Remove parenthetical phrase from filename? Options

[Praxis]

This is a great program, and one of a handfull of programs keeping me booting Windows on a regular basis. It beats Linux Easytag with a hammer.

Anyway, I'm wondering what the best way to remove a phrase that is in parenthesis from a Filename might be.

I make my filename out of various tag elements like:
%artist% - $num(%track%,2) - %title% - %album%

However the Title often has some additional information in paranthesis that I don't want to be part of the Filename for two reasons:
1) I'm trying to keep file names less than 64 characters so I can make CDs to play on my portable MP3 CD player.
2) I understand CD-Rs do not appreciate parenthesis in any case.

But I would like to keep the parenthetical information in the track Title so it displays when I play the song (my player displays Artist - Title).

Otherwise I'd just do a Filename->Tag conversion and send the parenthetical expression to the Comment field, then rename the file with Tag->Filename.

I have an inelegant way of dealing with this now. I simply manually edit the filenames in cases where not many files in an album have parenthetical clauses. In other cases I run a Replace action that converts "(" in to "- ", then I can wipe the expression from the Filename by running a Filename->Filename conversion using something like this:
%1 - %2 - %3 - %4 - %5
%1 - %2 - %3 - %5

I searched through the English Support forum, but didn't find any suggestions. Leider, ich spreche Deutsch wie ein Eingeboren - aus Madagascar.

Thanks,

[Sebastian Mares]

Do a RegEx replace on the filename using \s*\(.*\) as match and nothing as replace.

[Praxis]

Thanks, Sebastian, that did the trick. Now I just have to figure out why so I can learn a bit more about regular expressions.

[Sebastian Mares]

Thanks, Sebastian, that did the trick.  Now I just have to figure out why so I can learn a bit more about regular expressions. 

\s* matches any number of spaces.
\( matches a bracket (the charecter has to be escaped or otherwise MP3Tag thinks that it's the beginning of a group).
.* matches any number of characters
\) matches a bracket.

So basically, we are looking for spaces folowed by a bracket followed by characters followed by an ending bracket. All this is replaced by nothing.

This post has been edited by Sebastian Mares: Aug 18 2005, 08:41

[Praxis]

\s* matches any number of spaces.
\( matches a bracket (the charecter has to be escaped or otherwise MP3Tag thinks that it's the beginning of a group).
.* matches any number of characters
\) matches a bracket.

So basically, we are looking for spaces folowed by a bracket followed by characters followed by an ending bracket. All this is replaced by nothing.

Thanks again, a book on the wish list should be Amazon.deing its way to MP3Tag as I type (seemed easier than messing with PayPal, since I don't have an account). Hopefully I navigated the German menus properly.

I fooled around with the RegEx stuff before I posted, but didn't quite get the syntax right on my own. I didn't use the '\s*' to find blank spaces and tried both '*' & '*.*' between the escaped paranthesis brackets, but it didn't seem to work properly.