1. Rename templates are edited in Preferences - Rename. You create a template by naming it and then enter the common template editor. Rename Templates can be used to rename a filename and its parent folder to just about anything. There are conditional tokens which can be used to make decisions on the 'existence' of metadata. When you access a Rename Template from within an action you can use Variable tokens to insert anything you desire. You can use Rename templates in Move action statements which increases the power of the construct yet again, allowing you you easily modify up to four levels of folders. The only slightly tricky issue (based on feedback) is that the <Folder Start> token divides the template into two parts...the left being the filename, the right being the folder.

2. Pretty much the same as #1, just a different set of tokens. Filenames can also be directly accessed in actions and you can use a wide variety of text based functions to isolate components to allow for a more complicated 'decision' based extraction. There is a Scanner function.

3. The Move statement allows you to organize your folders any way you'd wish. You can run an action through the Batch Processor and reorganize your entire collection at once. My standard workflow move albums from my Mac's drive to a NAS drive organized as Artist/Album/Tracks. Artist components have leading articles removed. eg. Band not 'The Band'. My workflow moves collections to a Various folder organized as Various/Genre/Album/Tracks. All of this is arbitrary and there are tons of variants out there....all of which are possible to implement in Yate.

4. Sorry, no easy explanation. As in any programming environments there is a learning curve. The only tricky concept to get your mind around is the need to understand the current execution mode. Stepwise (operates on all tracks in parallel) or Grouped (a sequence of statements operates in entirety on a single track before proceeding to the next track). There is a Sample Actions page which has examples.

5. I have a variety of workflows I use, depending on where I've acquired the music. My 'standard' workflow verifies the existence of the fields I deem necessary; clears a bunch of privacy related fields; move's text around in title and artist fields (featuring); sets the alphabetic case/exceptions the way I like it; adds the tracks to iTunes; adds the tracks to an Album and Track database that Yate maintains; moves the tracks to my NAS drive and calls an external script to tell my streamer to update its library. I'm sure it does more, it's all I can remember at the top of my head 🙂

Yep, I use it all the time. The Action statement is called Sort Form and it either moves or restores articles. You can modify the list of articles in Preferences-Exceptions by editing the Natural Sort Set (s). In the upcoming v3.7 the functionality is also present in the redesigned multi-field editor.

2. Most of the simple stuff is just handled. '01' or '1' will just work. If you have an exceptionally complicated filename structure where many components are conditionally placed, you can always do the following:
- read a filename or path via the Get Property statement
- use the Scanner statement and conditionals to decompose the filename

3. answered there.

6. Betas/pre-releases are typically available to people who express an interest in them. We've had enough interest (and numbers) so that a general public beta was only done once for version 3.0. v3.7 will (hopefully) be released early next week. If you'd like to be on the pre-release list, let us know.

The File to Tag mechanism is a simple search for delimiters and save stuff between algorithm. All tokens must be delimited. Ignore is simply used to ignore text between two known delimiters.

This will work for all four examples:

FTT template: ❨Track❩-❨Artist❩-❨Title❩

action:

Filename to Tags (Track-Artist-Title)
Replace suffix of "_" in the Title and Artist fields with ""
Replace prefix of "_" in the Title and Artist fields with ""
Replace "_" in the Title and Artist fields with " "
Trim the Title and Artist fields (SP) [Leading] [Trailing]

The first two Replace statements are replacing with nothing. The third is replacing with a single space.

Quote from rocklobster on June 6, 2015, 10:42

Thanks. But boy that's confusing on many levels.

More than likely 🙂

First, in the preferences -> File to Tag section, there's nothing that indicates that any special template is going to be used rather than the specified (Track)-(Artist)-(Title) tokens. Nothing there that indicates: use an action instead. We're creating a special kind of action, then? And now you need to switch between the Preferences and the Action Manager.

I forgot to mention that you were creating an action 🙁

Second, in the Action Manager, it was not clear how to do "replace suffix" or "replace prefix" but I figured it out. For former you have to select "at start" and for latter you have to select "at end". Why not make the terms consistent?

Typically I send out packaged actions rather than the display text which solves the issue. I'm trying to get v3.7 completed and again I got lazy...in order to avoid going to a v3.6 release to build the action.

Third, I can't seem to enter an "_" as the replace term. It shows as a space:

This is totally bizarre! What language or encoding is running on your Mac? (This should not make a difference as Unicode is used internally.) I certainly cannot make this happen here. I can see the underscore in the field, but not in the display. Can you please export the action (right click on it in the Action Manager) and send into me at support@2manyrobots.com. I'd like to see what is actually encoded.

conclusion: it would be much better to have definable regex tokens or something, or replacement functions built into the file-to-tag section of the preferences. but i know that would be a lot of re-writing. maybe there's some better, more obvious way.

I appreciate your comments. That being said, invariably regular expressions leads to tons of support issues. There are a lot of people out there using the File to Tag UI and extending it via actions when necessary. That does not make it perfect...but for now it is the way it works.

question: what is the "format" button supposed to do? Does nothing it seems.

Insert a bunch of blank lines and then hit Format. It does a lot more in the Rename template editor where there are more tokens which take a "pretty print"