worth. Just number them in order from start to finish....
Legality = Bootleg or Official



Now press "Run" to apply all the tags. When you're satisfied, close masstagger, and you have nicely tagged files.



If you want to add multiple instances of the albumartist tags, required for the album to show up under multiple names in the album list, you'll need to head back to the main playlist window, select all of the files, right click, and select "properites". It will list all of the tags currently on the file. Double-click the "albumartist" field and add whatever extra artists you wish to, separated by a "\" character.



Now to setup the database. In the preferences dialog, select "database" from the list of options. Tell it what folder is the master for your audio files. You can also tell it what filetypes to add if you want. When you're done, you will need to shutdown and restart foobar2000. Then, re-enter the database dialog and press "scan". Depending on how many files you have, this will take several minutes to gather the metadata for every file.



Now to setup the album list. Again, go into the preferences dialog, and select album list. In this screencap, you'll see all of my formatting scripts. The one I am going to be displaying later on this page is here:

albumartist|'('$if3(%date%,%year%,'no date')')'     $if($greater($meta_num(albumartist),3),'Various Artists',$if(%band%,%artist%' & '%band%,$meta_sep(artist,'; ')))    '"'%album%'"       ['%legality% $upper($ext(%_path%))']'|$num(%tracknumber%,2)'. '$if($greater($meta_num(albumartist),3),$if(%band%,%artist%' & '%band%,$meta_sep(artist,'; '))' - ',)%title%'   ['%__bitrate%'Kbps]'

Save that script, then head to the album list.



Mine looks like this:



And then a glance at what a nicely organized artist entry is. Notice how they say what the "main artist" is at the beginning of each entry. There is one in there called "Rock of Ages" that is actually an album by The Band. Since Dylan appears on it, I added him has an "albumartist" previously, and now it shows up under both artists in the Album List.

[Reflection]

Thanks RainDawg, that looks great and it's very much appreciated!

Can't wait to dig into it later tonight.

Thanks again.

[Five]

Very nice! I'll scope this out when I tag my next show.

[dorrcoq]

damn, who would have ever thought there was so much to learn! HAHAHA

[RainDawg]

Dennis...this is just the tip of it. Between this and Five's SHN > FLAC tutorial you have the tip of the foobar2000 iceberg.....it just gets bigger and more impressive the deeper you get.

[dorrcoq]

Originally Posted by RainDawg

Dennis...this is just the tip of it. Between this and Five's SHN > FLAC tutorial you have the tip of the foobar2000 iceberg.....it just gets bigger and more impressive the deeper you get.

Uhhhhh, is that supposed to make me feel better?

[dorrcoq]

it's actually pretty amazing how powerful and effective some of these free programs are

[jazzbo]

Originally Posted by RainDawg

Actual track listing for this show:

1. announcement
2. Who Do You Work For?
3. Broken Shadows
4. Street Woman
5. Song for Che
6. Rock the Clock

[Five]

Originally Posted by jazzbo

Actual track listing for this show:

1. announcement
2. Who Do You Work For?
3. Broken Shadows
4. Street Woman
5. Song for Che
6. Rock the Clock

not what I was expecting to see!

[crazee_canuck]

If you want to get fancy with the formatting, see http://pelit.koillismaa.fi/fb2k/ .

Some pretty complex configs there...

[RainDawg]

Originally Posted by jazzbo

Actual track listing for this show:

1. announcement
2. Who Do You Work For?
3. Broken Shadows
4. Street Woman
5. Song for Che
6. Rock the Clock

Damn....thanks for the correction! I just grabbed that off of EZT recently, and that was the setlist they had. I'm correcting it now....

[jazzbo]

Originally Posted by RainDawg

Damn....thanks for the correction! I just grabbed that off of EZT recently, and that was the setlist they had. I'm correcting it now....

Right... this actually gets to one my pet peeves about ezt -- trying to follow things like setlist, date or venue corrections in the comments on a torrent. I had just happened to look in the last day or so on that exact show and noticed a corrected setlist was posted on that torrent. The problem is that if I hadn't looked before the torrent went off the tracker (and the comments were deleted), I probably wouldn't have known either.

[RainDawg]

Originally Posted by jazzbo

Right... this actually gets to one my pet peeves about ezt -- trying to follow things like setlist, date or venue corrections in the comments on a torrent. I had just happened to look in the last day or so on that exact show and noticed a corrected setlist was posted on that torrent. The problem is that if I hadn't looked before the torrent went off the tracker (and the comments were deleted), I probably wouldn't have known either.

What really gets me is that you can's subscribe to read the torrents comments, you only get a message that a comment was added if you posted the torrent or if your comments were quoted. I always subscribe to threads here so that if someone posts an update, I get it. For EZT, if it's not there when I find the seed, chances are I'm not going to get the corrections.

Thanks for the eagle-eye jazzbo...I appreciate the correction.

[feralicious]

Originally Posted by dorrcoq

damn, who would have ever thought there was so much to learn! HAHAHA

Well when you're starting with an empty vessel...

Thanks again for more info RainDawg.

[ssamadhi97]

You should really take a look at foo_tradersfriend, a plugin that was made specifically for parsing "etree-style" show info text files and adding relevant metadata to files.

plugin homepage

discussion thread on hydrogenaudio.org


Give it a whirl and please do post comments and feature requests on HA if you have any. The developer is currently working on an updated/revamped version, so I'm sure he'll to take requests into consideration (if they make sense and fit into the design, anyway ).