Hi,

in the default setting, I set up to remove all ID3v1 and APE tag and only try to ID3v2 as Unicode BE.

The reason I need to do this is that. I have a lot of non-English songs, and
-ID3v1 doesn't support Unicode, and most of players read this first before ID3v2. if I have something within ID3v1, the player display will come up junk
-ID3v2.3 BE is the most supported with players, I tried 2.4, and most of players doesn't support it
-APE will be readed too if I don't empty them out.


this works great and everything in the other tags could be copy over to ID3v2 and clean up all others by
1. select all songs
2. ctrl+X
3. ctrl+V


I just wonder if there is a better way to make it as "Actions" so I don't need to do the same thing over and over again.

thanks!

No, I'm afraid removing tags can't be done through an action.

This is a long standing enhancement request and one of Mp3tag's shortcomings, IMO. Tag management, in general, is somewhat awkward and non-intuitive. There are a number of things like this cannot be done in an action.

BTW, I prefer to use Save (Ctrl+S) and Remove (Ctrl+R) instead of using Cut and Paste to remove unwanted ID3 tags. It just feels safer and doesn't rely on the clipboard.

I think that cleaning up tags is a one-off at the very beginning of tagging so that you write the new information to right kind of tags.
If you apply a filter to the new files like
%_tag% HAS APE
then you see only those with APE tags and only have to deal with them.
%_tag% HAS 3v1
will show all that still have 3v1 tags. Might reduce the number of handled files a bit.

Tagging itself is a one-off. When I tag files, I almost never touch them again. The more that I can automate of the process, the better. If it takes me 15 seconds instead of 30 seconds to clean up, fill in, and retag an album full of files, then the program will be that much more valuable to me.



Library-wide operations are very much the exception to the rule. I think most people work primarily with single albums. A filter like this does them little good, as 99.9% of the time all tracks on an album are tagged in the same manner.

Agreed. Mostly.
As it happens I only have very little abilities on the clairvoyant side I regularly find features in playrs that make it necessary to grab the whole library and revise a concept.
E.g. if iTunes cannot cope with decimals in the BPM field (there was a time when it couldn't) then I had to strip them to even numbers.
Or like WMP that splits up e.g. the composer field if you separate the names by semicolon blank and I want to use that "feature" then I have to modify the entries in the whole library.
Cutting a tag version is usually done just once as afterwards it is gone. But no rule without exception: naturally I have an mp3 player in my zoo of hardware that only like v1-tags ... so I have to get rid of v2-tags for all the tracks I want to play tracks on that piece of equipment.
But thank God for mp3tag and its actions which makes it much easier to cater for all these requirements.
Having written all this I have to admit that it was a little shortsighted to claim the "one-off" procedure.