Multiple Guest Artist

When I download music, some artists will feature a guest artist on each track. Then in the download folder are many folders, one with the main artists name and others with the "artists name featuring guestname1" (with the actual names) and so on.

What is the easiest way to tag all of those folders and rename them to just the base artist name (all in one folder)?

I have been using 2 Explorer windows and dragging and dropping each "featuring" folder, but with many tracks that is very time consuming. I also tried "selecting" all of those folders in Explorer and right clicking to rename, but it just renamed them Artist (1), Artist (2), etc.

The file names also contain the name of the features artist, so for housekeeping reasons I don't need separate folders and I like to keep all the tracks from an album in one folder. BTW, 99+% of the time when I do this manually there are no conflicts.

Thanks for any ideas.

Take a look at Musicbrainz Picard software, hands down the best music tagging and organizing software there is.


It's hands down a lot easier to deal with as it doesn't just connect to the old online databases for music tagging, but it's own database, and it allows for a variety of tagging, along with features like moving all files from a single album into a single folder, with both folder naming conventions and file naming conventions.

There are a few others that are almost as good, such as TagScanner (also has custom file and folder naming), but Picard goes above and beyond because it handles a ton of stuff, and connects to multiple online repositories to get the files named and tagged factually correctly - and this includes things like album art (including discogs), lyrics (including genius, I think, or maybe evillyrics), and more. And it is extensible with both addons and direct scripting (both of which I've made use of).

And the best part is that you set it up to do what you want the way that you want - you can include or exclude any particular feature - like I add in the album art, but don't add in lyrics, as I listen to most of my music either while working (and thus don't read lyrics) or while driving (truly listening, not watching anything). I have different naming conventions set up for albums with a single artist, albums with various artists, soundtracks, DJ Mixes, and more. ANd this applies to both how the tracks are named as well as how the folder for the album is named. I even have naming conventions set up for box sets, multi-disc releases, and release by type - CD, digital only, vinyl (for the limited vinyl albums in my collection), even cassette (for some of my really old stuff that I bought only on cassette back in the day).

It's super powerful, but does come with a learning curve - but I haven't found anything nearly as robust as it in 20 years of RIPping CDs and tagging music files.

johnlgalt said:

Take a look at Musicbrainz Picard software, hands down the best music tagging and organizing software there is.

Click to expand...

Thanks for replying! I had actually tried Musicbrainz Picard previously for a different reason. I have a folder of my music library with about 1350-1400 albums with the folder structure Music>Artist>Album>Track. I only wanted to update 2 tags, Genre and Year on the whole library. Musicbrainz Picard proved too complex and I set that project aside.

Getting back to this post, the example was for music, but I often have a similar need to ?merge? the files of several folders into one. I was hoping there was a Windows method that was not too complex.

Thanks again and I do intend to learn to use some features of Musicbrainz Picard too.

Hollywood said:

but I often have a similar need to ?merge? the files of several folders into one.

Click to expand...

You could temporarily move all the “folders” you want to merge files from, into one folder.
Then open that folder that contains the folders you just moved the other folders into so you see those folders as subfolders in the top most folder
Use search at the top of the File Explorer window.
Type *.mp3 or *.flac (whatever the extensions are)
File explorer will find all the files with that extension and you can then copy or cut those files into the folder of your choice.

Example: ( * is a wildcard meaning “Any” so anyname.mp3)


Copy Folder 1, Folder 2, Folder 3 etc into a new folder -> Folder Name
Open topmost folder “Folder name”
Search *.mp3
All files with the extension .mp3 that are in the subfolders you copied or moved into “Folder Name” will show
Ctrl+A (Select All)
Ctrl+C (Copy) or Ctrl+X (Cut)
Open topmost folder again (or a new folder)
Ctrl+V (Paste) all files into that folder.

You can then delete all the original folders those files were in.
Take your time, check each result and be careful not to delete or copy the wrong folder files or folders.

antspants said:

You could temporarily move all the “folders” you want to merge files from, into one folder.
Then open that folder that contains the folders you just moved the other folders into so you see those folders as subfolders in the top most folder

Click to expand...

Good idea!
Thanks!

Hollywood said:

Getting back to this post, the example was for music, but I often have a similar need to ?merge? the files of several folders into one. I was hoping there was a Windows method that was not too complex.

Click to expand...

I have a couple of old utilities that I use for this purpose, which still do exactly what I want how I want.

1. Folder Merger - A tool to merge the contents of different folders into a single folder, while (optional) keeping its folder structure.

2. Suction - Suction on the other hand provides the means to consolidate files that are located in subfolders into one root folder. There are several applications for a tool like Suction.

I had to link to GHacks for the second one as:

Update: The suction website is currently not available. It is not clear if it will be back up again in the future, or if it is down permanently. We have uploaded the latest release version of the program to our server, from where you can download it. Just click on the following download link to download it to your PC:Â (Download Removed)

Click to expand...

However, this review of suction also mentions Folder Merger lol.

Both work, and work well, Suction is fast and moves everything to the root folder you pick, Folder Merger is a lot more robust, in that it allows you to move things how and where you want based on parameters. I use both and keep them around just for things like you mention, particularly images, As I started keeping a lot of images of varying sizes, and I grouped them into specific sizes (4K, etc.) and a misc for images that were just various different sizes not conforming to a particular nomenclature.

---

If you decide that you want to take Picard for another spin, let me know - you can easily work with it to only add certain parts of a tag to your existing files without replacing other info, I've done that plenty of times, because the databases are only as good as the info supplied by users, so not always correct. It really makes for tagging and moving music files really easy.

I know there is software with a similar approach that works for images, using EXIF information, but sometimes image just don't have that, and it gets to a be a PITA to use something like Phil Harvey's EXIF tools without a GUI, and GUI front ends for Harvey's EXIF tool have come and gone, but a few do exist, still, that work. But I have many, many more music files than I do images, so I've worked with Explorer (and Suction and Folder Merger) for all the images I have, and Picard exclusively for all my music.