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Remove a trailing remaster annotation

Remove a known Remastered suffix while retaining parentheses that belong to a title. A rule that deletes every bracketed phrase would also remove useful information such as (Live) or part of a work's name.

Start with known practice titles

Each row below starts from a separate copied file with one title value. The recipe accepts parentheses or square brackets around Remastered, optionally followed by a space and a four-digit year. Matching ignores case. ↵ represents a line break within one title value.

TITLE before TITLE after
Paper Boats (Remastered 2021) Paper Boats
North Pier [remastered] North Pier
Quiet Harbour (Live) Quiet Harbour (Live)
Remastered Memories Remastered Memories
Paper Boats (Remastered edition) Paper Boats (Remastered edition)
Quiet Harbour (Part (One)) Quiet Harbour (Part (One))
Paper Boats (Remastered 2021)↵Notes Paper Boats (Remastered 2021)↵Notes

The last five are intentional nonmatches. Inspect a sample of the titles that should stay unchanged as well as those that should change.

Build the two-action group

  1. Save or discard pending edits and select one copied practice file.
  2. Open Actions → Actions…, create Practice remove remaster suffix, and open Edit actions….
  3. Add these rows in order. Set Case-sensitive comparison to Off in both regex actions. Leave the replacement box completely empty.
  4. Keep the actions and group, then Save groups.
  5. Check only this group and choose Apply checked groups. Inspect the saved title before trying the remaining practice copies.
Step Action Field / source Pattern / format / separator Replacement / option
1 Replace with Regular Expression TITLE [ \t]*\(Remastered(?: [0-9]{4})?\)\z Leave empty
2 Replace with Regular Expression TITLE [ \t]*\[Remastered(?: [0-9]{4})?\]\z Leave empty

Type the pattern directly in the action's regex box, without wrapping it in format-string quotes. A regex action's replacement box is also literal: '' would insert apostrophes rather than requesting an empty replacement.

Understand what the patterns permit

  • [ \t]* includes spaces/tabs immediately before the annotation, so the deletion does not leave an extra trailing space.
  • \( and \) match literal parentheses. The second row uses \[ and \] for literal square brackets; the pairs must match.
  • Remastered is the exact annotation word, with case ignored by the setting.
  • (?: [0-9]{4})? allows either nothing or one space followed by exactly four digits. (?:…) groups those pieces without a capture number.
  • \z restricts the annotation to the end of the whole value, including values containing a line break. $ would also match at line ends here. Remastered Memories therefore does not match the suffix pattern.

Normalize unwanted trailing spaces first with the spacing recipe, or a space after the closing bracket can prevent this end-anchored match. These are two ordered replacements, not a repeated “remove all annotations” loop. For example, removing a final parenthesized annotation can expose a square-bracketed one for the next row; two consecutive parenthesized suffixes need a separate decision before repeating the group.

When removing any parenthesized suffix is intended

For a carefully reviewed selection, a broader pattern is:

Pattern Input Result
[ \t]*\([^()]*\)\z Paper Boats (Live) Paper Boats
[ \t]*\([^()]*\)\z Quiet Harbour (Part (One)) Quiet Harbour (Part (One))
[ \t]*\([^()]*\)\z Paper Boats (Remastered 2021)↵Notes Paper Boats (Remastered 2021)↵Notes

Use this as a separate regex action with an empty replacement, not as a silent substitute for the remaster rule. [^()]* permits characters other than parentheses, so it does not parse nested parentheses. A broad .* can instead span from an earlier opening bracket to the final closing one and remove more of the title than expected.

Verify and recover

A regex action runs immediately; there is no full-group dry-run preview in this recipe. Start with one copy, compare the before/after title, and check warnings. A no-match file remains unchanged by these replacements. An annotation-only title can leave no useful title; inspect those cases before using a cleaned value to rename files.

Use Edit → Undo … promptly for a recorded action write. History belongs to the current desktop session; a file backup remains the recovery route beyond it. Do not combine this cleanup with a destructive field-removal action until its intermediate result has been reviewed.