Best Free Software For Renaming Entire Music Collection's Track Numbers?

#1

Hi,

I have been trying to get the best method for correct mp3 burning to CD discs for album playback on my car stereos.

I thought using a padding method like inserting a ‘PL-1-*’ using Winamp’s Playlist Unpacker’, as suggested by Olyteddy, would be the best strategy. However, I am unable to play the renamed files from inside MCE2005’s frontend.

As I understand it, if you just rename the single-digit tracks (ie. 1-.mp3 to 01-.mp3) this will satify both requirements.

Anyone have the best idea on what free software to use for this onerous task? Thanks.

Alos, please let me know if this will cause other issues you may have encountered. Thanks.

#2

PlayList Unpacker automatically pads the appropriate number of zeroes. However ‘PL001 Frank Zappa Camarillo Brillo’ will be followed by ‘PL001 The Zombies Time of the Season’ and not ‘PL002 Frank Zappa Yellow Snow’. For it to work correctly, you need to build a playlist that’s the whole disk (a hundred songs or so).

#3

For it to work correctly, you need to build a playlist that’s the whole disk (a hundred songs or so).

That’s the problem, Oly. I want to burn my CDs to the original albums: ie.

1-Wilflowers with songs 1-14 (in original playing order)
2-Wish You Were Here w songs 1-5
3-All The Right Reasons w songs 1-12
4-Phil Collins…Hits w songs 1-16
etc.

And I don’t want to have to go through the hassle of restructuring song names everytime I burn a disc.

There must be software to rename my entire collection’s track nos. with minimal typing around?

I guess most people here don’t use MCE’s frontend for their playlists, otherwise it should be a relatively simple fix.

#4

Yeah, I use the unpacker on a disk by disk basis because I also like to use MP3 Gain on disks I make for the car. WinAmp is my player of choice and the ‘Library’ (which uses the Tag info, not the title) functions allow me to easily sort by artist, album, title, track number, etc., without having to rename the original files. If you want to order the original tracks you could use a tag editor with rename and rename the tracks from the tags like ‘artist - album - track# - title’ but unless the track# is padded with zeroes in the tag you’ll still have a problem. I use The GodFather (a freeware tag editor) to do stuff like that and iirc you may be able to edit the leading zero into the id3V2 tag and rename the file using it. id3v1 doesn’t support the leading zero. I just checked, and if the leading zero is there it becomes part of the name.