Remove parenthetical phrase from filename?

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,

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

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

\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.

I can't get this code to work as described. When testing, it tried to delete the filename. It does not removed backets and anything contained inside, despite creating a replace with regular expression using the code supplied. Why is this?

Please note that in old threads (like this one) sometimes some of the characters are swallowed up by the forum display parser.

should read:
\s*\(.*\)

2 Likes

Thank you, I did not realise! Kind of concerning..

6 posts were split to a new topic: Remove parenthetical "feat." from filename