Introduction

The new text processing has a tremendous power and flexibility, here are the 3 main modes of operation:

1. concerning one tag only
2. where two tags are involved
3. batch jobs that can act either on one or two tags sequentially

One tag only

1. Search and replace from text (normal, wildcards or Regex, with some predefined expression like find tonality, opus or a composer catalog number).
2. Search and replace from delimiters allows you to find text based on a cut off character such as : or a space for words (left or right part) or text which is between 2 characters for example ( and ) or, : and ;
3. Search and replace from position, for example:  Get a text starting at the 3rd letter of the line having a length of 10 letters.

For all of these cases the found text can be either replaced by another text or moved at the end or beginning of the line

Other features:

1. You can also insert some text entered manually or coming from the clipboard.
2. Add or remove blank spaces around punctuation or any characters.
3. Custom functions: converting roman to numeric or reversing last and first name (vice-versa in both cases).

Two tags

1. Copy/Cut/Swap a tag to another.
2. The same search capabilities as for the one tag case 

The  text can be copied or cut from the source to any position in the target tag

In all cases you have a preview of the result your actions by looking at the current and modified tab before you decide to save your work in the audio files metadata.

Batch processing
You can save any (almost) action in the “scratch pad” by clicking  and if you go to the “Action tab” you can see the list of saved rules there.

Given that often we end up doing the same operations all over again, we offer the possibility to save the action listed in the scratch pad by clicking .The resulting form will pop up

If you click 1) you can see the existing chapter names you have saved already. By clicking 2), it will show you the entire collection. If you are using an existing chapter name, you can see that you can override the content or add to it.

To use previously saved actions click , you can always look at the list of your saved actions .

A quick example

We start with a CD where the composition field is empty, but can be get it by splitting “name, title..” with “:”

(see blow the picture) We load the text processing utility and start; it is a 2 tag operation, source is “Name, title or movement”, target is “Composition”, the search is from delimiters, it is separated by “:” and the first occurrence of it, we are interested in the left part after it has been split, finally we copy it (as opposed to cut & paste) and replace the target field by this text. We can inspect with the Current and Modified values that we are getting the expected result, if satisfied we save the rule

Now we are only going to treat the “Composition” field, for example:
Deleting all commas, the metadata is then “Compositions”, search & replace from text, find “,” and replace by blank which is in effect a delete, and we save . For example sake, I cheated and filled up the composition field else I could not demonstrate anything.

Then we go on and add more actions in the same fashion (see in order below):

• Replace “No. ” by /0; it is a sub-opus and they are more than 10
• Replace ” minor” by “-m”
• Replace ” sharp” by “#”
• Replace ” flat” by “b”
• Replace “Op. ” by “Op” (I know I skipped one)
• Which is using Regular Expressions (RegEx) to find the tonality and move it to the end (See below)

RegEx are very powerful, but can be a bit daunting so we provided a few already, note instead of “Replace by” we decided to “Move to” the text at the “End”, with no offset.

Here is an example of final list of actions in the “Action list” tab. you can inspect the effect of your work on any tag by selecting it in the combo box (the red arrow below).

Because we are going to use these actions over and over again, lets them and call the “chapter” EXAMPLE.

When we want to use them later click and select the actions you want. Checking a chapter will select all the actions underneath or you can pick and choose any one of them randomly. In this screen too you can delete entries you do not want anymore.

Now time to save the cleaned compositions back to the audio files clicking 

Et voila!

Conclusion

These new features should save an enormous amount of time for those who want to groom their music collection. It is a great step for making the MusiCHI tagger, the killer app. We hope you will agree.